The fastest way to fundamentally transform America

It may be impossible to trace the first use of the maxim "culture is upstream from politics," but it's good to see that it has become entrenched in our side of the national conversation.  No, wait a minute.  This isn't any "conversation" we as a society are having.  It's a war for America's soul.

The distinction isn't an excuse to indulge in overheated rhetoric.  The distinction tells us everything about the above-stated truism.

John Boehner is engaged in a national conversation.  Single-issue activist groups focused on issues such as guns or taxation or health insurance are engaged in a national conversation.   Michael Barone is engaged in a national conversation.

Of course, given pieces of legislation making their ways through committees of legislatures state and national are often of paramount importance.  Arcane demographic information about voting patterns in particular Congressional districts can be important.

Policy preoccupation can, however, breed a myopia that permits the 50-yard line of normalcy to be moved without resistance.

And the 50-yard-line metaphor is the proper segue into the latest example of what I'm describing.

Football - team sports in general - have always been and still are predominantly a male enclave, Title IX notwithstanding.  Football, baseball and basketball were all invented by men.  It was years in each case before school leagues or professional leagues for women were brought on board.  The military trappings of their basis are obvious, beginning with the wearing of uniforms.  The glory of battle and particularly victory are central to their appeal.

Alas, they are also huge arenas of business, from actual team ownership and employment of players involving multi-million-dollar contracts to the supply chain involved in building a stadium to all the auxiliary promotional gravy trains arising from their popularity.

It's therefore no big surprise that leagues and teams would find it necessary to acknowledge the way political correctness has permeated everything in our time.  The NBA has a sizable "green" program, for instance, although the relationship between three-pointers and zone defense on the one hand and carbon footprints on the other is less than clear.

But the encroachment of homosexuality onto the turf or football takes us to a whole new level of considerations of masculinity and even basic humanity.

Unless a man is an unmitigated brute, he recoils at the notion of doing damage to, in the name of prevailing over, anyone he considers less than a full man.  Hence the honor code that gets convicted wife-beaters in instant trouble with fellow prison inmates.

But now, the bureaucratic, corporatist notion that "it doesn't matter what a person's orientation is as long as he or she can do the job" has extended to a realm in which manhood has heretofore been essential.  (This had already occurred in the realm of the military, but, since the first breach there, we have gone from strict prohibitions against homosexual behavior to repealing don't-ask-don't-tell to the current defense secretary saying that the military's "transgendered" - and yes, at LITD, we still put this in quotes - policy needs to be reviewed.)

So over the weekend we had the celebratory kiss between Michael Sam and his boyfriend upon his being signed to the St. Louis Rams.  And now we have confirmation that the NFL will not brook natural manly reactions to said kiss.

Football, until this weekend, was something that men played - men who were perfectly at home slamming into one another in attempts to either extend or thwart drives toward end zones, men who then went home and gave their tender kisses and embraces to women who were, in statistical comparison to the general female population, likely to be exquisitely fetching.

That was the thrill of football: an entire stadium full of players and spectators, men and women alike, exulting in something that required men to enact.

In some comment thread under a post I saw somewhere about this, someone said, rightly, that we should get ready for 20 years of "celebrating" the first homosexual cornerback, safety, etc.

This is the really formidable weapon in the West-destroyers' arsenal: rendering everything that had existed as our civilization's greatness was increasing utterly pointless.  Who will want to go see a football game played by two teams composed of beings whose essence no one can be sure of?

So, while attention must certainly be paid to "issues" (a term that begins to sound a bit trite given the avalanche-like assault coming at us by the hour now) that are in Congress's inbox, it has begun taking on the qualities of applying a spoon to an ocean.

The Freedom-Haters know how to wind up their grand project startlingly quickly: ruin everything.  Take the basic human joy, born out of the particularity that makes each activity distinct, out of sports, music, learning and work.

While we apply Herculean effort to matters of economics, immigration, health care and education, and even Constitutional fealty, let us do so with the grim context in which we act always in mind.  We are no longer tussling with what we've always thought of as human beings.  We are struggling with some frightful new kind of alien being.