I think the "LGBT" framing has become a massive misstep for the LGBs of the world. I'm more liberal, and I'd guess that I have a more positive view of the LGBs than most of this comment section will. Every LGB I've known has been pretty vanilla and normal.
But the T issue is completely difference. There's no LGB surgeries, no mental-illness issues for LGBs, no weird metaphysics about the concept of gender, and no elimination of single sex spaces.
It's as if we had one movement that combined both higher minimum wages and rent controls. Then you have people who hate rent controls supporting the "MWRC" movement because they want higher minimum wages. Just bizarre stuff.
Maybe. It would be interesting to see polling of LGB folks on this issue. My suspicion is they were happy to have the Ts as long as it helped their cause and didnt become a liability. But I would imagine many are concerned that a backlash to T will swallow them up as well. They are right to be fearful. If you told me I could stop T but it would mean no gay marriage I would do it in a heartbeat. Of course, that is most likely a false choice. But I was fine with gay marriage in 2015, less so now that it is clear T was the next hurdle after gay marriage. What comes after T?
The problem for LGB and T - and the rest of us, as well - is that the liberals were never really as interested in rights as they were in enforcing egalitarianism. Tribalism has been a way of teaching us to see ourselves as part of a group rather than as individuals. Once that has been accomplished, then group identity becomes whatever the party in charge wants it to be. Because once you're no longer an individual and your identity is not your own, does it really matter after that?
We are in a new era. Gays and lesbians are being pushed away as unimportant. You can't be a feminine gay man, you gotta be a transwoman. Or you can't be a butch lesbian, you gotta be a transman. WRONG. We all have masculine and feminine qualities, lets start embracing them, rather than presuming we have to BE a gender or sex that we are not. There is a lot wrong with the transgender movement.
I’m fully aware of gender dysphoria. It is a thing. I’m also aware that many minors are deceived into thinking they have it when they do not. There are many good aspects to discovering your gender identity and being trans, but there’s also a great deal of trauma being inflicted on youth who are too young to comprehend the permanence of surgically altering one’s gender or biological sex.
It may indeed be the case that many kids are adopting non-cisgender characteristics solely as result of socialization, but there's plenty of identity-space that can filled without them feeling the need to transition to fulfill the demands of the identity they have claimed. (And somewhat ironically, the more of such people, the more valid such mid-ground identities are seen)
For example, lots of young people take up they/them pronouns, say "any pronouns", call themselves "queer" and etc.
I'll further add that even if some do mistakenly demand medical interventions, I don't think it's nearly as easy as many conservatives imagine. Even among liberal parents, I doubt that more than ~2% are liable to be over eager. For the rest, there's still a lot of (understandable) apprehension about it.
A person genuinely suffering from a brain-body mismatch (due to a neurological or hormonal anomaly) deserves the same decency, compassion and access to medical treatment (if need be) as anyone with a deformity or disability.
In other words, it's a disability issue. It's not about "LGBTQ+"
I would go even further and say that your run-of-the-mill dismorphic used to be completely different from this weird spirituality of the "man with no features" that underpins gender ideology.
When I say being gay is okay, I DO mean the way being a doctor or lawyer is okay, but when I say being trans is okay, I mean the way that spending life in a wheelchair is okay. Being trans isn't glamorous or something desirable, and it isn't even value neutral like homosexuality. People with gender dysphoria deserve our pity, but why would we want to make kids miserable life them?
This isn't true. It's well-attested that rates of mental illness are vastly higher in non-heterosexuals. This is to be expected as nearly all mental health problems are strongly comorbid, including sexual targeting disorders.
The T is not separable from the LGB. This recent attempt at circumventing the issue is the same folly as what Richard has highlighted in his article. The T is a fundamental constituting element of the kink, and has always been there throughout history, side by side with pederasty. The surgeries too, albeit not as consensual, but one could rhetorically make the point that that is not any less the case now. You either need to come to terms with the fact that this is the final shape of your starting premise, or build up the bravery to just do away with this deranged framework.
The T is a much more dire extreme than the LGB, perhaps, but they undeniably belong together as sexual perversions/deviations. It's no coincidence that the groups have so much overlap.
There is a very large presence of lesbians in the Biden administration setting policy. If you've been wondering why there is such a large focus on people being able to change their gender, now you know why.
Stock is the exception that proves the rule. Lesbians, as a group, often share common experiences of discrimination and marginalization based on their sexual orientation. Many lesbians understand the importance of inclusivity and solidarity within the broader LGBTQ+ community. As such, many lesbians actively advocate for transgender rights and work towards creating a more inclusive society.
Most lesbians are very proud to be Women and think that women range from tomboys to ultra femme girls. They do not think a woman can change sex, nor that men can 'become' women. #Biology. Stock is not an exception to the rule. The views of radical transactivists are not shared by a lot of LGB people. There's now a movement to seperate the T from the LGB, who don't appreciate the blowback they're getting thanks to the divisive Trans positions on womens sports, men being allowed in womens dressing rooms, etc. A huge swathe of the LGB set also doesn't like the push to transition kids either—as most kids who experienece gender confusion are just gay, they grow out of it, they do not require sex changes. Imagine how offensive that "conversion theapy" is to gay people.
Regarding teachers talking about their spouses in school. As a member of the "previous generation" (grade school in the early 70's), I recall all our teachers were referred to as "Mrs", but we had absolutely no interest in their personal lives and I don't remember any of them telling us about their husbands or children. We didn't care about our teacher's personal lives until high school and then mostly we made fun of them. My point is, kids live in their own kid's world and I'm pretty sure they're not clamoring for information about their teacher's home life. All the complaints about not being able to talk about heterosexual relations is coming from the adults, not the kids.
The entire "Teaching for Social Justice" project is designed to meet the social, psychological and career needs of the teachers, with the children just a backdrop or pretext. In our age of expressive individualism and maximum personal autonomy, even professions meant to aid others, like teacher or doctor etc, become just another venue to publicly proclaim your True Self™ and how stunning and brave it is.
As a relatively new dad, I assure you that as soon as you introduce the concept of fatherhood, motherhood, or marriage to a toddler, at least *some* of those toddlers will ask every teacher under the sun who they're married to.
And it probably ceases to be interesting by the 2nd grade, but it seems very odd to prohibit fifth grade teachers from answerimg the sort of questions toddlers would ask.
Outside of that, I went to grade school in the 90s. Some very conservative private schools. Some more liberal public ones. By then at least, it was common for teachers to reference their home life.
Discussing spouses in particular wasn't common but anything related to childhood was pretty common. "I was also bullied when I was your age" and "my daughter and I fought too and here's how we worked things out" was (and I think, still is) pretty normal.
"You can only rationally do so if you think the cis-hetero individual should be thought of as the default, idealized form of a human being."
This is correct. It doesn't mean we should punish adults for homosexuality or whatever. But heteronormativity is essential for human flourishing. "Oh but we'll have synthetic wombs and blah blah" whatever. It wont be enough to make up for the anti-natalist side effects of this ideology. The classical liberals have their heads in the sand on this issue and conservatives caved the moment elite people started calling them bigots.
We'll see if this recent successful pushback has any teeth or is just a flash in the pan. I have my doubts since nobody of any importance in national politics or corporate governance will do anything about it. In fact they are it's biggest supporters! PGLE isn't going to stop because of a GOP win here and there.
"We have to do this because of the antinatalist effects of homosexuality" is a leap of the caliber that Ben Shapiro does above. It's OK to just admit that you find something distasteful and leave it at that.
Yeah I was fine with the classical liberal 2015 version of "We just want to have the same rights as straight people" as opposed to the meat-lego gnosticisn of Martine Rothblatt that now pervades the entirety of society. But go ahead and pretend that we just think butt sex is gross and that's the end of it.
This is an example of the cognitive dissonance, actually. The "classical liberal 2015 version" is already as "antinatalist" or birthrate depressing or whatever as any LGBTism that exists today. If you actually dislike ${technobabble} LGBTism for reducing the birthrate you should equally dislike classical-liberal-2015 LGBTism.
And I think that's right. We don't jail or punish people for having mental illnesses, or even for engaging in private behavior that's not harming others as a result. But the laws and norms that best promote marriage and childrearing shouldn't be destroyed just to make people with a particular mental illness feel less bad about themselves. Nor should we pretend it's somehow "equally good" for people to have sex with their same sex.
This is the nub of it. Why did the ancient taboo against homosexuality appear? Most likely because there was no welfare state or automation, and so these societies needed babies or else they'd go extinct. No children? Well, there's no pensions either so sucks to be you.
In the modern world we've lost that basic understanding that babies matter, that self propagation matters. In fact large parts of the left wing population argue explicitly against having babies, often for the most dubious of reasons (like climate doomerism), and even try to guilt trip people who do have them! They think existing levels of state spending are immovable, inevitable and indestructible, and their general disinterest in tradeoffs (of which economics and state budgets are a subset) means they are disinclined to ponder the consequences of this stance. So all the welfare systems even in the richest countries are heading towards bankruptcy, everyone knows this and yet even raising the retirement age for women to match that of men - by the tiny amount of like, one year - triggers mass protests and political instability. So if welfare levels can't be reduced then the only other option is to have way more children.
Now, this doesn't necessarily have to involve artificial wombs or going back to suppression of homosexuality. There aren't that many LG people! The more obvious and less disruptive path is to make adoption a lot easier. Today the state makes adoption hard and it's not a popular choice, also perhaps due to uncertainty about how much nature vs nurture matters. But we can imagine a future in which most parents have children in their mid 40s for example, not biologically but via surrogate mothers or just through adoption.
The ancient taboo is related to destructive equality. There was a taboo about having twins because of the competition. Possibly having two mothers leads to jealousy between them without a natural method for the child to understand the hierarchy. Ancient stories seem to be full of this.
I think ancient cultures also understood the relationship of homosexuality and self-love, in that the hero can fall in love with an image of himself and then abuse his lovers by seducing and discarding them. Once they love him it fuels his desire for himself and then he discards them.
Possibly masturbation and homosexuality are taboo because in some ways they are more sexually satisfying, even while they fuel this kind of self-love crisis of the individual, which of course doesn’t stop with him. He wants his mate to become him, in a way, but of course if they become exactly like him he gets repelled.
The culture’s purpose is to defuse these kinds of crises and competitions over equality by re-establishing an order. The more important competition is over wealth and ability, but I think it may apply to culture war positions too. The healthy culture finds a way for you to complement your partner or your community.
The taboo seems pretty obvious to me. The equipment is not biologically designed to operate that way and even a cave-man could figure out there was something unnatural about it.
And you must be incredibly against straight couples engaging in "exotic" forms of sexual pleasure since "clearly" the mouth, hand and anus are not "designed" to "operate that way" as you put it.
Gay sex is definitionally biologically incorrect use (or wrong, or unnatural depending on how you define those words). And that isn't my experience, that is just biology. Morally wrong is up to individuals and societies to decide. But that decision is not being made in a vacuum of knowledge about how the equipment is designed to be used.
We had a young pig that would hump anything. Ears, heads, anything he could find. I was 16 at the time and didn't even think it was that weird. After a few weeks he figured it out though. And he never did an ear again after that. That is how sex works in real life.
So if I just live on a farm I'll realize I'm really attracted to women and I'll never have sex unless it's purely to have kids again? That was what I was missing? All that city life got the better of me? Or am I just sick (like the other dude said)?
I doubt it. At least not from what I am told. What is affecting human populations is a different phenomena than what you were citing (when it happens occasionally in nature). What is happening in humans is probably due to overpopulation. Again, search for mouse utopia 25.
We know that in less developed species (fish for example) population pressure or food abundance (or fish size, related to food) can cause sex switching.
In mammals, sex is far less malleable. But high species still retain remnants of what came before them. So overpopulation is a fairly viable hypothesis.
I am sure you were excited to find this scientific excuse. Unfortunately it just isn't true. I grew up on a farm. They do it very rarely. And even then, typically when they are young, and presumably a bit confused about how it is all meant to work. Sex is bizarre and complicated. We shouldn't take observations of a few hiccups in the process as anything more than just hiccups. Lets just face the fact that the point of sex is reproduction, and done wrong it is giant waste of natures prime directive (reproduction) so it is definitionally an aberration. Just is.
#Sarcasm and I am SURE you are JUST as upset about straight people copulating with their...other parts, and infertile people copulating. Got to keep sex pure. Just like animals. Oh wait.
I would hesitate in making that argument because anal sex is clearly pleasurable enough for people to do it, yet that pleasurability serves no obvious purpose. And then there's homosexuality in the animal kingdom too.
It seems more like the opposite: it actually is natural, but the taboo evolved against it for the same reasons that many other ancient taboos against natural things evolved (e.g. polygamy) - it was bad for society at the time.
Pleasure is not the criteria by which the equipment's use is judged.
The equipment is not designed FOR your pleasure.
Pleasure is an afterthought that biology implemented to try and get you to use the equipment at all, as the whole process is bizarre in the abstract.
While you clearly can, and people do, use it for pleasure, that is not what it is actually for. And that is just a fact.
The fact that homosexuality exists elsewhere doesn't make it "natural" or normal. It simply means the system malfunctions elsewhere sometimes as well. Typically, the driver for homosexuality appears to be overpopulation. See (mouse utopia 25).
