Adam Sieff, Staff Writer
Ideology: Liberal | Writing from: Columbia University

The struggle for equality is perpetual and without satisfaction. Its cause is righteous in our minds, but intractable in our condition.

For modern man, the criticism of inequality has been largely completed. Indeed, the criticism of inequality, to some extent, is the premise of all modern criticism.

But modern men have found in the fantastic idea of equality—where they expected to find truth—only their own reflections. They have been made to realize that man makes equality, equality does not make man. Nevertheless, equality has become the general theory of this world, its logical popular form, its general basis of political justification.

So it is without coincidence that, in states across the country, there have been—with limited effect—efforts to extend the aroma of equality into every corner of our hall of mirrors. The latest frontier in the struggle for total mythical self-realization is homosexual marriage, a noble struggle indeed. Today, beneath the banner of that idea called equality, millions of Americans demand their political emancipation. It is thought to be political because marriage, superficially, remains a political function of the state.

But what spoils await the homosexual when his political emancipation is had? When the state ceases to maintain its partial attitude towards sexuality—when man and man, and woman and woman, can join man and woman in formalizing their relations—what then is the condition of their existence?

Do not, in these very United States—where racial equality was ceremoniously “attainted” through the great struggle of the sixties—blacks and browns still suffer the glares and prejudice of their fellow “citizens.”

Or in the European states—Norway, Sweden, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Spain—where such political emancipation has already been attained, does not the germ of hatred still brood? Do not the hearts of many free Europeans still beat to the drum of discrimination and judgment? If we find in these countries, which have attained full political emancipation, that injustice not only continues to exist, but is in fact fresh and vigorous, this is proof that the existence of injustice is in no way opposed to the perfection of the state.

But since the existence of injustice is the existence of a defect, according to the invented wisdom, the source of this defect must originate in the nature of the state itself a priori. Inequality, then, no longer appears as the manifestation, but the basis of our own prejudice. For faced with an unequal, unjust and unexplainable realm of suffering, man has invented equality—a secular theodicy, an unfeasible cause.

Because while the realization of absolute equality is that for which civilized man strives, it is not possible. It is now sought politically, and then civilly, but it is nether political nor civil. Equality is a product of mind, while inequality is a product of fact, and the majesty of mind has heretofore yet to conquer the goliath Reality. This is, to us modern men, lamentable, and, indeed, even unacceptable. 

But the struggle for equality is perpetual and without satisfaction. Its cause is righteous in our minds, but intractable in our condition. The tension between those who seek it, and those who reject it, is a fact of our existence insofar as we have invented its necessity.

For one day the homosexual will awake to political emancipation, suck in the moist morning dew with the elation of a small child, only to exhale solemnly with a sigh—for he has realized that it tastes no different.