Light People, an Obelisk, and The GTI

Why Light People Marriage Must End In Gay Marriage

by John Heers, of First Things Foundation

First, before we dig into some heavy things, did you know that there is something called the Gay Travel Index?

Here’s what this index does: It ranks the world’s nations for friendliness toward gay people. The index is published by The Advocate, an LGBTQ+-friendly magazine. They use certain criteria. Things like same-sex marriage prohibitions give your country a low score. Gay rights enshrined in law, like the right to adopt as same-sex couples, those things create a high score. The best score is a 10. The worst score is -14.

Do you know who scores very, very high on the Gay Travel Index (GTI)?

That’s right, Light People countries. People of the Enlightenment, rationalists, New Worlders, followers of Francis Bacon and Thomas Jefferson, and the Altruistic Essentialists. Klaus The Schwab. They score very high. Light People countries are gay-friendly countries. Here are your top ten:

1. Canada
2. Malta (I know, right? Malta?)
3. Portugal
4. Spain
5. Austria
6. Denmark
7. Sweden
8. United Kingdom
9. Australia
10. Germany

What do you notice? These countries are all inheritors of the Enlightenment. You’ll also notice that these people are what we’ve come to know as white people. Every single one of these nations is majority caucasoid (I am using caucasoid here the way race peddlers and the eugenicists of the European Enlightenment used the word). This race category isn’t salient, but I’ll use it a bit anyway as a way to connect history to our current vocabulary, and I’ll use it as a way to refer to what many today call “The West.”

Do you want to know who is on the bottom of the GTI, way down at unfriendly nation #202?

Of course you do. This is fun.

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Chechnya. That’s rock bottom — number 202 on the list, dead last. Russia comes in as the 176th most friendly nation to gay people. And check it out: Among the bottom 75 nations on this gay-friendly list, only Chechnya and Russia are dominant race-science white. The others, all of them in the basement, places like The United Arab Emirates, Tanzania, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Cameroon, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Jamaica, and Haiti… all of them are black and brown nations. You won’t find another caucasoid face until nation #126. Hello Poland.

But as I mentioned, this race stuff is stupid. Let’s try a different paradigm to understand same-sex unions and marital trends. Let’s try the terms “Old World” and “New World.” Think of the Old World as cultures that existed before the Enlightenment, and persist still in various forms right up to our New World present. These bottom-feeding countries on our GTI are old, as in the Old World. The bottom feeders on this list are the “unenlightened” people, or as the Light People historians termed them, “Dark Age” people. (You can learn more about these categories by looking at our first Heavy Things Done Lightly article. We lay out these ideas for context).

So, what should we take away from this Gay Travel Index?

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Before that, just a bit more history. Do you know what an obelisk is? The Egyptians did. They built them tall and beautiful – heavy monoliths quarried from the fine pink granite found at Aswan, the city of trade and gateway to black Africa. The earliest obelisks were raised at On, the sacred ceremonial city known today by its Greek name, Heliopsis, City of the Sun, or more precisely, City of the Sun god Ra. The obelisk represents a ray of sun, jutting up but also coming down. It is the interpenetration of the darkness. It is that which enters and offers life. The obelisk was, for the ancient Egyptians, an origins tale told in granite. And it was, in essence, phallic — the thing that penetrates.

This obelisk idea isn’t just found in Egypt, either. You can find it all over history. You can find one celebrating women in South Africa at a place called Bloemfontein. You can find a whole set of them in the holy city of Axum in northern Ethiopia, and they call them stele there. If you were alive before Columbus in what is today Peru, you could have seen the Incas put one up, and not just one. You can find this kind of monument in just about every culture, and if you look carefully, you can often find them juxtaposed with some sort of dome.

Regard St. Peter’s Basilica in Italy. You’ll find the dome of St. Peter’s facing off with its brother obelisk at the Vatican. Note the Washington monument. It sits opposite the U.S. Capitol and its massive nine-million-pound dome. And check out most mosques around the world. When you do you’ll see a dome within which people do their Zakat, their prayers. Alongside the dome, you’ll inevitably find the minaret, the perch for the muezzin, and the masculine counter to the feminine dome.

The dome is another manifestation of an archetype. It is a type of womb, a type of femininity, an architectural incarnation of that which receives. The obelisk is that which gives. In the Christian East, you can see this idea in church architecture. Churches are domed, and at the east end of the domed building, you find Theotokos, the God-bearer, depicted above the altar, enveloping the altar, protecting the contents there as a type of womb. And what is the content? It is, of course, He who gives light into the world. There in the bosom of the God-bearer, you find the icon of Christ.

Phallus and womb — the archetypes known to humankind for thousands and thousands of years.

