Queer Eye For The History Guy

I really, really dislike identity politics - but all the moreso when groups cluster around identities that are inarguably malleable and malodorously contemptible, and try to re-write history to conform to their retrograde predilictions:

A [state] senate committee approved a bill Wednesday that would require California's textbooks to include the contributions of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people to the state and nation's history.

The bill outraged some religious and conservative family groups, which said it would indoctrinate students in what they view as an unacceptable lifestyle.

That's the, er, bare bones of the story. Am I outraged by this bill? I guess I should be. I really don't see what "abandon[ing] the natural function of the woman and burn[ing] in their desire toward one another" (and the equivalent for lesbos and the other sexually confused) has to do with the same persons' contributions to state and national history. Are any of the vastly greater number of straight historical figures in the history books because they weren't sexually dysfunctional? Was being "AC/DC" a remotely determinative factor in, for example, the legendary military conquests of Alexander the Great? Wouldn't it be more than a little insulting to the "greatest commander in history" to suggest that his epic accomplishments - conquering most of the known world of his day with a relatively small but superbly trained, led, and eminently superior army - grew out of or was significantly influenced by where he preferred to holster his broadsword?

So if sexuality is irrelevant to earned fame, why is the pervert crowd so eager to paint history in shades of lavender? And doesn't the question pretty much answer itself?

So leave it to state Senator Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, Gollyfornia's first openly muff-diving legislator, to be redundant:

"Our community is invisible in all of the teaching material, so that our students are never, ever given any information about the fact that somebody who did something good was a gay person. That changes the way you feel about someone," said Kuehl, who was the state's first openly gay legislator.

She and members of Equality California, a gay rights group that sponsored the bill, said gay and lesbian students are less likely to feel isolated and even drop out of school if they see themselves represented in the material they learn at school.

The sodomite subset may be many things, but "invisible" isn't one of them. Have homosexuals "done good things"? Sure. Was it because they were homosexual? I don't see how. Isn't the opposite - that normal people do bad things, such as refuse to pitch over the side five millenia of moral and societal standards just to indulge the feelings of a tiny minority the majority of which are openly contemptuous of them - because they're normal strongly implied? Sure seems that way.

I guess I'm just too cynical to be truly outraged. Anybody who follows the culture war can't be surprised by a bill like this. It's pure identity politics that seeks, in this instance, to remake history to its own, well, "preferences" rather than teach history objectively. It's the politicization of reality. And it manifests equal contempt upon its purported young beneficiaries, whose numbers Senator Kuehl typically vastly overestimates and whose mentality (and maturity) she equally underestimates.

I've always been an amatuer historian. But I didn't develop that avid interest because I "saw myself represented" in notable past events. And that's most likely because I wasn't raised to militantly embrace any particular "identity," but rather to live in the real world. A place that those of Senator Kuehl's sexual AND political persuasion are determined to legislate out of existence.