The final piece of the puzzle is provided by the way sexuality has been made fundamental to identity. Again, this is an obvious legacy of Marcuse and company and one with great practical significance for the public square. For in contemporary Western society, once something is a matter of identity, it often has the privilege of functioning as a legal category.

One of the striking features of the brouhaha surrounding the RFRA protests of last week is the violence of the rhetoric used by those who accuse many of their (comparatively mild-mannered) opponents of being motivated by hate. When the advocates of peace and tolerance call for the burning down of a Christian-owned pizza parlor, Rod Dreher asks the obvious question: Who are the ones who are really full of hate?

Even as the Indiana incident fades from the headlines, Dreher’s queston is likely to become more, not less, apposite because it touches on the consequences of a development which at first glance seems counterintuitive: The transformation of the libertarian impulse of the sexual revolution of the sixties into the totalitarian ambition of today’s sexual politics. How did this happen?

Last week I commented on the detachment of love from any prior notion of virtue and its reduction to emotional and sexual self-fulfillment. A moment’s reflection, of course, reveals that a change in the definition of love requires a change in the definition of its antonym, hate. Thus, if love is rooted in self-realization, then hate is anything which prevents this. Hence critics of the revolution are by definition those who hate, however moderately they express their dissents.

To this we should add a point I have noted before: Oppression is now a highly psychologized category. Put bluntly, it is not about hurting bodies or bank balances. It is about hurting feelings. Once the preserve of the post-Marcuse New Left, this view has gradually gained general social acceptance. And thanks to the influence of Freud refracted through Marcuse, political oppression has come to be closely associated with sexual repression.

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