Quaint, right? Cute. A dustbin of interesting ideas. But still, how does any of this help us understand marriage and this Gay Travel Index?

The fastest way to get from the bottom of the GTI to the top is to pass a law that says men can marry men. Do that, and you aren’t Somalia anymore. Do that, and you can get all the way up to #57, like the United States. Re-think marriage, and immediately you join the Light People. C’mon, Nigeria, just pass those gay marriage laws and get caught up already!

But these Old World folks just won’t do it. And deep down in that reticence lies the dome and the phallus. See, they don’t see how two phalluses can make for a marriage. They can try lots of new world gadgets, things like Cashapp and Meta, but two domes? Phallus meets phallus and live happily ever after? It’s just not possible, not for the mind of the Old World people. The parts just don’t fit.

But there isn’t really anger in all of this in the Old World. Not yet, anyway. After living and working in many of these GTI loser countries, I’ve come to realize that regular unenlightened people aren’t angry about gay people. Not at all. Mostly, when asked, they just don’t get it. They don’t understand how it can be a marriage when there are two obelisks. And there’s a reason for this confusion, one that really makes sense if you understand the history of marriage.

Old World marriage isn’t about feelings, and feeling loved is different from loving your spouse.

And that brings me to Jane Austen.

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You know Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen; Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet Jane Austin. If you don’t know who I’m talking about, just think of Victorian England and mansions where social distancing style dance parties rule. Think ascots and high collars of all types. Jane Austen was a stenographer of the death of Old World marriage. Austen committed herself to documenting the changing norms and creating space for new norms, including something called the love match. The love match is familiar to us today, but two hundred years ago, it was new. It was progressive. It was the freedom to fall in love and marry the person of your choice. It was democracy in action.

See, people have always fallen in love. Don’t read history like a dummy. Remarkably few things have changed regarding the history of the human belly, or as the Old World knows it, human passion. People have always fallen in love, and fallen for greed, and fallen for speed, drugs, and all kinds of delectable things. It’s just that these things were never the basis for human bonding. And that was Austen’s project. Not hers alone, of course. It was the Light People who set out to show that the love match could be, no, should be, the basis for the bonding known as marriage.

By 1813 and the Pride and Prejudice narrative, Light People were ripe for a change. For more than 300 years, Europeans had gotten a steady diet of individualism, rationalism, Protestantism, and, of course, I-think-therefore-I-am-ism. Light people were on a trajectory toward love marriages because they had ingested the kool-aid known as Cartesian philosophy. You may know this fancy philosophy as “agency.” Most of the Old World knows it as colonialism.

Agency. It’s deeply related to modern marriage. But to be more precise, it’s deeply related to modern divorce. And as you can already see, it is the very cornerstone of the same-sex marriage monument.

Now, look at these stats. The countries that have seen the largest dip in marriage rates over the last ten years are the same countries that are most friendly on the GTI. Belgium. Italy. France. Sweden. All are filled with marriage-less populations. There are only five countries with populations over 50 million in which citizens are lining up to get married. Number three on the list, The Philippines. Two, Vietnam. And the number one place to go to see lots of people getting married (in 2021)… The Congo.

I don’t need to tell you where these countries ranked on the Gay Travel Index, do I? Okay, I will tell you: Philippines 75, Vietnam 76, The Congo… 129.

Ouch. 

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So, to recap, the places where gay folks feel most welcomed are also the places where traditional marriage is on the decrease. The places where phallus and womb buildings still represent phallus and womb are the places where gay folks don’t want to go. They prefer places where marriage isn’t about parts but about predilections, desires, and passions.

This brings me to the final point; for Old World people, gay marriage isn’t a thing because marriage is a thing. For the Light People, gay marriage is no big deal because marriage is no big deal. The feeling of love; that’s the thing for us moderns, and why do I need a paper for that?

I’m afraid there’s no turning back. Marriage and dating and gender and all of it are fluid. Not because people are making it that way, not because LGBTQ+ people are “marching” – that’s just a Fox News meme. The reason we can’t turn back is that people are simply living out their new faith, and their new faith is in the god of the mind, the god of the reasoned self. And that cult, that god, that’s a powerful deity indeed. The computing power of the rational mind is on the move, justifying every emotion and desire and belly-born want. Old World people have always been scared of these twin towers of power. A belly justified by the mind, with no nous in sight, is a very scary thing indeed. The Old World has always feared humans without chests.

Next time let’s do a chat on the Old World and the New World and the notion of evolution, shall we? I think we can make some pretty interesting connections regarding this very new world theory and how it also shapes everything we call “normal” today.

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This article originally published on Substack on March 18, 2023, as the second installment in a new series.

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