Turkish Police Raid Gay Bars and Arrest Activists

The permanent things are not permanent by accident. What is being proposed here violates the sixth canon above all others - the recognition that change and reform are not identical, and that whatever claims the authority of prescription must in fact be prescribed, grown slowly out of the accumulated life of a people, rather than decreed overnight by a police raid on a Sunday night in Istanbul or Ankara.

The family is indeed among the permanent things. I have never doubted it, and I would not insult the reader by pretending that a conservative ought to view its erosion with indifference. But the family survives, when it survives, because it is inherited - because children absorb it from parents who absorbed it from theirs, in a chain of transmission that no magistrate can forge and no ordinance can supply. What Ankara has done is something else entirely. Dozens arrested, homes of LGBTQ activists searched, gay bars shuttered - this is not prescription. This is decree wearing the mask of prescription, and the mask does not fit.

Consider what is actually being claimed. President Erdogan’s government asserts that a falling birth rate is the consequence of a “deviant movement,” as though demography were a matter of moral contagion correctable by arrest. This is ideology in the precise sense I have always opposed - the reduction of a complex civilizational trouble to a single cause, followed by the mechanical application of state power against that cause. The birth rate is declining across nearly every developed nation, Muslim and Christian and secular alike, for reasons bound up with economics, urbanization, the changed position of women, the exhaustion of hope in the future - reasons no raid on a bar in Beyoglu will touch. To blame a small and already-marginal community for a demographic transformation affecting the whole industrialized world is not conservatism. It is scapegoating dressed in conservatism’s inherited vocabulary, and the theft of that vocabulary should trouble a genuine traditionalist more than it troubles the regime’s critics.

There is also the matter of what such raids teach the society that watches them. A young Turkish couple deciding whether to have a child does not consult the fate of their gay neighbours; but they do absorb, from the spectacle of police entering private homes on a Sunday, a lesson about what their state considers its business. A government willing to police desire will not hesitate to police the womb, the classroom, the pulpit. Order purchased by surveillance is not order at all - it is merely the postponement of disorder’s bill, presented later and with interest.

I do not say this from any confusion about what marriage and family require for their flourishing. I say it because I have read enough history to know that civilizations rot fastest not when they are attacked from without but when their own authorities begin substituting decree for inheritance, believing that the permanent things can be conscripted rather than cultivated. Erdogan’s police have made their arrests. The birth rate, indifferent to handcuffs, will do what it was already doing.