In 2016, when "Captain America: Civil War" was being released, there was a strong push by the left (namely the LGBTQ+ community) to turn Steve Rogers (Captain America) and Bucky Barnes into a homosexual couple.
At the time, I was bothered by it to the point of feeling the need to write an article about it for The Federalist, which I did.
I think it bothered me because I'd seen it happen so much around that time, and it's happened ever since. This especially applies to male friendships. It's as if the left can't stand to see men have a deep bond that doesn't turn out to be sexual in nature. The obsession with making this a pattern culturally always struck me as odd.
Funny enough, C.S. Lewis even noticed it happening in his time (1960), and he wrote about it in "The Four Loves."
“Those who cannot conceive of Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend,” wrote Lewis.
This is something I echoed in my article at The Federalist, where I wrote:
Social justice warriors falsely insist two men can’t just have a deep bond garnered from childhood friendship—or even more, a bond developed by fighting side-by-side in battle. If you ask soldiers about their fellow brothers in arms, you’ll definitely hear an overtone of love and respect, but the social justice insistence that any affection between men must include homosexuality is rather insulting.
The bond between fellow soldiers is so far out of the experience of the social justice community and the mainstream media that they can only interpret it through a contemporary Hollywood lens. This is such narrow, lazy thinking. Aside from being insulting, it’s boring.
The pattern continues, however, and is mainly directed toward male heterosexual friendships. It's not pressed on women as much, though modern women don't seem to have a problem with flirting with the idea, at least when it comes to getting attention of some kind.
After a while, it started to dawn on me that this push to classify male bonds as secretly homosexual, or even just flirting with homosexuality, is a great strategy for removing the masculine element from society.
Look at it this way: A single man can do a lot of damage to a place or people with the right tools and drive. Get a lot of them together, and you have one of the most awesome forces on the planet. This is why militaries work. It's two opposing sides getting a bunch of men together under a banner and throwing them at each other in various ways, until one side causes the other to submit. The male of the species isn't just built for fighting; it has brainpower that no other species can comprehend or compare to. When you get that kind of brainpower to cooperate and unify, serious damage is going to occur to whatever they set themselves against.
If you're an authoritative body or an ideological group that wants to dominate a nation, the last thing you want is a bunch of men gathering together to stop you because your odds of winning, or even surviving, go down significantly.
Eroding those bonds by suggesting that passing a certain level of closeness is a homosexual act could stop these kinds of groups from forming. Society becomes less likely to mount a real defense because the men no longer gather in ways that could pose a threat.
Don't think the left doesn't learn from history. They saw what a room of drunk dudes in their 20s and 30s could do to an entire empire. They would kick it to the curb, and then go on to form the greatest nation that ever existed.
Look around society today. How often do you see men's groups like you used to? How many of them haven't been disassembled through social pressure or invaded by socio-political groups? The Boy Scouts are no longer the Boy Scouts. It's now an arm of the left. Do they allow boys' clubs in schools anymore, or offer extracurricular activities that are male-centric?
Bonds are harder to forge when you're not setting the soil for them to do so.
But perhaps that's just my tinfoil hat theory. I just don't think it's a mistake that this is a constant pattern. It looks a lot like another branch of the deconstruction of masculinity, which we all know is a consistent problem in modern society.