Why is homosexuality present across the animal kingdom if it's unnatural? Why do we allow straight couples to have sex in a variety of "unnatural" ways (as you describe it) if that's not how our "equipment" is supposed to be used?
Because it is a complex system that is fairly easy to use wrong.
We allow anybody to get their rocks off anyway they like. And I am not suggesting that is a bad policy. But I am suggesting that the equipment is clearly designed for a specific purpose. And it would be lying to ourselves and others to pretend otherwise.
I doubt any society anywhere has ever had enough homosexuals to make that society worried about reproducing enough to survive. Even with high child hood mortality rates and child birth related deaths, not having effective birth control plus normal human desires was presumably enough to keep fertility rates well above replacement rates.
Also, the state may make adoption hard, but generally there are way more people wanting to adopt than there are healthy, adoptable children. If the state made it easier, it wouldn't increase the number of babies available for adoption. Juts too many people have historically rather they be killed than go through pregnancy and then adoption.
There are unfortunately way more special needs and abused children than there are people wanting to adopt them.
Ancient Sparta might be an example. They encouraged homosexual relations between men as a (possibly misguided) means of promoting military cohesion. They promoted homosexual relations between women, as well, although I don't recall the pretext for this. They didn't last all that long:
"The Spartiate population declined from 8000 in the early fifth century to less than 1000 in the mid-fourth, and caused Sparta's political fortunes to drop dramatically from being the unofficial hegemon of the Greek-speaking peoples to a strictly local power in the Hellenistic period. This was the most dramatic population change of any ancient Greek city aside from cases of andrapodismos, and it drew the attention of contemporaries to the process such as Aristotle and Xenophon. Some modern scholars have seen this phenomenon primarily as a personnel loss due to families being demoted from the Spartiate rank or to deliberate elite fertility restriction due to estate preservation. But these explanations neglect the peculiarities of Spartiate reproductive customs maladaptive to demographic recovery. This dissertation first examines what made the Spartiate population regime unique, how it succeeded at first, and why and how it failed to produce a sufficient number of Spartiates to continue Sparta's hegemony. Second, it argues that Sparta's imperial phase was a response to and a result of this attested decline in Spartiate numbers and the attendant addition of non-Spartiates to the Lakedaimonian army."
I just want to say that, whether its conclusions are true or not, that dissertation is a really awesome find and I wish I had time to read it in full.
I've only ever heard the view that the decline in the Spartiate population was driven by customs that made it far easier to lose one's Spartiate status than to gain it.
He addresses that here:
Demotion means that oliganthropia results when males who had been born and raised Spartiate but fell out of the Spartiate class, that is, out of the class of homoioi or “equals,” primarily because they could not pay the contributions required for their syssitia or common dining-societies.3 This brought them into the ranks of the hypomeiones or “inferiors,” another class that seems to have included the tresantes (“tremblers” or cowards), the agamoi (unmarried men), and several other categories of person. This process of demotion from the Spartiates has been isolated since the 1980s as the prime cause of oliganthropia, and Aristotle’s analysis of the decline can be taken to support this as well.This analysis has in fact become the communis opinio.4Very recently, however, it has been argued that demotion cannot have been responsible for a great percentage of the decrease in Spartiates: low fertility must comprise most of the problem.5 In this argument, oliganthropia is thus primarily population loss, not just personnel demotion. Spartiate families, in addition to some demotions whose quantities may have been overestimated in the “personnel-demotion model,” were simply not producing enough children to cope with the mortality rate. Uncontroversially, this has been explained by the deliberate preservation of property and status: too many offspring will split property into unusably or unfashionably small amounts.6 However, we would then expect to see oliganthropia due to estate preservation amongst other populations in the Classical Greek world. But no Greek sub-population underwent any process of dramatic diminution similar to that found amongst the Spartiates.
Interesting. Is it possible that Richard is unable to mention the centrality of Christianity to his position in the same way that conservatives are unable to mention society?
I don't really like framing it in terms of societies, which reeks of group selection -- framing it in terms of individual selection is probably good enough.
In a number of past societies, male homosexual behavior (especially pederasty) was very widespread. It would appear that bisexuality, especially directed towards boys and teens, is rather easily to socially condition. This is in contrast with obligate homosexuality, which is difficult to explain biologically and probably doesn't ever exceed a few percentage points of the population. Hence Cochran's Germ Theory.
But it still seems unlikely that the taboo was selected for on a societal level. The male disgust reaction to homosexual acts (particularly anal sex) is real, and the social taboos are probably just a manifestation of that individual disgust reaction. Which in turn might have its origins in excess mortality from disease, but I'm inclined to think it's instead more rooted in imposing a limit to the degree to which homosexual acts can substitute for heterosexual ones -- with bisexual men who were more open to substitution also producing fewer progeny. Note that even the Greeks are said to have frowned upon anal sex.
Nobody at the time would have been thinking in abstract intellectualist terms like the fertility rate of a whole society. The problem would have been that if you didn't have children you'd become a burden directly on your neighbours.
As for not having enough, bear in mind once a taboo is established you don't know how many people would violate it if the taboo was lifted. It's quite tricky.
A lot here I agree with. And perhaps I'm reading you incorrectly, but I dont think adoption and surrogacy by 40 year olds will replace healthy 20-somethings getting married and having a lot of sex.
I guess it depends on the social desirability and acceptability of becoming a baby factory for money. It's a very rare choice today but the question is, does it have to be that way? I pass no comment on the desirability of such an outcome but if society won't budge on welfare, restricts immigration and many people refuse to raise children, then it's one way out.
My dude. Gays aren't numerous enough to affect birth rates. Stuff like free/subsidised kindergarten and pre-K seems far more likely to influence parents' decision to reproduce and/or to have 1 vs 2 vs 3 kids... It's all about the Benjamins.
They aren't numerous enough? I keep seeing articles gloating about gen Z being 20% LGBT. Why wouldn't it keep increasing as long as LGBT is heavily promoted? I think there is more plasticity to sexuality than cons or libs realize.
Not that it matters that much. I mainly use the fertility argument for the sake of Hanania who only cares about this issue as it relates to fertility.
Yep, there is where I come down -- as long as we're talking about bisexuality and not obligate homosexuality.
Bisexuality is much more common among Gen Z women than men, but I think that's at least in part because women continue to impose social costs on men who engage in bisexual behavior. But I also see signs that's changing. The guy Taylor Swift is currently having sex with has made some very hip statements around a more casual sort of male homosexual behavior that stops short of intercourse, and I see that becoming more normalized in the next generation.
The big thing, from talking to women, is the STD rate. A lot of them who think guy-on-guy is hot won't date an actual bisexual because your risk of herpes, etc. goes way up.
There may very well be less PC arguments they're not admitting to, we all know about that. ;)
To me, STD rate, while true, sounds like rationalization of what's really just a disgust reaction. If the STD problem were solved tomorrow, would that disgust reaction really go away?
So maybe what's normalized is teen boys / young men flirting, kissing, etc., but not anal sex. Which, again, the Greeks frowned upon as well. Maybe such a man doesn't even identify as LGBT+++, it's just that some level of behavior like this will be expected (or at least rewarded) from a proper "ally".
Here's the description of Matty Healy (Swift's guy) from Wikipedia:
After Queerty republished his statements from the Attitude article and headlined it Matt Healy comes out as "aesthete," says he’ll kiss beautiful men but won’t have sex with them",[134] Healy issued a statement on Twitter, criticising the publication for misinterpreting his words: "I didn’t come out as anything. […] I’m not playing a game and trying to take up queer spaces, I’m simply trying to be an ally and this headline makes me uncomfortable."[135] In 2020, when asked by ShortList if he is attracted to men, he stated "Yes, but not in a carnal, sexual way."
It's hard to tell; I saw Dan Savage saying now young people don't want to call themselves 'straight' because it has conservative political implications (my old self: WTF?). So maybe it is something an ally is expected to do these days!
Disgust evolved to protect from pathogens--what's the grossest thing there is? right, dead bodies, poop, and spoiled food. So even if the STD problem were solved (which it isn't), it would probably be a matter of evolutionary instincts doing their job (former job, in this hypothetical). Those tend to be pretty sticky.
1. It's against Christianity, lots of people here are Christian. I'm sure you know the arguments.
2. Against nature. This kind of falls into 1. above, though.
3. Less likely to have kids. Righties tend to be pronatalists.
There are right ideologies like libertarianism that are OK with it, but generally conservatives are for traditional values, and in the West those come from Christianity, which is says being gay is bad. So there's your answer, more or less.
1. I am a Christian, so I don't find this convincing. I have also been puzzled why Christians are so against gay people and not against other issues like...interest from the bank. Or divorce. Or sodomy among straight people. There are countless laws in the Old Testament that are supposed Christian beliefs that supposed Christians don't follow. Furthermore: we don't live in a Christian nation, you don't get to impose your religion on me. So I don't find this relevant. No Christian would let Shariah law be imposed, and Christian law is no different.
2. If this is against nature why do so many animals practice homosexuality? It's literally all over the place. This argument is just wrong.
3. I WANT kids, being gay does NOT mean you wont have kids
And no: Western civilization is NOT just Christianity. It in fact predates Christianity. So this is wrong too. Which means your argument boils down to "this is against my religion"
The US isn't a religious nation. Don't impose your view of Christianity on me. I'll do the same.
As for your #1, divorce is a major topic among Christians. Unlike homosexuality, I've actually heard pastors preach on it from the pulpit. In a Bible-believing church, it is grounds for disqualification from ministry or eldership unless the divorce can be shown to have been Biblically valid (per Matthew 5:31-32, for example).
I have thoughts on usury and believe that it's still a relevant topic today, but I think it's too technical and removed from most people's lives to gather much attention. Much of the OT law is viewed as ritual law and not relevant to gentile Christians today, for example in Acts 15 and Mark 7:19. But note that the New Testament repeatedly affirms OT sexual morality, in the Gospels, Acts, epistles, and Revelation.
The reason homosexuality receives the most attention in the political space is because it's the main point of moral conflict between contemporary Christian and worldly culture. What really animates me personally, and I think many Christians, is the sense that worldly culture is trying to make acceptance of homosexual behavior mandatory for participation in American civic, cultural, and economic life.
I was mildly opposed to gay marriage prior to Obama's second term -- I just didn't think it that important of an issue that would affect my life personally. The experiences of Brendan Eich and Masterpiece Cake Shop were two events that caused me to develop the sense that Pride is an all-conquering force that is prepared to wreck the lives of any who refuse to submit, and the conquest of all American institutions by Pride since that time has only reinforced this sense.
Correct. "Gay marriage" was sold on the premise of "why do you care what people do behind closed doors?" If the sale were honest, we likely wouldn't have this conflict. The problem is that the doors didn't stay closed like we were told.
As to your first point: I do not see any people seriously asking for the US to ban divorce and usury (or, for that matter, sodomy between heterosexuals) and until they do I will assume that their attempts to stop homosexuality is just based on hate and bigotry.
As to your last: I don't understand why any gay couple would want an evangelical christian to make their wedding cake, and I did not support ending his business.
1. I just Googled the phrase "ban no-fault divorce" and came up with recent articles from Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Jezebel, and others fretting about the right's growing opposition to it. If you listen to socially conservative intellectual circles, the idea of banning no-fault divorce has been in discussion for a long time. A TOTAL ban on divorce hasn't really ever been the Protestant position, since it's a tougher standard than even Jesus applied.
2. Usury does affect people's lives (the two modern-day examples of usury that I'd give are credit card loans and student loans), but very few people are, or ever have the opportunity to be, usurers, and most people don't really understand the topic. The Evangelical church is generally pietistic, more interested in personal morality than broader social crusades. The only real example of the latter has been the pro-life cause, which really sucks up the oxygen from any other social crusades, and as crusades go, attacking usury just comes across as quixotic. The opposition to legalized gay marriage wasn't really a social crusade in this sense, but more of an effort to preserve the longstanding status quo.
3. My understanding is that the men who sued Masterpiece Cakeshop weren't looking for a cake, they went to multiple cake shops specifically looking for someone to sue and destroy. It was a deliberate and organized attack. It doesn't matter if you personally don't support it. I've heard a number of individual leftists say this, but I never saw any signs of waffling from leftist media and institutions.
Fair enough, there are 1.2 billion Christians or so, you'd expect a few doctrinal variations. I'm giving the arguments (you asked why people act that way), not endorsing them. I don't actually think being gay is bad (as I said).
1. I should have said conservative Christian. The religious thing does underpin a lot of it. Plenty of denominations march in Pride parades these days.
2. You sometimes see this in a 'nature or nature's god' argument, to argue some sort of natural law. I don't really think it makes moral sense either--we're naturally drawn to cheeseburgers for instance, but they're not healthy.
3. It decreases the chances because you have to (a) find someone to settle down with and (b) find someone to have the biological kid with. For a heterosexual those can be the same person. I know a lot of gay people are entering coparenting arrangements and the like, so it's certainly not impossible, but it does make it harder.
As an aside, this is one of Hanania's views, so he attracts people who agree with him. I enjoy the heterodox attacks on the right and left. It's hard to find a conservative writer who's so honest about his own side's shortcomings. But don't think you have to agree with everything he says. People tend to start getting really into certain writers and then get depressed when they say something offensive. Particularly when dealing with these sort of dissident-right ideas, it kind of comes with the territory.
