Customer Reviews

Do Ask, Do Tell: A Gay Conservative Lashes Back

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This is a richly detailed personal history of an unconventional and highly individuated life that is filled with enthusiasm for living, and deep in its idealization and love for the best in humanity. As a framework, the author presents the story of his coming to grips with his homosexuality during the Vietnam era (he went out of his way to enlist in the Army during this time), and the enduring access to truth seeking and moral courage that came from choosing this difficult path. All of this is skillfully woven within a critique-cum-psychological-analysis of American society (1960-present) that is warm, accurate, original, and often disturbingly funny. We learn from many of his better than sit-com stories that: "When there was fighting to be done, the military didn't have time for the foolishness of gay discharges." Throughout, Boushka raises the banner of personal responsibility, and he keeps his audience on target with questions that are too hot to handle for most of us. You can disturb some of your time-honored values by reading this book.

The author's confusion is evident starting with the title, in which he tries to identify himself as both a conservative and a libertarian. In fact, he's neither.

The book is basically a screed in which he sets forth his opinions without really giving us any reason why we should care what he thinks. His egotism is evident in the Introduction and never does let up.

And a lot of what he thinks sounds pretty alarming to conservatives and libertarians alike. I'm a conservative, and I showed some highlights of this book to a Libertarian friend of mine to find out what she thought.

Boushka: "I would see that legal precedents sometimes leave our liberties up to political barter, and that to simultaneously protect personal rights and encourage personal responsibility, we need a bottom-up review of our Bill of Rights."

Me: "...The idea of 'reviewing' the Bill of Rights doesn't strike you as pretty damned dangerous? Are you really that confident that the new version will be better? And if so, would you like to buy some oceanfront property?"

My Libertarian friend: "It is my Libertarian opinion that there is nothing less Libertarian than to start tinkering with the Bill of Rights. We're *all about* the Bill of Rights. We love it to little bits. Where does he get this stuff?"

Boushka: "People ask me why I still call myself a 'conservative.' After all, libertarianism would advocate the use of the established political power structure to deconstruct itself, an idea that some people find contradictory. When at their best, conservatives advocate government's interfering with individual's personal and economic decisions... as little as possible, yet conservatives realize that the survival... of ordered liberty can't be taken for granted. Certainly, my writings up to this point reflect both concerns."

[The ellipses indicate where he sticks in extraneous references to various thinkers whose concepts slightly converged with his own.]

Me: "Well, at least you got the bit about the survival of ordered liberty not being taken for granted right. But what's this about 'deconstructing' the government? I've long considered Libertarians to be our allies; have I been unknowingly hand in hand with revolutionaries?"

My Libertarian friend: "The power structure needs to be deconstructed from within? Um... Okay? In what sense of the word deconstructed would that be, sir? The craaaazy academic literary theory way, or the actually destroying it way? That sentence made no sense."

He also outlines a "right to privacy" constitutional amendment he wants passed. It's longer than all the existing amendments put together. I have to admit that most of it I would agree with as legislation, but amending the Constitution is an extreme measure. And of course, there's the couple of things in it I can't approve of.

The man's grasp of the English language leaves a great deal to be desired. A sample is this monument to convolution:

"Algebra invokes the manipulation of symbols as surrogates for numbers or objects. As a child, it had sounded like a great mystery, doing arithmetic or `figuring' with `letters' rather than numbers. Some people never understand the abstraction, and stay back at the grade school level where you never do your `number work' in ink."

That second sentence, taken as written, means that algebra sounded like a great mystery when it was a child. I wonder what algebra sounded like when it grew up. In the final sentence, he switches from the third to the second person midway through. And the entire book is written this way. This kind of sloppiness is natural in spoken conversation, but has no place in a published work. Another beauty turns up in his discussion of abortion: "We weigh the moral values of a woman's control over her own pregnancy and of the unborn's penultimate right to live." The unborn's next to the last right to live? I wonder what the unborn's antepenultimate right is.

There are, at a generous estimate, perhaps a dozen gay conservative books out there. Even with this scarcity, I have to say, don't bother with this one.