Watching news over the weekend of the mass shooting in Los Angeles, and one in Baton Rouge, I reflected on how bizarre America looks from Budapest. This is the capital city of a European country that is not remotely as wealthy per capita as the United States, yet you can walk around this city anywhere, at any time of day, and not be afraid. You can't do that in Paris or London, come to think of it. It's not because there are police everywhere, either, or that this is some kind of authoritarian state. It's just safe, and orderly. That's how things are here. When people ask me what Hungary is like, I tell them that it feels like what America did when it was normal.

The other night I met with a group of Hungarian students. You'll find that Hungarians love the US, but are also very wary of it, afraid that what has happened to America (the Great Awokening) is going to happen to them if they aren't careful. One of them put a great question to me: If you could change one thing about the last twenty years, what would it be? In context of the discussion, he was asking me for the single event that was the tipping point, the crossing of the Rubicon, that led America to its current mess.

It's not an easy question, is it? You have to stop and think about what, exactly, constitutes "America's current mess." The Great Awokening covers sex, gender, and race, and it's hard to come up with an event that entails all three (though maybe you can). It's also tricky to think in terms of cause and effect. I told the questioner that I would say the loss of the one-male + one- female binary as the exclusive model for marriage was the turning point. You lose that, and you lose so very much else, I said (I was thinking of transgenderism).

As I thought about it later, though, I realized that Hungary doesn't have the same civil rights laws as America does, so the phenomenon of identifying particular characteristics as constitutive of personhood, such that it triggers civil rights protection for a minority, isn't in effect here. Still, there's no denying that granting same-sex marriage rights to gay people (a sexual minority) was the necessary precursor to the entire panoply of trans rights. I don't find the granting of marital status to gays to be nearly as radical and revolutionary as the demolition of the gender binary, which did not have to happen, but did. Strictly speaking, the T doesn't have to do with the LGB, but in popular culture, and now, increasingly, in the law, gender expression is granted the same ontological status as sexual desire. Recognizing that wokeness is a broad phenomenon, if I had to pick a single event that can be seen as the most causative in terms of advancing wokeness, I would say the 2015 Obergefell decision constitutionalizing same-sex marriage.

But I'm not comfortable with making that judgment, because I believe that for the most part, Obergefell simply ratified a shift most of the country had already made. For me, the real turning point was the summer of 2006, when the Federal Marriage Amendment officially died in the Republican-controlled House and Senate, with a Republican in the White House. The FMA would have written the traditional marriage model into the Constitution. That didn't cause wokeness, but it did reveal the weakness of the opposition. After the FMA failed, I knew without a doubt that we would have same-sex marriage in this country, sooner or later, because the underlying support for the older model -- Christian faith and cultural tradition -- had eroded beyond repair. The summer of 2006 wasn't a causative element in wokeness as much as an epiphany about how feeble the opposition to its gay expression was.

Naturally anti-woke gay people like Andrew Sullivan, Douglas Murray, and Bari Weiss think of all this as an advance, and would therefore have a different answer to the Hungarian student's question. (I'd be interested to hear it, actually.) To be very clear, it is not my belief that if no Obergefell, or if we had been able to pass the FMA, then wokeness never would have happened. As I've said repeatedly here, wokeness is a broad and disparate phenomenon.

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LINK:https://www.theamericanconservative.com/what-was-the-woke-tipping-point/