If you spend two seconds looking into adoption seriously, you will instantly come across a flood of information about how traumatic it is and how many problems adoptees have, even when the process goes relatively smoothly. It's incredible to me that people really have so much trouble imagining what could possibly go wrong with homosexual male couples pursuing adoption just so they can play pretend at a heteronormative family (which also begs the question of why they're even trying to copy heteronormativity when it's something they typically scorn in other contexts).
I'm gonna have to go with the Isaiah Berlin Fox vs. Hedgehog analogy, "a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing," with liberals being foxes and conservatives being hedgehogs.
Liberals know about things like heteronormativity and "gender expression", that there have always been gay people and other sexual minorities and that these people need to be centered so their self-esteem can be raised to hetero levels, which in their belief system is necessary to attain Justice and Equality.
Conservatives know that the liberal project of "social liberation" has no limiting principle and that if liberals are willing to teach Queer Theory to children and encourage their "gender journeys" behind the backs of parents while lying to them about it, then the liberal project is a dagger aimed directly at their parental rights and authority and at their traditional religious beliefs.
Wow, only liberals know about gay people in history? Let's ask the typical liberal voter what they know about history, shall we? Liberals would be better served (or perhaps not) by knowing things like how to educate their kids, how to keep their kids off drugs, how to create and maintain a marriage, how to not overspend their money, how to not vote for warmongers, how to manage cities, how to take personal responsibility, and how to think for themselves - afterall, there is no hivemind like the liberal hivemind. And that is why we are here, because the hive wants to enforce its foolishness on not just its own.
The hedgehog just wants to be free to do as he pleases without causing or incurring interference from anyone. Maybe if liberals knew things like, how to be a free-thinker, we'd all get along better, but that authoritarianism from the current leadership (not biden), is simply the cancer of bolshevism out of remission.
Keep believing that the faux-intellectualism that has brought us such wonders as brutalism, Detroit, and disparate impact theory is some kind of genius-level nuance that only Swarthmore grads that didn't start KKR understand.
Also, keep thinking that self-esteem can be imparted.
hey i was generalizing, which of course means broad brushes, and I wasn't necessarily endorsing, just trying to describe.
i do agree that liberals have given away too much too often to leftists, who only take advantage of the freedoms of liberalism in order to undermine and hopefully overthrow it.
Are public libraries hosting Hooter girl story hours? Are government agencies flying the Hooters flag for a month out of every year? Is every academic institution and corporation forcing people to write an essay about how they will personally advance the righteous cause of Hooterism as a condition of admission or employment?
Conservatives may be simple-minded and intellectually inconsistent/dishonest, but they are smart enough to realize when the entire ruling class of the Western world is pissing on their leg while telling them it’s raining.
Maybe it is a British private school thing but we weren't supposed to know anything about our teachers, even their first names were semi secret.
I am not sure conservatives would be happy with complete symmetry, but it strikes me that teachers who want to talk about fetishes are largely GBTQ (not sure any lesbians want to talk about it) and parents from both sides would be equally upset if a teacher wanted to discuss heterosexual BDSM or similar.
Aren't conservatives anti-Hooters? Isn't it just low salience in the current world.
When it comes to discussing spouses with kids, there's also something of a social contract involved. If teachers can't be trusted to use discretion about sharing details with their students (e.g. telling kids you're married: OK, telling kids how active your sex life is: not OK), then the policy hammer might have to come down and say teachers are not to discuss their personal lives at all.
It's a very good question, and I think the answer would be along the lines that we see that LGBT is in part socially constructed, and most people would rather their kids end up as conventional heterosexuals for obvious evolutionary reasons. But I don't prioritize this issue as much as many conservatives do, as I don't have any kind of religious objection to homosexuality or anything.
I think this really requires two separate answers, for LGB and T.
Most conservatives would admit that they don't want their kids to be trans AND they believe gender identity is socially constructed.
Homosexuality is different. Non-religious conservatives probably don't think very negatively of homosexuality, even if they may prefer their kids were straight. They're also less convinced that sexuality is socially constructed vs innate.
With this in mind, intellectual conservatives can consistently defend bans on trans ideology in schools, as well as overtly sexualized content (like that "banned" children's book which described sex acts in detail). But they should back away from normal gay stuff. It's fine if your kid's teacher says he's married to a man.
Depending on who you are including as "non-religious", I think you are overestimating non-religious conservatives acceptance of homosexuality. Despite what they say, I think most conservatives, including non-religious ones, are still tolerant of homosexuality in the literal sense of the word. When dealing with friends and aquaintences, that tolerance looks more or less indistinguishable from complete acceptance. But when dealing with immediate family, particularly children, I think they will still pretty strongly desire that their kids be heterosexual.
Agree with most of that ; the one point I'd push back is that if gender identity is indeed socially constructed (meaning, what it means to be a man or a woman is not the same as being male/female and accepts social variability across time and space), it should, at some point, be okay to discuss it with kids.
I don't remember anyone in my class questioning why Ancient Greeks were wearing skirts and Ancient Romans were wearing dresses but that would not be an unreasonable question and, at some point, that might lead to a discussion about gender roles and how they get created...
I mean, who remembers that, in Victorian England, pink was for boys and blue was for girls?
Isn't it essentially the same argument you are exposing but written in a more intellectual language?
Call it "being socially constructed" instead of "groomed" it still doesn't make any sense unless we are treating cis-hetero individual as the default, idealized form of a human being, thus making a moral judgement. Even if you appeal towards evolutionary reasons, instead of divine ones as a source of such morality.
I asked the same question before seeing this. I think this is a huge issue and maybe you should write something more in depth here. I've read a few other article on it, and have my own opinion but I'm not finding this short answer very convincing if I'm a liberal
Part socially constructed? Hm, okay. I guess transgenderism can have a social contagion component and be attractive to people with mental issues. Gays and Lesbians, otoh? I'm not seeing it. First of all, you can have homosexual experiences, decide it's not for you and never identify as gay/lesbian... Second, like, it's not that trendy or life transforming to be gay so it seems unlikely people would push so hard on heteronormativity if it weren't for the moral aspect.
The idea we do it for evolutionary reasons (having grandkids?) seems... weird. I remember discussing our yet-to-be-born children with my wife and agreeing we'd prefer them being straight but entirely b/c we didn't them to struggle against latent/open homophobia.
OTOH, the very fact that I didn't want my children to struggle against homophobia is very much why I support gay rights broadly and want children be (age appropriately) informed that some people are indeed gay and it's okay. Some parents won't have a choice and will have to defend their kid/family member from opprobrium and they shouldn't have to. Ask Dick and Liz Cheney.
I don't agree that evolutionary reasoning is weird. I think it's weird and unfortunate that we've gotten away from thinking about what kind of future of humanity we want.
"banning LGBTQ-related discussions in front of kids?"
I think the issue is that this is an enormously broad heading, which could encompass everything from teaching a 12-yr-old about Harvey Milk or the Sacred Band of Thebes to teaching a 7-yr-old about the Genderbread Person and puberty blockers...
I don't think it's that surprising that if a teacher wants to give sexually explicit material to junior high kids that some parents will object. Most adults wouldn't put on Pornhub when a young person comes over. The question always comes down to where to draw the line.
The Left has become so evangelical about Queer Theory that they read any possible objections to their sacred cause as ipso facto hateful bigotry. But if we're talking about public schools and age-appropraite material, it's best to err on the side of caution, otherwise the risk is an angry backlash, which is not surprising when it comes to parents wanting to protect their children.
No objections. I'm not going to defend every insanity going on in the USA. I will simply observe that, in a country of 300M people, you will have someone doing or saying something extremely stupid every day, indeed every second of every minute of every day...
If, on top, you set up incentives to surface every inanity professed by anyone from the other side, you can be build a long and profitable career, nay, network and it still will have been a moral panic i.e. nothing consequential actually taking place.
yes! you have just described modern America and its media/entertainment state where Bread & Circuses are on the menu every second of every day. it is actually amazing that when you leave the internet and go out IRL all seems for the most part holding together and most people are pleasant to deal with. but a stable, prosperous country with normal challenges is bad for business, so the war of attrition via clickbait shall continue....
Indeed. Taking the other side, liberals are freaking out about book banning in schools/libraries but, apparently, 60% of book banning requests have been/are carried out by 11 individuals...
oh don't get me started on the whole "book banning" manufactured controversy. the MSM acts like a pyromaniac put in charge of the Fire Dept...there have to be a constant stream of "Nazi Bigots Attack! Fourth Reich is here!" narratives in order for them to present themselves as the Wise and Compassionate voices we should obey and never contradict. These people lie like the rest of us breathe.
On “should we ban lgbtq discussion in front of kids” idea:
Its a massive greyzone and mess of inteprqbility, but i think their could be dimensions of how one looks on subsidizing or encouraging it, or banning or regulating it either legally, economicly or socially: (with examples of high and low regulation, “pro queer” standing for ways to encouraging or destigmatize it: neutral being no stance/laisse fair treatment; pro-hetero being either anti queer policies and norms, or strongly advocating and subsidizing heteronormativity and Cis man/woman ideals, ie anti trans directly or indirectly)
1: how frequently and intensely it is discussed or brought up in public settings, either by goverment, companies, non profits, or individuals
Freedom of speech on the subject.
(Pro Queer: goverment or company funded pridemonth and loads of commercials and celebrations
Neutral: goverment gives no money or national holidays for LGBTQ events
Pro hetero: goverment places fines on companies or goverment organizations discussing/celebrating LGBTQ; organizing pride month is made illegal or increadibly difficult; or extremely, bans on those things.
2; how positively or negatively or neutrally it is discussed
Freedom of speech again
Pro-queer: loads of media pottayals of happy couples, goverment funded art celebrating queernes, etc.
Neutral: either no goverment involvement, or ban on funding or any sort of lgbtq things on the goverments part. No involvement in provate sphere though
Pro-hetero: probably lots of polocies like the ones russia haves, etc
3: what threshold of relevant cues must be met to discuss it:
Pro-queer: any context is allowed to discuss queer things, saying “queerness is not relevant” is looked down upon as a way to silence individuals. On extreme end, mandatory policies of bringing it up or looking for it or discrimination
Neutral: neutral?
Pro-hetero: bringing up queer identity or events in one life is looked down upon, and seen as innapropriate. On extreme end, ban on bringing it up unless prompted.
Gonna stop going “pro queer” or “pro hetero” as i think you get the idea that you can have a spectrum of regulation
4: policies around kids.
Ie: sex ed, libraries, pride parades letting kids participate or not, etc.
5: policies on kids own activities and ideas vs parental determination:
Ie, if a kid says they want X queer thing and parents says no, who gets priority there, what age must the kid be to have priority (on one extreme must be legal adults, on another extreme a 5 year old can decide on their own)
6: discrimination lawsuits and thresholds, how much anti queer or pro queer ideas can go or act without legal consequences as long as they arnt directly violating a law or moral principle everyone agrees on etc
Idk did this make sense?
Im a gay male, and i suppose that i am generally neutral or 40% pro queer. But i am a swede and sweden is very pro queer generally, and might be seen as extremely pro queer in USA
hey i must be older than you, i had to sneak some Playboys w my friends in junior high. i think if there's one thing we should be able to agree upon in modern America is that we are certainly not suffering from any shortage of "explicit sexual material" (i can't even watch sitcoms w my mom without blushing!)
The rational for limiting discussions until age appropriate is that the equipment is not designed for those uses, and so there is not a good reason to encourage the misuse of the equipment.
Shapiro's argument about teachers is indeed retarded, but who is taking kids to Hooters? This sounds like a "your terms are acceptable" moment; the left may be smarter, but precisely because of its cultural hegemony, it's less able to see things from the cultural conservative point of view. Thus it assumes social conservatives believe that no sexual restraint should ever be imposed on men, only women.
As for Richard;'s last point, I don't really buy into the idea that there will be many conservative victories here. Any fleeting rightward drift really just represents the Boomers and Gen X's last hurrah. Once Millennials and Gen Z are fully running the show, that whole game will be over, submission to almighty Pride will be demanded with more vigor than ever.
The one time in my life I went to a Hooters, there were several kids there under the age of ten. Mostly boys but one or two girls as well. It was weird.
I've probably been 10-15 times, and I don't remember ever seeing kids. But it might be that, at certain times of day, depending on what's nearby, some Hooters locations are more prone to this. Probably less likely to be a destination for kids ("Who wants to go to Hooters?") than a place that gets some family walk-in traffic as a result of what else is nearby.
On the occasions I went, it was normally either late at night or happy hour after work. I also went to one in Tokyo, funny enough, just to see what it was like. There was only one other patron there, a middle-aged Japanese guy, and we ended up talking about baseball as he wanted to practice his English. Not surprisingly, Hooters in Japan appears to have failed.
For the record, I absolutely don't think kids belong at Hooters, either. That said, it needs to be pointed out that kids aren't going to see much at Hooters that they aren't likely to see at many public beaches, either, which cannot be said for a gay man in a costume, dancing around, pretending he's Britney Spears or whatever to satisfy some fetish or compulsion.
