Currents

The National Legal and Policy Center, an organisation that claims to promote conservatism, recently put out a bizarre video that asks, “Is your favourite sandwich cookie company grooming children? What happened to the kid-friendly cookie we all used to know and love?” It goes on to warn, “Don’t let PFLAG and Oreo corrupt your children!” In a better world, the insinuation that Oreo’s association with the group Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) means that consumption of Oreos will turn kids gay or trans would be comical. Sadly, in the real world, this kind of conspiracist scaremongering is neither unusual nor inconsequential. Social media influencers like Libs of TikTok scour the web to highlight cherry-picked video clips from the most extreme fringes of LGBT activism to advance this same conspiracy theory that the “LGBT community” aims to influence children's sexual orientation and gender identity. Republican politicians, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, reinforce this thinking in so-called “conservative” circles by suggesting his opponents are “backed by groomers” and that “leftist politicians” are trying to sexualise children. Prominent “conservative” advocacy groups, such as Moms for Liberty, even suggest that being trans is simply a mental illness and imply that there is a coordinated government effort to promote it.

By and large, the contemporary American right describes themselves as being politically “conservative”, as the right has long done. But this current populist iteration that has emerged over the past decade is anything but conservative. Consumed by group resentments, obsessed with culture wars, and animated by bigoted impulses to enact sweeping changes in violation of accepted societal values, the modern political right are, in fact, radicals. What's more, when we examine the philosophical tradition upon which the political right was founded, going back to Edmund Burke, we find a powerfully conservative argument in favour of LGBT rights.

The conservative philosophical tradition, founded by the 18th-century British reformer Edmund Burke, was aimed at conserving British progress. In Burke’s time, Britain had become a much freer society than continental Europe, with greater civil liberties, speech rights, economic freedom, and religious tolerance than most of their neighbours. Burke believed that these freedoms came about not from a group of intellectuals putting their ideals about concepts like “liberty” into practice, as happened in the US. Instead, he believed that they had organically evolved over centuries, with each generation adding to the efforts of the last. Burke revered the status quo of his day not because it was old, but because he could see that it worked better than the political cultures of other countries. But the manner in which change occurred was key. In his seminal work, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke observed the dangerous radicalism behind the French Revolution, arguing that gradual reforms produce far better results than abrupt — and especially violent — upheavals.

In Burke’s day, perhaps the world’s foremost revolutionary, in favour of the American and Jacobin Revolutions alike, was the intellectual Thomas Paine. Paine believed he could take the aspects of English liberalism that appealed to him, such as individual liberty, separate them from aspects he didn't like, such as the monarchy, and apply them to France. Burke rejected this as radicalism, believing that the features Paine liked about England worked there because they had emerged over centuries. For the changes Paine envisaged to work in France, Burke thought they would either need to develop organically, as they had in England or be imposed at the cost of bloodshed on a population not ready for them. It is difficult to argue that Burke was incorrect. Not only did he foresee the appalling bloodbath that ensued in France, but he also predicted the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.

It was precisely the horrors of the French Revolution that hoodwinked 20th-century conservative intellectuals to first recoil at the thought of legalising homosexuality and bisexuality and then in the 21st century to push back against same-sex marriage. But how could anyone place LGBT rights in the same category as a bloody revolution?

This thinking was most famously articulated in Lord Patrick Devlin’s 1959 treatise, The Enforcement of Morals. In the late 1950s, the British government toyed with the idea of legalising homosexuality and commissioned the Wolfenden Report to review the issue and make recommendations. The report argued that same-sex acts between two consenting adults should no longer be a criminal offence. In Enforcement of Morals, Devlin stridently opposed legalising homosexuality, reasoning not that legalisation would be morally wrong, but that it ran contrary to the prevailing values of British society at the time. Devlin believed that imposing such a change would come at a very dear cost because society was not ready for it, in the same way the French were not ready for the values the Revolution aimed to impose upon them.

In the early 21st century, religious conservatives such as the American politician Rick Santorum used rather less nuanced logic. When he wasn’t comparing same-sex marriage to bestiality, Santorum argued that the onus was on LGBT people to demonstrate that same-sex marriage would not be morally corrosive to society and, in particular, children. Santorum exemplified a characteristically conservative fear of unforeseen consequences, cautioning that it would represent a very radical departure from the past. However, the legalisation of same-sex marriage in the US in 2015 was not the radical change conservatives like Santorum thought it was, and the negative effects they warned of never came to pass. Instead, the gradual shift in public attitudes was making him the radical. By 2015, the average American no longer felt the state had any business telling gay, lesbian, or same-sex bi couples that they could not get married. Had this not been the case, such a change could not have been implemented without coercive pressure.

In The Enforcement of Morals, Lord Devlin argued that homosexuality ought to remain illegal because the public consciousness was against it. That was in 1959, not 2024. Given the widespread acceptance of LGBT people across the Anglosphere today, Devlin's argument would now logically support conserving LGBT rights. It therefore stands to reason that opposition to LGBT acceptance and rights no longer stands within the tradition of conservatism. In 2024, it is the 29% of Americans who think same-sex marriage is morally wrong who are the radicals, not the 69% who have no problem with it.

Today, Burkean conservatives acknowledge the flaws in many Western institutions and a duty to improve them. At the same time, they argue that we in the Anglosphere are the custodians of some of the safest, most developed, innovative, diverse, and prosperous societies in history. These societies deserve conserving and should be changed only incrementally and with caution. To this way of thinking, right-wing radicalism is every bit as dangerous as left-wing radicalism, particularly when it threatens LGBT rights and acceptance and thus our standing as a society on the world stage. From a classically conservative standpoint, the shift in the public consciousness toward the acceptance of LGBT people in the West should be conserved, cherished, and celebrated as a defining aspect of our cultural identity.

After more than a decade of majority LGBT acceptance, it is no longer prudent for conservatives to worry about what the unforeseen consequences of such acceptance might be, as these have come and gone. What conservatives should instead worry about is what unforeseen consequences of regression might come to pass. In 2024, a philosophically consistent conservative outlook would regard bigotry, discrimination, and hostility on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity as anathema to individualism, established institutions, and the prevailing social norms. There is nothing “conservative” about trying to forcibly wrench society back in time. A rollback of LGBT rights would be a radical desecration not only of hard-won progress, but also, some of our most sacred cultural values, such as equality before the law, consent of the governed, and personal freedom, among others.

The conservative philosophical tradition offers a powerful lens through which to preserve the advances we have gained, and to understand threats to our societies. Were he a man of our time, Edmund Burke would encourage us to protect our liberal order from the radical iconoclasm so ascendent on the populist right. He would also encourage us to revere our institutions, given that they reflect the changes each generation has contributed over the centuries. Burke may not have been partying at Pride parades, given that he was a British Anglican of the 18th century. But he would be very hard-pressed and thus highly unlikely to argue that the acceptance of LGBT people, as advocated for by the 21st-century Church of England, who have anointed LGBT vicars since 2005, is not precisely one of the changes that conservatism should celebrate.

After all, conservatism was never really about mindless traditionalism and the worship of things because they are old. It’s about recognizing the progress we have made, identifying the established norms and values that work, and then conserving them. The Anglosphere's cultural acceptance of LGBT people, rooted in grassroots change and an organic shift of public opinion, has become a large part of who we are, and what sets us apart from less enlightened places around the world. Whether the modern right wants to acknowledge it or not, protecting LGBT rights is now fundamentally conservative.

Published Aug 2, 2024