LGBT - The Great Whore of Babylon

  

Modernities are amongst other things characterized by what people from other periods would term moral depravation. Seen in a long term perspective this is the result of the revolt against and breaking down of the high levels of control from forms and norms, levels of control which it had taken centuries to build up. We see this revolt in many fields; the arts free themselves from forms and naturalism, peoples want freedom from oppression, wars liberate themselves from restraint, sexuality becomes unbounded. But what started as a welcome liberation from external and internal suppression and control ends by being part of what breaks civilizations down. At the end of a moderlity we see what looks like barbarism. In politics wish for power becomes dominant and diplomacy is forgotten. Hatred or even violence prevails between people, between politicians and between countries.

 

Here though I will focus on sexuality. In modernities sexuality is liberated from norms and rules and marriage. Despite constant conservative resistance this process proceeds until we see conditions which were unthinkable at the start of modernities. Typically this continues for decades after the end of a moderlity. Just look at Messalina. At the same time we see a counter-movement to end perceived sexual promiscuity and perversions. Augustus who ended the Greco-Roman moderlity  tried this and for example sent the “immoral” poet Ovid to the Black Sea.

 

Today in the Western civilization we are perhaps seven decades from our Augustus, and we see the two sides both radicalizing, this coupled with the increasing political polarization. People with sexual LGBT-orientations are becoming a central battleground. In many leading and official circles such people are almost privileged and dominating. In other parts of society LGBT is viewed with great hostility as incomprehensible and unnatural.

 

This conservative hostility is a part of the beginning attempts at moral restoration. We see these conservative attempts all over the world. The radicalization and the dominance on the side of the LGBT-supporters make the opposite side more and more hostile. But the attempts at moral restoration come in many milder forms around the world, both in religious countries (United States, Middle East) and in secular countries (China), and it needs not be especially concerned with only LGBT.

 

 

 

A much more fundamental resistance to LGBT comes from East Europe with its presumed new civilization. Emerging civilizations begin with strong religious and/or moral feelings. This was the situation for the Oriental civilization two thousand years ago.  This civilization encompassed the whole Middle East, including Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians and later the Moslems. The Jews had experienced firstly the (second) Mesopotamian modernity during their stay in the “immoral” Big city of Babylon, hence  the expression Great Whore of Babylon. Later the Jews and the Christians experienced the Greco-Roman modernity in depraved Rome. No wonder that Rome was called Great Whore of Babylon. The present hate from Islamic terrorists against New York as illustrated by Bin Laden is a late expression of the same hatred, now directed against the Western civilization’s Babylon.

 

Today for many East Europeans parts of the Western civilization are seen as incomprehensible and immoral. LGBT has become the main focus point of these hostile feelings from Warsaw and Budapest to Vladivostok. In this part of the world LGBT is the Great Whore of Babylon. This explains the intensity of feelings against these sexual minorities. Such feelings are clear even in East European countries which otherwise still adhere to western liberal political forms and are thus deeply rooted and almost impossible to change.