I don't know that conservatives are being mealy mouthed or hypocritical here. I think the fundamental difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality in an educational setting is that teaching kids about the mechanics of human reproduction is different from teaching them about things that happen to make certain people aroused. In this sense, teaching kids about homosexuality is grooming in the same way that discussing heterosexual fetishes is grooming -- you're normalizing adults having sexually explicit conversations with kids that don't involve teaching them how babies are made. You don't have to actively "marginalize" (or whatever) homosexuality; this is just a natural understanding people have when LGBT doesn't have a stranglehold on the culture.
I'm reluctant to accept that only conservatives are prone to reacting from the gut. Isn't it just that liberals, typically being more educated, are more skilled at rationalising their gut feelings?
The handy thing about the trans stuff is how it reveals those rationalisation chops. Because, as Richard helpfully pointed out in his Twitter essay (linked in the piece) this revolves around metaphysical principles more than the scientifically verifiable or falsifiable arguments about other types of social justice.
So I'm not confident, really, that we aren't conflating intelligence with word skills when we compare how conservatives and liberals parse the edge cases of sexual identity.
You're missing a BIG part of the equation. And that is that it is not only conservative Republicans who feel strongly about money hungry surgeons mutilating children in the name of gender identity. It is not only Republicans who are concerned about biological males with penises and testicles, who "identify" as women, RAPING biological women in "women's prisons."
You're trying to make it sound like ONLY Repubs are concerned with the troubling issues pertaining to the LGBTQ community and transgenderism, and that's wrong. There are scores of Dems who don't believe a child can consent to a life altering surgery, that involves castration and sterilization. I'm a Democrat and I share many of the same concerns, so you're wrong on that front. It's not only Repubs, it's Dems, too. Welcome to 2023. Also, I strongly encourage you to go to YouTube and listen to the Detransition stories. They are heartbreaking and offer an extremely important perspective that can no longer be denied or pushed under the proverbial rug.
"Conservatives granted that homosexuality isn’t inherently inferior to heterosexuality. "
That is the leftist position and not the conservative position. Conservatives have never granted this premise.
Conservatives know the biological reality is that the equipment is designed for a certain use. They believe using the equipment incorrectly is weird, and quite inferior. But using it wrong isn't hurting those adults too much. So fine. If you must.
To keep things apolitical. People walk on their legs and not their hands. While you "can" walk on your hands, and even might enjoy it, that is not how the equipment was designed to be used. Walking on your hands in the supermarket is awkward for the rest of us is - but we can live with it because we are inherently accommodating and nice people.
But teachers walking on their hands in school all day. And corporations trying to sell handshoes to children gets really worrisome. Because this is just going to cause lots of kids to live difficult lives that don't need to do so. Now the handwalkers are doing harm. The children are now being explicitly told by these teachers and corporations that handwalking will solve their teenage angst. And it WON'T. The problem with LGBTQ is the proselytizing and recruiting.
While we can tolerate handwalking, their is no reason on the planet to encourage it. It is not "normal" in a very real way. And every person is "not normal" in some (or many) ways. I have no desire to punish people who are different (as we all are in some way). But that doesn't mean society needs to encourage unnormal behaviors in malleable children - who are best served to be as normal as they can be (and compensate for the rest).
This is getting long, but you will like "mouse utopia experiment 25". It explains an awful lot.
And your shtick about conservatives being stupid is getting old and typically disrespectfully leftist.
I am gay. Should I be allowed to raise kids, be a teacher (or a politician, policeman, etc)?
Also: I’d hand walking is so bad, why is homosexual behavior so common in the animal kingdom? We see it in most animals that I’m aware of and in fact gay parents are present in many species? Does this not contradict your argument?
Question 2: It is not common. For incredibly obvious reasons. You are looking for excuses to justify what is happening. Read about mouse utopia 25. This appears to mostly happen in species which are overpopulated.
I am not normal in many ways (some good and some not). We all are.
That does not mean I cannot admit the reality of my situation and that I am required to take every discussion of those abnormalities as a personal offense.
I am asking basic questions. Kids shouldn’t learn about LGBT people because it isn’t normal, I’m ‘imperfect’ because I’m gay and I’d be better off if i acknowledged that I’m suboptimal. How am I supposed to take that suggestion?
Kids should be taught age appropriate things. Not things that make adults feel better about themselves and shore up their fragile egos.
You are correct, that 8 year-olds should not be taught about LGBT, or prostitution, or or blow jobs, or wife swapping, or lots of things related to sex. If they ask then tell them to go play on the swings.
At some age people can learn about bestiality and sadomasochisms and anything they like. But they should not be taught (read leftist indoctrinated) about any of it in the public school system. Even sex-ed should not be about how to get pleasure. It should be about how people get pregnant - end of story.
And I honestly think you know both those things and are searching for excuses for the recent leftist bad behaviors.
Everybody should acknowledge that they are suboptimal because they are. Lying to yourself, and insisting others lie about things is not a viable solution. I like you for you for who you really are, flaws included, - you will be much happier if you also accept reality. Neither of us should have to pretend that the equipment was designed for that.
How is your homosexuality relevant to children's education? I'm theoretically ok with the idea of gay teachers; in 3rd grade I had one who I didn't know was gay (though it is telling in retrospect that he incorrectly interpreted the arm-motion vandalism of a desk by another boy I was sitting next to as masturbation). It's not the end of the world if you keep personal photo of you and your husband or whatever on your desk facing your own seat. If a nosy child looks over and sees it, ok, they may become aware that gay people exist; such a thing is already inevitable in any case. But how is anything more than that relevant? Kids can learn about Alan Turing or James Buchanan or Frederick the Great without learning about their sex lives.
Homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom isn't that common actually. It exists yes, but not as often as you put it.
But personally I think it's technically wrong to call homosexuality "unnatural". People are born that way and, as you said, it exists in the animal kingdom. However, I think it's "abnormal" just as being born with 12 fingers is. It's not a "bad thing", but it shouldn't be seen as normal either.
As I said it's not a bad thing in itself. But it shouldn't be normalized. It would go something like this IMO :
- Do homosexuality exist ? Yes.
- Is it natural ? Technically, yes.
- Is it normal ? No, reproductive organs aren't made to interact in that way.
- Should they be bullied, discriminated against in everydaylife (job, opportunities) ? No.
- Should we put heterosexuality as the default standard ? Yes.
Problem is that conservatives don't have the guts to do that. So they contort themselves into improbable mental gymnastics and liberals end up having the more logically consistent argument on that issue as Richard said.
Normalizing it is bad because it is not normal. If we make heterosexuality the default standard, most gays won't publicly display their sexuality so discriminations will be pretty rare. And we can still have anti-discrimination law just like those for disabled.
Not sure if this is what the other guy means--but there's a difference between "normalizing" something in the sense removing the surprise or disgust (AAH! Gayness!) and trying to build a culture where it's just as normal as everything else. The culture should drive itself forward based on heterosexual norms, families, and children, and being gay or trans or dressing up as the opposite sex should be a niche thing that we accommodate as best we can. But not a thing that we have an entire month (or season!) celebrating, to the point that I hear far more in popular culture about transforming yourself into the opposite sex than I do about raising children.
I have a circadian rhythm disorder. I can't wake up or even work at normal hours; I have to sleep very late and wake very late. It has caused immense trouble in my life. I am abnormal. The prevalence of this disorder is about similar to gay (and certainly more prevalent than trans). Society should tolerate this aspect of my physiology, but stores should not be forced to stay open later, movies should not regularly feature people waking up for work several hours later than normal, people should assume that I will be awake at normal hours and I should be forced to explain my disorder, etc.
Liberals largely control our moral universe and specifically taboos, which leaves conservatives to fight culture wars with a hand tied behind their backs. So it is with this issue, where questioning whether it is in society's best interest to celebrate rather than stigmatize LBTQ is beyond the pale.
But I don't think flawed argumentation is unique to conservative advocacy. Most advocacy relies on emotion over great argument, including wokeness, which is obviously remarkably successful and dumb.
Ideological conservatives only have themselves to blame for not creating viable media alternatives/offerings (or at least buying a single paper like the NYT, the WSJ barely counts these days). Nearly every single movie/television show carries an implicit liberal worldview (and has for quite some time), if there's one to be found.
I think part of what makes this debate especially confusing is that trans activists are very slippery about what their condition IS exactly, and tend to strategically equivocate between different definitions as suits their argument at the moment.
Traditionally, my understanding was that gender dysphoria is a psychological disorder which causes intense distress and anguish to those who suffer from it, and which requires medical intervention to treat effectively. In this model, trans is something like depression or anorexia: obviously no one should be ashamed for suffering from these conditions, and I want anyone suffering from them to get the most effective treatment available (whatever that might be). That's a far cry from saying that depression or anorexia should be promoted: there's a world of difference between "no one should feel ashamed for having this condition" and "this condition is great and wonderful and should be actively celebrated". If I had a daughter and I caught her reading pro-anorexia content, I'd be horrified, which is not to say I would be angry at her if she DEVELOPED anorexia.
An alternative conception holds that a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria is not a prerequisite for being trans, not every trans person has gender dysphoria, and trans people are just as heckin cute and valid as anyone else. In this model, trans is not a disorder but rather a lifestyle choice or a community (like veganism, or being a hippie), promoting it as a good and normal way to live one's life is perfectly responsible, we shouldn't assume that people who practice that lifestyle are any more or less mentally fragile than anyone else, and (crucially) it's open to criticism, just like any other lifestyle choice is in a pluralistic society.
My frustration is that trans activists have an annoying tendency to strategically equivocate between these two stances when it suits them. On the one hand they'll say that being trans is healthy and normal, there's nothing wrong with being trans, trans people should be celebrated for embracing their true inner selves etc. (this is the bailey). As soon as they get pushback on some of their more outré claims or demands, they'll retreat and start talking about how trans people are in intense distress and any criticism of their lifestyle is extremely triggering and if you don't accept their proposals you are LITERALLY endagering the lives of psychologically vulnerable trans kids and complicit in their eventual suicide (this is the motte). They want it both ways: their lifestyle to be celebrated as healthy or normal, without being subject to reasonable criticism the way every other lifestyle is.
But you can't have it both ways. If trans is just an alternative lifestyle choice (like veganism or being a hippie), then there's no intrinsic problem with it being promoted as a normal way to live one's life - but equally, the lifestyle itself is open to criticism, the people who practise it should be not be assumed to be any more or less likely to be in grave mental distress than anyone else, and are entitled to no special accommodations (as, by their own admission, there's nothing wrong with them). Conversely, if trans is a mental disorder which causes distress, then society should try to be considerate and accommodating towards those suffering from it and should try to help them get the treatment they need - but it shouldn't be promoted or glamorized, any more than anorexia should.
I think a lot of people are getting wise to this style of argumentation and recognising that a lot of the handwringing and rending of hair about "protecting vulnerable trans kids" is just naked emotional manipulation designed to shore up a lifestyle/community from external criticism. If it's a normally healthy lifestyle, it can be promoted but can just as equally be criticised by reasonable people. If it's a mental disorder, it's irresponsible to promote it. You can't have it both ways.
I agree that people often equivocate between these two worldviews. But I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I think It's pretty likely that some people don't have gender dysphoria but would just prefer to live as the other gender. And many of those would benefit from transiting.
Imagine some future where we can swich gender just by pressing a button. I think there would be very little reason to object to people just changing their gender. If I could, I'm sure I would want to sometimes live as a woman sometimes as a man maybe sometimes as a non binary person, just for fun.
The problem is transitioning is hard and often cannot be fully reversed. Maybe like going into debt. Ideally we would have some genie that could tell every person who wanted to transition if it was positive or negative expected value for them, because we dont have a genie we should probably let every one transition who want's to and try to make sure that they are well informed and don't do something they might regret. (This is just for adults for children it's a different topic.)
>But I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I think It's pretty likely that some people don't have gender dysphoria but would just prefer to live as the other gender.
If this is the case, the truth doesn't lie "somewhere in the middle": trans is just a lifestyle choice, not a medical condition causing intense distress and anguish. As such, the lifestyle choice and the people who practise it should not be immune from criticism or uncomfortable questions.
>Ideally we would have some genie that could tell every person who wanted to transition if it was positive or negative expected value for them, because we dont have a genie we should probably let every one transition who want's to and try to make sure that they are well informed and don't do something they might regret.
I'm an absolutist and fully support the right of adults to make any changes to their body that they want to, up to and including gender reassignment surgery. But again, "trans as lifestyle" vs. "trans as medical condition" implies two different approaches. If trans is a medical condition, then gender reassignment surgery is a treatment intended to alleviate distress and anguish, and we should be compassionate and caring towards people who undergo it, and not mock their clownish or ghoulish appearances. But if trans is a lifestyle choice, then gender reassignment surgery is no different from undergoing any other kind of cosmetic procedure. No one thinks making fun of the Bogdanoffs' creepy appearances is off-limits, so why should Caitlyn Jenner's?
I think the "LGBT" framing has become a massive misstep for the LGBs of the world. I'm more liberal, and I'd guess that I have a more positive view of the LGBs than most of this comment section will. Every LGB I've known has been pretty vanilla and normal.
But the T issue is completely difference. There's no LGB surgeries, no mental-illness issues for LGBs, no weird metaphysics about the concept of gender, and no elimination of single sex spaces.
It's as if we had one movement that combined both higher minimum wages and rent controls. Then you have people who hate rent controls supporting the "MWRC" movement because they want higher minimum wages. Just bizarre stuff.
Maybe. It would be interesting to see polling of LGB folks on this issue. My suspicion is they were happy to have the Ts as long as it helped their cause and didnt become a liability. But I would imagine many are concerned that a backlash to T will swallow them up as well. They are right to be fearful. If you told me I could stop T but it would mean no gay marriage I would do it in a heartbeat. Of course, that is most likely a false choice. But I was fine with gay marriage in 2015, less so now that it is clear T was the next hurdle after gay marriage. What comes after T?
The problem for LGB and T - and the rest of us, as well - is that the liberals were never really as interested in rights as they were in enforcing egalitarianism. Tribalism has been a way of teaching us to see ourselves as part of a group rather than as individuals. Once that has been accomplished, then group identity becomes whatever the party in charge wants it to be. Because once you're no longer an individual and your identity is not your own, does it really matter after that?
These two essay will interest you:
"The Queers Versus The Homosexuals
We are in a new era. And the erasure of gay men and lesbians is intensifying."
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-queers-versus-the-homosexuals
"From Queer to Gay to Queer"
https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/from-queer-to-gay-to-queer/
We are in a new era. Gays and lesbians are being pushed away as unimportant. You can't be a feminine gay man, you gotta be a transwoman. Or you can't be a butch lesbian, you gotta be a transman. WRONG. We all have masculine and feminine qualities, lets start embracing them, rather than presuming we have to BE a gender or sex that we are not. There is a lot wrong with the transgender movement.
Gender dysphoria is a thing. Quite distinct from just feeling masculine/feminine.
This really doesn't help for those people. All or close to all medically transitioning trans people have it.
I’m fully aware of gender dysphoria. It is a thing. I’m also aware that many minors are deceived into thinking they have it when they do not. There are many good aspects to discovering your gender identity and being trans, but there’s also a great deal of trauma being inflicted on youth who are too young to comprehend the permanence of surgically altering one’s gender or biological sex.
I'm just really not sure "many" is accurate.
It may indeed be the case that many kids are adopting non-cisgender characteristics solely as result of socialization, but there's plenty of identity-space that can filled without them feeling the need to transition to fulfill the demands of the identity they have claimed. (And somewhat ironically, the more of such people, the more valid such mid-ground identities are seen)
For example, lots of young people take up they/them pronouns, say "any pronouns", call themselves "queer" and etc.
I'll further add that even if some do mistakenly demand medical interventions, I don't think it's nearly as easy as many conservatives imagine. Even among liberal parents, I doubt that more than ~2% are liable to be over eager. For the rest, there's still a lot of (understandable) apprehension about it.
Re gender dysphoria:
A person genuinely suffering from a brain-body mismatch (due to a neurological or hormonal anomaly) deserves the same decency, compassion and access to medical treatment (if need be) as anyone with a deformity or disability.
In other words, it's a disability issue. It's not about "LGBTQ+"
I would go even further and say that your run-of-the-mill dismorphic used to be completely different from this weird spirituality of the "man with no features" that underpins gender ideology.
When I say being gay is okay, I DO mean the way being a doctor or lawyer is okay, but when I say being trans is okay, I mean the way that spending life in a wheelchair is okay. Being trans isn't glamorous or something desirable, and it isn't even value neutral like homosexuality. People with gender dysphoria deserve our pity, but why would we want to make kids miserable life them?
Very relevant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGB_Alliance
“no mental-illness issues for LGBs”
This isn't true. It's well-attested that rates of mental illness are vastly higher in non-heterosexuals. This is to be expected as nearly all mental health problems are strongly comorbid, including sexual targeting disorders.
The T is not separable from the LGB. This recent attempt at circumventing the issue is the same folly as what Richard has highlighted in his article. The T is a fundamental constituting element of the kink, and has always been there throughout history, side by side with pederasty. The surgeries too, albeit not as consensual, but one could rhetorically make the point that that is not any less the case now. You either need to come to terms with the fact that this is the final shape of your starting premise, or build up the bravery to just do away with this deranged framework.
The T is a much more dire extreme than the LGB, perhaps, but they undeniably belong together as sexual perversions/deviations. It's no coincidence that the groups have so much overlap.
(nobody really cares about lesbians).
There is a very large presence of lesbians in the Biden administration setting policy. If you've been wondering why there is such a large focus on people being able to change their gender, now you know why.
Lesbians are the leading opponants to the trans belief that sex in not binary. Look up Kathleen Stock.
Stock is the exception that proves the rule. Lesbians, as a group, often share common experiences of discrimination and marginalization based on their sexual orientation. Many lesbians understand the importance of inclusivity and solidarity within the broader LGBTQ+ community. As such, many lesbians actively advocate for transgender rights and work towards creating a more inclusive society.
Most lesbians are very proud to be Women and think that women range from tomboys to ultra femme girls. They do not think a woman can change sex, nor that men can 'become' women. #Biology. Stock is not an exception to the rule. The views of radical transactivists are not shared by a lot of LGB people. There's now a movement to seperate the T from the LGB, who don't appreciate the blowback they're getting thanks to the divisive Trans positions on womens sports, men being allowed in womens dressing rooms, etc. A huge swathe of the LGB set also doesn't like the push to transition kids either—as most kids who experienece gender confusion are just gay, they grow out of it, they do not require sex changes. Imagine how offensive that "conversion theapy" is to gay people.
Regarding teachers talking about their spouses in school. As a member of the "previous generation" (grade school in the early 70's), I recall all our teachers were referred to as "Mrs", but we had absolutely no interest in their personal lives and I don't remember any of them telling us about their husbands or children. We didn't care about our teacher's personal lives until high school and then mostly we made fun of them. My point is, kids live in their own kid's world and I'm pretty sure they're not clamoring for information about their teacher's home life. All the complaints about not being able to talk about heterosexual relations is coming from the adults, not the kids.
The entire "Teaching for Social Justice" project is designed to meet the social, psychological and career needs of the teachers, with the children just a backdrop or pretext. In our age of expressive individualism and maximum personal autonomy, even professions meant to aid others, like teacher or doctor etc, become just another venue to publicly proclaim your True Self™ and how stunning and brave it is.
Yes and no. I can imagine kids being curious about same sex couples and/or one of their classmates having 2 mommies/2 daddies.
OTOH, it's not too complicated to explain and certainly doesn't require any graphic details or age inappropriate content.
As a relatively new dad, I assure you that as soon as you introduce the concept of fatherhood, motherhood, or marriage to a toddler, at least *some* of those toddlers will ask every teacher under the sun who they're married to.
And it probably ceases to be interesting by the 2nd grade, but it seems very odd to prohibit fifth grade teachers from answerimg the sort of questions toddlers would ask.
Outside of that, I went to grade school in the 90s. Some very conservative private schools. Some more liberal public ones. By then at least, it was common for teachers to reference their home life.
Discussing spouses in particular wasn't common but anything related to childhood was pretty common. "I was also bullied when I was your age" and "my daughter and I fought too and here's how we worked things out" was (and I think, still is) pretty normal.
I never experienced anything of the kind. Not in kindergarten, not ever. I loved my teachers, but I never knew a thing about their private lives.
"You can only rationally do so if you think the cis-hetero individual should be thought of as the default, idealized form of a human being."
This is correct. It doesn't mean we should punish adults for homosexuality or whatever. But heteronormativity is essential for human flourishing. "Oh but we'll have synthetic wombs and blah blah" whatever. It wont be enough to make up for the anti-natalist side effects of this ideology. The classical liberals have their heads in the sand on this issue and conservatives caved the moment elite people started calling them bigots.
We'll see if this recent successful pushback has any teeth or is just a flash in the pan. I have my doubts since nobody of any importance in national politics or corporate governance will do anything about it. In fact they are it's biggest supporters! PGLE isn't going to stop because of a GOP win here and there.
"We have to do this because of the antinatalist effects of homosexuality" is a leap of the caliber that Ben Shapiro does above. It's OK to just admit that you find something distasteful and leave it at that.
Yeah I was fine with the classical liberal 2015 version of "We just want to have the same rights as straight people" as opposed to the meat-lego gnosticisn of Martine Rothblatt that now pervades the entirety of society. But go ahead and pretend that we just think butt sex is gross and that's the end of it.
This is an example of the cognitive dissonance, actually. The "classical liberal 2015 version" is already as "antinatalist" or birthrate depressing or whatever as any LGBTism that exists today. If you actually dislike ${technobabble} LGBTism for reducing the birthrate you should equally dislike classical-liberal-2015 LGBTism.
The excellent and honest Emil Kirkegaard put out a good piece earlier this year on why homosexuality is a mental illness.
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/01/homosexuality-is-a-mental-illness/
And I think that's right. We don't jail or punish people for having mental illnesses, or even for engaging in private behavior that's not harming others as a result. But the laws and norms that best promote marriage and childrearing shouldn't be destroyed just to make people with a particular mental illness feel less bad about themselves. Nor should we pretend it's somehow "equally good" for people to have sex with their same sex.
This is the nub of it. Why did the ancient taboo against homosexuality appear? Most likely because there was no welfare state or automation, and so these societies needed babies or else they'd go extinct. No children? Well, there's no pensions either so sucks to be you.
In the modern world we've lost that basic understanding that babies matter, that self propagation matters. In fact large parts of the left wing population argue explicitly against having babies, often for the most dubious of reasons (like climate doomerism), and even try to guilt trip people who do have them! They think existing levels of state spending are immovable, inevitable and indestructible, and their general disinterest in tradeoffs (of which economics and state budgets are a subset) means they are disinclined to ponder the consequences of this stance. So all the welfare systems even in the richest countries are heading towards bankruptcy, everyone knows this and yet even raising the retirement age for women to match that of men - by the tiny amount of like, one year - triggers mass protests and political instability. So if welfare levels can't be reduced then the only other option is to have way more children.
Now, this doesn't necessarily have to involve artificial wombs or going back to suppression of homosexuality. There aren't that many LG people! The more obvious and less disruptive path is to make adoption a lot easier. Today the state makes adoption hard and it's not a popular choice, also perhaps due to uncertainty about how much nature vs nurture matters. But we can imagine a future in which most parents have children in their mid 40s for example, not biologically but via surrogate mothers or just through adoption.
The ancient taboo is related to destructive equality. There was a taboo about having twins because of the competition. Possibly having two mothers leads to jealousy between them without a natural method for the child to understand the hierarchy. Ancient stories seem to be full of this.
I think ancient cultures also understood the relationship of homosexuality and self-love, in that the hero can fall in love with an image of himself and then abuse his lovers by seducing and discarding them. Once they love him it fuels his desire for himself and then he discards them.
Possibly masturbation and homosexuality are taboo because in some ways they are more sexually satisfying, even while they fuel this kind of self-love crisis of the individual, which of course doesn’t stop with him. He wants his mate to become him, in a way, but of course if they become exactly like him he gets repelled.
The culture’s purpose is to defuse these kinds of crises and competitions over equality by re-establishing an order. The more important competition is over wealth and ability, but I think it may apply to culture war positions too. The healthy culture finds a way for you to complement your partner or your community.
Hmm, a fascinating take. Thanks for taking the time to write it.
Anything that makes sense to you I probably lifted from René Girard
The taboo seems pretty obvious to me. The equipment is not biologically designed to operate that way and even a cave-man could figure out there was something unnatural about it.
And you must be incredibly against straight couples engaging in "exotic" forms of sexual pleasure since "clearly" the mouth, hand and anus are not "designed" to "operate that way" as you put it.
I am not advocating for them being taught to children in school, that is certainly for sure.
And I’m not advocating for teaching gay sex either. But being gay isn’t wrong or unnatural and all your experience to the contrary isn’t proof.
Gay sex is definitionally biologically incorrect use (or wrong, or unnatural depending on how you define those words). And that isn't my experience, that is just biology. Morally wrong is up to individuals and societies to decide. But that decision is not being made in a vacuum of knowledge about how the equipment is designed to be used.
Dolphins, elephants, great apes, sheep, birds, and basically every other animal species seem to be "unnaturally" copulating all the time
We had a young pig that would hump anything. Ears, heads, anything he could find. I was 16 at the time and didn't even think it was that weird. After a few weeks he figured it out though. And he never did an ear again after that. That is how sex works in real life.
So if I just live on a farm I'll realize I'm really attracted to women and I'll never have sex unless it's purely to have kids again? That was what I was missing? All that city life got the better of me? Or am I just sick (like the other dude said)?
I doubt it. At least not from what I am told. What is affecting human populations is a different phenomena than what you were citing (when it happens occasionally in nature). What is happening in humans is probably due to overpopulation. Again, search for mouse utopia 25.
We know that in less developed species (fish for example) population pressure or food abundance (or fish size, related to food) can cause sex switching.
In mammals, sex is far less malleable. But high species still retain remnants of what came before them. So overpopulation is a fairly viable hypothesis.
I am sure you were excited to find this scientific excuse. Unfortunately it just isn't true. I grew up on a farm. They do it very rarely. And even then, typically when they are young, and presumably a bit confused about how it is all meant to work. Sex is bizarre and complicated. We shouldn't take observations of a few hiccups in the process as anything more than just hiccups. Lets just face the fact that the point of sex is reproduction, and done wrong it is giant waste of natures prime directive (reproduction) so it is definitionally an aberration. Just is.
#Sarcasm and I am SURE you are JUST as upset about straight people copulating with their...other parts, and infertile people copulating. Got to keep sex pure. Just like animals. Oh wait.
https://www.livescience.com/44464-bonobo-homosexuality-natural.html
I am not upset about anybody pleasuring themselves any way they like.
I am just not going to lie and say that is what the equipment is for.
Get your rocks off as you please, just don't try to confuse children to try and make yourself feel better about it.
Growing up on a farm isn't expertise. Even a cursory glance at the animal kingdom shows this is false. I'm sorry you dislike gay people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals#:~:text=According%20to%20Bruce%20Bagemihl%2C%20same,450%20species%20of%20animals%20worldwide.
It actually is expertise. Especially in sex. You clearly are a city boy.
A cursory glance at the animal kingdom shows homosexual behavior as not typical.
I don't dislike gay people in the slightest. I am just not willing to lie about what sexual organs are designed for.
I would hesitate in making that argument because anal sex is clearly pleasurable enough for people to do it, yet that pleasurability serves no obvious purpose. And then there's homosexuality in the animal kingdom too.
It seems more like the opposite: it actually is natural, but the taboo evolved against it for the same reasons that many other ancient taboos against natural things evolved (e.g. polygamy) - it was bad for society at the time.
Pleasure is not the criteria by which the equipment's use is judged.
The equipment is not designed FOR your pleasure.
Pleasure is an afterthought that biology implemented to try and get you to use the equipment at all, as the whole process is bizarre in the abstract.
While you clearly can, and people do, use it for pleasure, that is not what it is actually for. And that is just a fact.
The fact that homosexuality exists elsewhere doesn't make it "natural" or normal. It simply means the system malfunctions elsewhere sometimes as well. Typically, the driver for homosexuality appears to be overpopulation. See (mouse utopia 25).
Why is homosexuality present across the animal kingdom if it's unnatural? Why do we allow straight couples to have sex in a variety of "unnatural" ways (as you describe it) if that's not how our "equipment" is supposed to be used?
Because it is a complex system that is fairly easy to use wrong.
We allow anybody to get their rocks off anyway they like. And I am not suggesting that is a bad policy. But I am suggesting that the equipment is clearly designed for a specific purpose. And it would be lying to ourselves and others to pretend otherwise.
I doubt any society anywhere has ever had enough homosexuals to make that society worried about reproducing enough to survive. Even with high child hood mortality rates and child birth related deaths, not having effective birth control plus normal human desires was presumably enough to keep fertility rates well above replacement rates.
Also, the state may make adoption hard, but generally there are way more people wanting to adopt than there are healthy, adoptable children. If the state made it easier, it wouldn't increase the number of babies available for adoption. Juts too many people have historically rather they be killed than go through pregnancy and then adoption.
There are unfortunately way more special needs and abused children than there are people wanting to adopt them.
Ancient Sparta might be an example. They encouraged homosexual relations between men as a (possibly misguided) means of promoting military cohesion. They promoted homosexual relations between women, as well, although I don't recall the pretext for this. They didn't last all that long:
"The Spartiate population declined from 8000 in the early fifth century to less than 1000 in the mid-fourth, and caused Sparta's political fortunes to drop dramatically from being the unofficial hegemon of the Greek-speaking peoples to a strictly local power in the Hellenistic period. This was the most dramatic population change of any ancient Greek city aside from cases of andrapodismos, and it drew the attention of contemporaries to the process such as Aristotle and Xenophon. Some modern scholars have seen this phenomenon primarily as a personnel loss due to families being demoted from the Spartiate rank or to deliberate elite fertility restriction due to estate preservation. But these explanations neglect the peculiarities of Spartiate reproductive customs maladaptive to demographic recovery. This dissertation first examines what made the Spartiate population regime unique, how it succeeded at first, and why and how it failed to produce a sufficient number of Spartiates to continue Sparta's hegemony. Second, it argues that Sparta's imperial phase was a response to and a result of this attested decline in Spartiate numbers and the attendant addition of non-Spartiates to the Lakedaimonian army."
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3pk467b6
I just want to say that, whether its conclusions are true or not, that dissertation is a really awesome find and I wish I had time to read it in full.
I've only ever heard the view that the decline in the Spartiate population was driven by customs that made it far easier to lose one's Spartiate status than to gain it.
He addresses that here:
Demotion means that oliganthropia results when males who had been born and raised Spartiate but fell out of the Spartiate class, that is, out of the class of homoioi or “equals,” primarily because they could not pay the contributions required for their syssitia or common dining-societies.3 This brought them into the ranks of the hypomeiones or “inferiors,” another class that seems to have included the tresantes (“tremblers” or cowards), the agamoi (unmarried men), and several other categories of person. This process of demotion from the Spartiates has been isolated since the 1980s as the prime cause of oliganthropia, and Aristotle’s analysis of the decline can be taken to support this as well.This analysis has in fact become the communis opinio.4Very recently, however, it has been argued that demotion cannot have been responsible for a great percentage of the decrease in Spartiates: low fertility must comprise most of the problem.5 In this argument, oliganthropia is thus primarily population loss, not just personnel demotion. Spartiate families, in addition to some demotions whose quantities may have been overestimated in the “personnel-demotion model,” were simply not producing enough children to cope with the mortality rate. Uncontroversially, this has been explained by the deliberate preservation of property and status: too many offspring will split property into unusably or unfashionably small amounts.6 However, we would then expect to see oliganthropia due to estate preservation amongst other populations in the Classical Greek world. But no Greek sub-population underwent any process of dramatic diminution similar to that found amongst the Spartiates.
Interesting. Is it possible that Richard is unable to mention the centrality of Christianity to his position in the same way that conservatives are unable to mention society?
I don't really like framing it in terms of societies, which reeks of group selection -- framing it in terms of individual selection is probably good enough.
In a number of past societies, male homosexual behavior (especially pederasty) was very widespread. It would appear that bisexuality, especially directed towards boys and teens, is rather easily to socially condition. This is in contrast with obligate homosexuality, which is difficult to explain biologically and probably doesn't ever exceed a few percentage points of the population. Hence Cochran's Germ Theory.
But it still seems unlikely that the taboo was selected for on a societal level. The male disgust reaction to homosexual acts (particularly anal sex) is real, and the social taboos are probably just a manifestation of that individual disgust reaction. Which in turn might have its origins in excess mortality from disease, but I'm inclined to think it's instead more rooted in imposing a limit to the degree to which homosexual acts can substitute for heterosexual ones -- with bisexual men who were more open to substitution also producing fewer progeny. Note that even the Greeks are said to have frowned upon anal sex.
They thought the Emperor Claudius was odd because he only had sex with women.
Nobody at the time would have been thinking in abstract intellectualist terms like the fertility rate of a whole society. The problem would have been that if you didn't have children you'd become a burden directly on your neighbours.
As for not having enough, bear in mind once a taboo is established you don't know how many people would violate it if the taboo was lifted. It's quite tricky.
There was also an ancient taboo against having daughters. I'm incredibly hesitant to take "ancient taboo" as a reason to much of anything.
And if you're OK with surrogate mothers and adoption, then why does it matter if the parents are gay?
A lot here I agree with. And perhaps I'm reading you incorrectly, but I dont think adoption and surrogacy by 40 year olds will replace healthy 20-somethings getting married and having a lot of sex.
I guess it depends on the social desirability and acceptability of becoming a baby factory for money. It's a very rare choice today but the question is, does it have to be that way? I pass no comment on the desirability of such an outcome but if society won't budge on welfare, restricts immigration and many people refuse to raise children, then it's one way out.
Anti-natalism?
My dude. Gays aren't numerous enough to affect birth rates. Stuff like free/subsidised kindergarten and pre-K seems far more likely to influence parents' decision to reproduce and/or to have 1 vs 2 vs 3 kids... It's all about the Benjamins.
They aren't numerous enough? I keep seeing articles gloating about gen Z being 20% LGBT. Why wouldn't it keep increasing as long as LGBT is heavily promoted? I think there is more plasticity to sexuality than cons or libs realize.
Not that it matters that much. I mainly use the fertility argument for the sake of Hanania who only cares about this issue as it relates to fertility.
Yep, there is where I come down -- as long as we're talking about bisexuality and not obligate homosexuality.
Bisexuality is much more common among Gen Z women than men, but I think that's at least in part because women continue to impose social costs on men who engage in bisexual behavior. But I also see signs that's changing. The guy Taylor Swift is currently having sex with has made some very hip statements around a more casual sort of male homosexual behavior that stops short of intercourse, and I see that becoming more normalized in the next generation.
The big thing, from talking to women, is the STD rate. A lot of them who think guy-on-guy is hot won't date an actual bisexual because your risk of herpes, etc. goes way up.
There may very well be less PC arguments they're not admitting to, we all know about that. ;)
To me, STD rate, while true, sounds like rationalization of what's really just a disgust reaction. If the STD problem were solved tomorrow, would that disgust reaction really go away?
So maybe what's normalized is teen boys / young men flirting, kissing, etc., but not anal sex. Which, again, the Greeks frowned upon as well. Maybe such a man doesn't even identify as LGBT+++, it's just that some level of behavior like this will be expected (or at least rewarded) from a proper "ally".
Here's the description of Matty Healy (Swift's guy) from Wikipedia:
After Queerty republished his statements from the Attitude article and headlined it Matt Healy comes out as "aesthete," says he’ll kiss beautiful men but won’t have sex with them",[134] Healy issued a statement on Twitter, criticising the publication for misinterpreting his words: "I didn’t come out as anything. […] I’m not playing a game and trying to take up queer spaces, I’m simply trying to be an ally and this headline makes me uncomfortable."[135] In 2020, when asked by ShortList if he is attracted to men, he stated "Yes, but not in a carnal, sexual way."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matty_Healy
It's hard to tell; I saw Dan Savage saying now young people don't want to call themselves 'straight' because it has conservative political implications (my old self: WTF?). So maybe it is something an ally is expected to do these days!
Disgust evolved to protect from pathogens--what's the grossest thing there is? right, dead bodies, poop, and spoiled food. So even if the STD problem were solved (which it isn't), it would probably be a matter of evolutionary instincts doing their job (former job, in this hypothetical). Those tend to be pretty sticky.
I'm gay. Why is me being gay a bad thing?
*I* don't think it is.
1. It's against Christianity, lots of people here are Christian. I'm sure you know the arguments.
2. Against nature. This kind of falls into 1. above, though.
3. Less likely to have kids. Righties tend to be pronatalists.
There are right ideologies like libertarianism that are OK with it, but generally conservatives are for traditional values, and in the West those come from Christianity, which is says being gay is bad. So there's your answer, more or less.
1. I am a Christian, so I don't find this convincing. I have also been puzzled why Christians are so against gay people and not against other issues like...interest from the bank. Or divorce. Or sodomy among straight people. There are countless laws in the Old Testament that are supposed Christian beliefs that supposed Christians don't follow. Furthermore: we don't live in a Christian nation, you don't get to impose your religion on me. So I don't find this relevant. No Christian would let Shariah law be imposed, and Christian law is no different.
2. If this is against nature why do so many animals practice homosexuality? It's literally all over the place. This argument is just wrong.
3. I WANT kids, being gay does NOT mean you wont have kids
And no: Western civilization is NOT just Christianity. It in fact predates Christianity. So this is wrong too. Which means your argument boils down to "this is against my religion"
The US isn't a religious nation. Don't impose your view of Christianity on me. I'll do the same.
Being gay does mean you won't have kids, not in anything resembling the ideal, at least. How do you plan on having them with your "husband?"
No way you’ll approve of bigot
Refusal to answer proves my point.
As for your #1, divorce is a major topic among Christians. Unlike homosexuality, I've actually heard pastors preach on it from the pulpit. In a Bible-believing church, it is grounds for disqualification from ministry or eldership unless the divorce can be shown to have been Biblically valid (per Matthew 5:31-32, for example).
I have thoughts on usury and believe that it's still a relevant topic today, but I think it's too technical and removed from most people's lives to gather much attention. Much of the OT law is viewed as ritual law and not relevant to gentile Christians today, for example in Acts 15 and Mark 7:19. But note that the New Testament repeatedly affirms OT sexual morality, in the Gospels, Acts, epistles, and Revelation.
The reason homosexuality receives the most attention in the political space is because it's the main point of moral conflict between contemporary Christian and worldly culture. What really animates me personally, and I think many Christians, is the sense that worldly culture is trying to make acceptance of homosexual behavior mandatory for participation in American civic, cultural, and economic life.
I was mildly opposed to gay marriage prior to Obama's second term -- I just didn't think it that important of an issue that would affect my life personally. The experiences of Brendan Eich and Masterpiece Cake Shop were two events that caused me to develop the sense that Pride is an all-conquering force that is prepared to wreck the lives of any who refuse to submit, and the conquest of all American institutions by Pride since that time has only reinforced this sense.
Correct. "Gay marriage" was sold on the premise of "why do you care what people do behind closed doors?" If the sale were honest, we likely wouldn't have this conflict. The problem is that the doors didn't stay closed like we were told.
and as for usury not being important to people's daily lives: I find this argument laughable.
As to your first point: I do not see any people seriously asking for the US to ban divorce and usury (or, for that matter, sodomy between heterosexuals) and until they do I will assume that their attempts to stop homosexuality is just based on hate and bigotry.
As to your last: I don't understand why any gay couple would want an evangelical christian to make their wedding cake, and I did not support ending his business.
1. I just Googled the phrase "ban no-fault divorce" and came up with recent articles from Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Jezebel, and others fretting about the right's growing opposition to it. If you listen to socially conservative intellectual circles, the idea of banning no-fault divorce has been in discussion for a long time. A TOTAL ban on divorce hasn't really ever been the Protestant position, since it's a tougher standard than even Jesus applied.
2. Usury does affect people's lives (the two modern-day examples of usury that I'd give are credit card loans and student loans), but very few people are, or ever have the opportunity to be, usurers, and most people don't really understand the topic. The Evangelical church is generally pietistic, more interested in personal morality than broader social crusades. The only real example of the latter has been the pro-life cause, which really sucks up the oxygen from any other social crusades, and as crusades go, attacking usury just comes across as quixotic. The opposition to legalized gay marriage wasn't really a social crusade in this sense, but more of an effort to preserve the longstanding status quo.
3. My understanding is that the men who sued Masterpiece Cakeshop weren't looking for a cake, they went to multiple cake shops specifically looking for someone to sue and destroy. It was a deliberate and organized attack. It doesn't matter if you personally don't support it. I've heard a number of individual leftists say this, but I never saw any signs of waffling from leftist media and institutions.
Fair enough, there are 1.2 billion Christians or so, you'd expect a few doctrinal variations. I'm giving the arguments (you asked why people act that way), not endorsing them. I don't actually think being gay is bad (as I said).
1. I should have said conservative Christian. The religious thing does underpin a lot of it. Plenty of denominations march in Pride parades these days.
2. You sometimes see this in a 'nature or nature's god' argument, to argue some sort of natural law. I don't really think it makes moral sense either--we're naturally drawn to cheeseburgers for instance, but they're not healthy.
3. It decreases the chances because you have to (a) find someone to settle down with and (b) find someone to have the biological kid with. For a heterosexual those can be the same person. I know a lot of gay people are entering coparenting arrangements and the like, so it's certainly not impossible, but it does make it harder.
As an aside, this is one of Hanania's views, so he attracts people who agree with him. I enjoy the heterodox attacks on the right and left. It's hard to find a conservative writer who's so honest about his own side's shortcomings. But don't think you have to agree with everything he says. People tend to start getting really into certain writers and then get depressed when they say something offensive. Particularly when dealing with these sort of dissident-right ideas, it kind of comes with the territory.
If you spend two seconds looking into adoption seriously, you will instantly come across a flood of information about how traumatic it is and how many problems adoptees have, even when the process goes relatively smoothly. It's incredible to me that people really have so much trouble imagining what could possibly go wrong with homosexual male couples pursuing adoption just so they can play pretend at a heteronormative family (which also begs the question of why they're even trying to copy heteronormativity when it's something they typically scorn in other contexts).
I'm gonna have to go with the Isaiah Berlin Fox vs. Hedgehog analogy, "a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing," with liberals being foxes and conservatives being hedgehogs.
Liberals know about things like heteronormativity and "gender expression", that there have always been gay people and other sexual minorities and that these people need to be centered so their self-esteem can be raised to hetero levels, which in their belief system is necessary to attain Justice and Equality.
Conservatives know that the liberal project of "social liberation" has no limiting principle and that if liberals are willing to teach Queer Theory to children and encourage their "gender journeys" behind the backs of parents while lying to them about it, then the liberal project is a dagger aimed directly at their parental rights and authority and at their traditional religious beliefs.
I think both can be true.
Wow, only liberals know about gay people in history? Let's ask the typical liberal voter what they know about history, shall we? Liberals would be better served (or perhaps not) by knowing things like how to educate their kids, how to keep their kids off drugs, how to create and maintain a marriage, how to not overspend their money, how to not vote for warmongers, how to manage cities, how to take personal responsibility, and how to think for themselves - afterall, there is no hivemind like the liberal hivemind. And that is why we are here, because the hive wants to enforce its foolishness on not just its own.
The hedgehog just wants to be free to do as he pleases without causing or incurring interference from anyone. Maybe if liberals knew things like, how to be a free-thinker, we'd all get along better, but that authoritarianism from the current leadership (not biden), is simply the cancer of bolshevism out of remission.
Keep believing that the faux-intellectualism that has brought us such wonders as brutalism, Detroit, and disparate impact theory is some kind of genius-level nuance that only Swarthmore grads that didn't start KKR understand.
Also, keep thinking that self-esteem can be imparted.
hey i was generalizing, which of course means broad brushes, and I wasn't necessarily endorsing, just trying to describe.
i do agree that liberals have given away too much too often to leftists, who only take advantage of the freedoms of liberalism in order to undermine and hopefully overthrow it.
great comment
thanks!
Are public libraries hosting Hooter girl story hours? Are government agencies flying the Hooters flag for a month out of every year? Is every academic institution and corporation forcing people to write an essay about how they will personally advance the righteous cause of Hooterism as a condition of admission or employment?
Conservatives may be simple-minded and intellectually inconsistent/dishonest, but they are smart enough to realize when the entire ruling class of the Western world is pissing on their leg while telling them it’s raining.
Maybe it is a British private school thing but we weren't supposed to know anything about our teachers, even their first names were semi secret.
I am not sure conservatives would be happy with complete symmetry, but it strikes me that teachers who want to talk about fetishes are largely GBTQ (not sure any lesbians want to talk about it) and parents from both sides would be equally upset if a teacher wanted to discuss heterosexual BDSM or similar.
Aren't conservatives anti-Hooters? Isn't it just low salience in the current world.
When it comes to discussing spouses with kids, there's also something of a social contract involved. If teachers can't be trusted to use discretion about sharing details with their students (e.g. telling kids you're married: OK, telling kids how active your sex life is: not OK), then the policy hammer might have to come down and say teachers are not to discuss their personal lives at all.
Since you're the smart/intellectual conservative, what's your rationale for banning LGBTQ-related discussions in front of kids?
Or is your argument that gays etc. are morally inferior to heterosexuals and it was always okay to persecute them?
It's a very good question, and I think the answer would be along the lines that we see that LGBT is in part socially constructed, and most people would rather their kids end up as conventional heterosexuals for obvious evolutionary reasons. But I don't prioritize this issue as much as many conservatives do, as I don't have any kind of religious objection to homosexuality or anything.
I think this really requires two separate answers, for LGB and T.
Most conservatives would admit that they don't want their kids to be trans AND they believe gender identity is socially constructed.
Homosexuality is different. Non-religious conservatives probably don't think very negatively of homosexuality, even if they may prefer their kids were straight. They're also less convinced that sexuality is socially constructed vs innate.
With this in mind, intellectual conservatives can consistently defend bans on trans ideology in schools, as well as overtly sexualized content (like that "banned" children's book which described sex acts in detail). But they should back away from normal gay stuff. It's fine if your kid's teacher says he's married to a man.
Depending on who you are including as "non-religious", I think you are overestimating non-religious conservatives acceptance of homosexuality. Despite what they say, I think most conservatives, including non-religious ones, are still tolerant of homosexuality in the literal sense of the word. When dealing with friends and aquaintences, that tolerance looks more or less indistinguishable from complete acceptance. But when dealing with immediate family, particularly children, I think they will still pretty strongly desire that their kids be heterosexual.
Agree with most of that ; the one point I'd push back is that if gender identity is indeed socially constructed (meaning, what it means to be a man or a woman is not the same as being male/female and accepts social variability across time and space), it should, at some point, be okay to discuss it with kids.
I don't remember anyone in my class questioning why Ancient Greeks were wearing skirts and Ancient Romans were wearing dresses but that would not be an unreasonable question and, at some point, that might lead to a discussion about gender roles and how they get created...
I mean, who remembers that, in Victorian England, pink was for boys and blue was for girls?
Isn't it essentially the same argument you are exposing but written in a more intellectual language?
Call it "being socially constructed" instead of "groomed" it still doesn't make any sense unless we are treating cis-hetero individual as the default, idealized form of a human being, thus making a moral judgement. Even if you appeal towards evolutionary reasons, instead of divine ones as a source of such morality.
I asked the same question before seeing this. I think this is a huge issue and maybe you should write something more in depth here. I've read a few other article on it, and have my own opinion but I'm not finding this short answer very convincing if I'm a liberal
Part socially constructed? Hm, okay. I guess transgenderism can have a social contagion component and be attractive to people with mental issues. Gays and Lesbians, otoh? I'm not seeing it. First of all, you can have homosexual experiences, decide it's not for you and never identify as gay/lesbian... Second, like, it's not that trendy or life transforming to be gay so it seems unlikely people would push so hard on heteronormativity if it weren't for the moral aspect.
The idea we do it for evolutionary reasons (having grandkids?) seems... weird. I remember discussing our yet-to-be-born children with my wife and agreeing we'd prefer them being straight but entirely b/c we didn't them to struggle against latent/open homophobia.
OTOH, the very fact that I didn't want my children to struggle against homophobia is very much why I support gay rights broadly and want children be (age appropriately) informed that some people are indeed gay and it's okay. Some parents won't have a choice and will have to defend their kid/family member from opprobrium and they shouldn't have to. Ask Dick and Liz Cheney.
I don't agree that evolutionary reasoning is weird. I think it's weird and unfortunate that we've gotten away from thinking about what kind of future of humanity we want.
This is probably the only thing I've found on an actual, non-religious, argument saying why we should, at least, not promote homosexuality
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/homosexuality-is-a-mental-illness
"banning LGBTQ-related discussions in front of kids?"
I think the issue is that this is an enormously broad heading, which could encompass everything from teaching a 12-yr-old about Harvey Milk or the Sacred Band of Thebes to teaching a 7-yr-old about the Genderbread Person and puberty blockers...
I don't think it's that surprising that if a teacher wants to give sexually explicit material to junior high kids that some parents will object. Most adults wouldn't put on Pornhub when a young person comes over. The question always comes down to where to draw the line.
The Left has become so evangelical about Queer Theory that they read any possible objections to their sacred cause as ipso facto hateful bigotry. But if we're talking about public schools and age-appropraite material, it's best to err on the side of caution, otherwise the risk is an angry backlash, which is not surprising when it comes to parents wanting to protect their children.
No objections. I'm not going to defend every insanity going on in the USA. I will simply observe that, in a country of 300M people, you will have someone doing or saying something extremely stupid every day, indeed every second of every minute of every day...
If, on top, you set up incentives to surface every inanity professed by anyone from the other side, you can be build a long and profitable career, nay, network and it still will have been a moral panic i.e. nothing consequential actually taking place.
yes! you have just described modern America and its media/entertainment state where Bread & Circuses are on the menu every second of every day. it is actually amazing that when you leave the internet and go out IRL all seems for the most part holding together and most people are pleasant to deal with. but a stable, prosperous country with normal challenges is bad for business, so the war of attrition via clickbait shall continue....
Indeed. Taking the other side, liberals are freaking out about book banning in schools/libraries but, apparently, 60% of book banning requests have been/are carried out by 11 individuals...
300M people, 11 assholes. Not exactly damning.
https://jabberwocking.com/book-banning-is-a-very-very-niche-activity/
oh don't get me started on the whole "book banning" manufactured controversy. the MSM acts like a pyromaniac put in charge of the Fire Dept...there have to be a constant stream of "Nazi Bigots Attack! Fourth Reich is here!" narratives in order for them to present themselves as the Wise and Compassionate voices we should obey and never contradict. These people lie like the rest of us breathe.
Very thoughtful comments from both fredm421 and Clever S.
Thanks.
On “should we ban lgbtq discussion in front of kids” idea:
Its a massive greyzone and mess of inteprqbility, but i think their could be dimensions of how one looks on subsidizing or encouraging it, or banning or regulating it either legally, economicly or socially: (with examples of high and low regulation, “pro queer” standing for ways to encouraging or destigmatize it: neutral being no stance/laisse fair treatment; pro-hetero being either anti queer policies and norms, or strongly advocating and subsidizing heteronormativity and Cis man/woman ideals, ie anti trans directly or indirectly)
1: how frequently and intensely it is discussed or brought up in public settings, either by goverment, companies, non profits, or individuals
Freedom of speech on the subject.
(Pro Queer: goverment or company funded pridemonth and loads of commercials and celebrations
Neutral: goverment gives no money or national holidays for LGBTQ events
Pro hetero: goverment places fines on companies or goverment organizations discussing/celebrating LGBTQ; organizing pride month is made illegal or increadibly difficult; or extremely, bans on those things.
2; how positively or negatively or neutrally it is discussed
Freedom of speech again
Pro-queer: loads of media pottayals of happy couples, goverment funded art celebrating queernes, etc.
Neutral: either no goverment involvement, or ban on funding or any sort of lgbtq things on the goverments part. No involvement in provate sphere though
Pro-hetero: probably lots of polocies like the ones russia haves, etc
3: what threshold of relevant cues must be met to discuss it:
Pro-queer: any context is allowed to discuss queer things, saying “queerness is not relevant” is looked down upon as a way to silence individuals. On extreme end, mandatory policies of bringing it up or looking for it or discrimination
Neutral: neutral?
Pro-hetero: bringing up queer identity or events in one life is looked down upon, and seen as innapropriate. On extreme end, ban on bringing it up unless prompted.
Gonna stop going “pro queer” or “pro hetero” as i think you get the idea that you can have a spectrum of regulation
4: policies around kids.
Ie: sex ed, libraries, pride parades letting kids participate or not, etc.
5: policies on kids own activities and ideas vs parental determination:
Ie, if a kid says they want X queer thing and parents says no, who gets priority there, what age must the kid be to have priority (on one extreme must be legal adults, on another extreme a 5 year old can decide on their own)
6: discrimination lawsuits and thresholds, how much anti queer or pro queer ideas can go or act without legal consequences as long as they arnt directly violating a law or moral principle everyone agrees on etc
Idk did this make sense?
Im a gay male, and i suppose that i am generally neutral or 40% pro queer. But i am a swede and sweden is very pro queer generally, and might be seen as extremely pro queer in USA
hey i must be older than you, i had to sneak some Playboys w my friends in junior high. i think if there's one thing we should be able to agree upon in modern America is that we are certainly not suffering from any shortage of "explicit sexual material" (i can't even watch sitcoms w my mom without blushing!)
That is in an interesting point
The rational for limiting discussions until age appropriate is that the equipment is not designed for those uses, and so there is not a good reason to encourage the misuse of the equipment.
Shapiro's argument about teachers is indeed retarded, but who is taking kids to Hooters? This sounds like a "your terms are acceptable" moment; the left may be smarter, but precisely because of its cultural hegemony, it's less able to see things from the cultural conservative point of view. Thus it assumes social conservatives believe that no sexual restraint should ever be imposed on men, only women.
As for Richard;'s last point, I don't really buy into the idea that there will be many conservative victories here. Any fleeting rightward drift really just represents the Boomers and Gen X's last hurrah. Once Millennials and Gen Z are fully running the show, that whole game will be over, submission to almighty Pride will be demanded with more vigor than ever.
The one time in my life I went to a Hooters, there were several kids there under the age of ten. Mostly boys but one or two girls as well. It was weird.
I've probably been 10-15 times, and I don't remember ever seeing kids. But it might be that, at certain times of day, depending on what's nearby, some Hooters locations are more prone to this. Probably less likely to be a destination for kids ("Who wants to go to Hooters?") than a place that gets some family walk-in traffic as a result of what else is nearby.
On the occasions I went, it was normally either late at night or happy hour after work. I also went to one in Tokyo, funny enough, just to see what it was like. There was only one other patron there, a middle-aged Japanese guy, and we ended up talking about baseball as he wanted to practice his English. Not surprisingly, Hooters in Japan appears to have failed.
https://soranews24.com/2020/08/19/hooters-closing-original-location-in-japan-as-large-chested-chains-downsizing-continues/
Might be different cultural norms in onenpart of the country around kids at hooters then in other parts
For the record, I absolutely don't think kids belong at Hooters, either. That said, it needs to be pointed out that kids aren't going to see much at Hooters that they aren't likely to see at many public beaches, either, which cannot be said for a gay man in a costume, dancing around, pretending he's Britney Spears or whatever to satisfy some fetish or compulsion.
I don't know that conservatives are being mealy mouthed or hypocritical here. I think the fundamental difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality in an educational setting is that teaching kids about the mechanics of human reproduction is different from teaching them about things that happen to make certain people aroused. In this sense, teaching kids about homosexuality is grooming in the same way that discussing heterosexual fetishes is grooming -- you're normalizing adults having sexually explicit conversations with kids that don't involve teaching them how babies are made. You don't have to actively "marginalize" (or whatever) homosexuality; this is just a natural understanding people have when LGBT doesn't have a stranglehold on the culture.
I'm reluctant to accept that only conservatives are prone to reacting from the gut. Isn't it just that liberals, typically being more educated, are more skilled at rationalising their gut feelings?
The handy thing about the trans stuff is how it reveals those rationalisation chops. Because, as Richard helpfully pointed out in his Twitter essay (linked in the piece) this revolves around metaphysical principles more than the scientifically verifiable or falsifiable arguments about other types of social justice.
So I'm not confident, really, that we aren't conflating intelligence with word skills when we compare how conservatives and liberals parse the edge cases of sexual identity.
You're missing a BIG part of the equation. And that is that it is not only conservative Republicans who feel strongly about money hungry surgeons mutilating children in the name of gender identity. It is not only Republicans who are concerned about biological males with penises and testicles, who "identify" as women, RAPING biological women in "women's prisons."
You're trying to make it sound like ONLY Repubs are concerned with the troubling issues pertaining to the LGBTQ community and transgenderism, and that's wrong. There are scores of Dems who don't believe a child can consent to a life altering surgery, that involves castration and sterilization. I'm a Democrat and I share many of the same concerns, so you're wrong on that front. It's not only Repubs, it's Dems, too. Welcome to 2023. Also, I strongly encourage you to go to YouTube and listen to the Detransition stories. They are heartbreaking and offer an extremely important perspective that can no longer be denied or pushed under the proverbial rug.
"Conservatives granted that homosexuality isn’t inherently inferior to heterosexuality. "
That is the leftist position and not the conservative position. Conservatives have never granted this premise.
Conservatives know the biological reality is that the equipment is designed for a certain use. They believe using the equipment incorrectly is weird, and quite inferior. But using it wrong isn't hurting those adults too much. So fine. If you must.
To keep things apolitical. People walk on their legs and not their hands. While you "can" walk on your hands, and even might enjoy it, that is not how the equipment was designed to be used. Walking on your hands in the supermarket is awkward for the rest of us is - but we can live with it because we are inherently accommodating and nice people.
But teachers walking on their hands in school all day. And corporations trying to sell handshoes to children gets really worrisome. Because this is just going to cause lots of kids to live difficult lives that don't need to do so. Now the handwalkers are doing harm. The children are now being explicitly told by these teachers and corporations that handwalking will solve their teenage angst. And it WON'T. The problem with LGBTQ is the proselytizing and recruiting.
While we can tolerate handwalking, their is no reason on the planet to encourage it. It is not "normal" in a very real way. And every person is "not normal" in some (or many) ways. I have no desire to punish people who are different (as we all are in some way). But that doesn't mean society needs to encourage unnormal behaviors in malleable children - who are best served to be as normal as they can be (and compensate for the rest).
This is getting long, but you will like "mouse utopia experiment 25". It explains an awful lot.
And your shtick about conservatives being stupid is getting old and typically disrespectfully leftist.
I am gay. Should I be allowed to raise kids, be a teacher (or a politician, policeman, etc)?
Also: I’d hand walking is so bad, why is homosexual behavior so common in the animal kingdom? We see it in most animals that I’m aware of and in fact gay parents are present in many species? Does this not contradict your argument?
Question 1: Has anyone here suggested otherwise?
Question 2: It is not common. For incredibly obvious reasons. You are looking for excuses to justify what is happening. Read about mouse utopia 25. This appears to mostly happen in species which are overpopulated.
I am not normal in many ways (some good and some not). We all are.
That does not mean I cannot admit the reality of my situation and that I am required to take every discussion of those abnormalities as a personal offense.
I am asking basic questions. Kids shouldn’t learn about LGBT people because it isn’t normal, I’m ‘imperfect’ because I’m gay and I’d be better off if i acknowledged that I’m suboptimal. How am I supposed to take that suggestion?
Kids should be taught age appropriate things. Not things that make adults feel better about themselves and shore up their fragile egos.
You are correct, that 8 year-olds should not be taught about LGBT, or prostitution, or or blow jobs, or wife swapping, or lots of things related to sex. If they ask then tell them to go play on the swings.
At some age people can learn about bestiality and sadomasochisms and anything they like. But they should not be taught (read leftist indoctrinated) about any of it in the public school system. Even sex-ed should not be about how to get pleasure. It should be about how people get pregnant - end of story.
And I honestly think you know both those things and are searching for excuses for the recent leftist bad behaviors.
Everybody should acknowledge that they are suboptimal because they are. Lying to yourself, and insisting others lie about things is not a viable solution. I like you for you for who you really are, flaws included, - you will be much happier if you also accept reality. Neither of us should have to pretend that the equipment was designed for that.
You're now being obtuse. There is a BIG difference between knowing that some people are gay and learning about blow jobs
But I think it's clear that you just don't like gay people
How is your homosexuality relevant to children's education? I'm theoretically ok with the idea of gay teachers; in 3rd grade I had one who I didn't know was gay (though it is telling in retrospect that he incorrectly interpreted the arm-motion vandalism of a desk by another boy I was sitting next to as masturbation). It's not the end of the world if you keep personal photo of you and your husband or whatever on your desk facing your own seat. If a nosy child looks over and sees it, ok, they may become aware that gay people exist; such a thing is already inevitable in any case. But how is anything more than that relevant? Kids can learn about Alan Turing or James Buchanan or Frederick the Great without learning about their sex lives.
Homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom isn't that common actually. It exists yes, but not as often as you put it.
But personally I think it's technically wrong to call homosexuality "unnatural". People are born that way and, as you said, it exists in the animal kingdom. However, I think it's "abnormal" just as being born with 12 fingers is. It's not a "bad thing", but it shouldn't be seen as normal either.
Ok. So should it still be accepted, tolerated and understood? Is it bad?
As I said it's not a bad thing in itself. But it shouldn't be normalized. It would go something like this IMO :
- Do homosexuality exist ? Yes.
- Is it natural ? Technically, yes.
- Is it normal ? No, reproductive organs aren't made to interact in that way.
- Should they be bullied, discriminated against in everydaylife (job, opportunities) ? No.
- Should we put heterosexuality as the default standard ? Yes.
Problem is that conservatives don't have the guts to do that. So they contort themselves into improbable mental gymnastics and liberals end up having the more logically consistent argument on that issue as Richard said.
Why is normalizing being gay bad and doesn’t refusing to normalize it inherently create a situation where you’re discriminating against gay people?
Normalizing it is bad because it is not normal. If we make heterosexuality the default standard, most gays won't publicly display their sexuality so discriminations will be pretty rare. And we can still have anti-discrimination law just like those for disabled.
Not sure if this is what the other guy means--but there's a difference between "normalizing" something in the sense removing the surprise or disgust (AAH! Gayness!) and trying to build a culture where it's just as normal as everything else. The culture should drive itself forward based on heterosexual norms, families, and children, and being gay or trans or dressing up as the opposite sex should be a niche thing that we accommodate as best we can. But not a thing that we have an entire month (or season!) celebrating, to the point that I hear far more in popular culture about transforming yourself into the opposite sex than I do about raising children.
I have a circadian rhythm disorder. I can't wake up or even work at normal hours; I have to sleep very late and wake very late. It has caused immense trouble in my life. I am abnormal. The prevalence of this disorder is about similar to gay (and certainly more prevalent than trans). Society should tolerate this aspect of my physiology, but stores should not be forced to stay open later, movies should not regularly feature people waking up for work several hours later than normal, people should assume that I will be awake at normal hours and I should be forced to explain my disorder, etc.
Gays should not be able to adopt children. Not sorry about this at all.
Why?
Liberals largely control our moral universe and specifically taboos, which leaves conservatives to fight culture wars with a hand tied behind their backs. So it is with this issue, where questioning whether it is in society's best interest to celebrate rather than stigmatize LBTQ is beyond the pale.
But I don't think flawed argumentation is unique to conservative advocacy. Most advocacy relies on emotion over great argument, including wokeness, which is obviously remarkably successful and dumb.
Ideological conservatives only have themselves to blame for not creating viable media alternatives/offerings (or at least buying a single paper like the NYT, the WSJ barely counts these days). Nearly every single movie/television show carries an implicit liberal worldview (and has for quite some time), if there's one to be found.
I think part of what makes this debate especially confusing is that trans activists are very slippery about what their condition IS exactly, and tend to strategically equivocate between different definitions as suits their argument at the moment.
Traditionally, my understanding was that gender dysphoria is a psychological disorder which causes intense distress and anguish to those who suffer from it, and which requires medical intervention to treat effectively. In this model, trans is something like depression or anorexia: obviously no one should be ashamed for suffering from these conditions, and I want anyone suffering from them to get the most effective treatment available (whatever that might be). That's a far cry from saying that depression or anorexia should be promoted: there's a world of difference between "no one should feel ashamed for having this condition" and "this condition is great and wonderful and should be actively celebrated". If I had a daughter and I caught her reading pro-anorexia content, I'd be horrified, which is not to say I would be angry at her if she DEVELOPED anorexia.
An alternative conception holds that a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria is not a prerequisite for being trans, not every trans person has gender dysphoria, and trans people are just as heckin cute and valid as anyone else. In this model, trans is not a disorder but rather a lifestyle choice or a community (like veganism, or being a hippie), promoting it as a good and normal way to live one's life is perfectly responsible, we shouldn't assume that people who practice that lifestyle are any more or less mentally fragile than anyone else, and (crucially) it's open to criticism, just like any other lifestyle choice is in a pluralistic society.
My frustration is that trans activists have an annoying tendency to strategically equivocate between these two stances when it suits them. On the one hand they'll say that being trans is healthy and normal, there's nothing wrong with being trans, trans people should be celebrated for embracing their true inner selves etc. (this is the bailey). As soon as they get pushback on some of their more outré claims or demands, they'll retreat and start talking about how trans people are in intense distress and any criticism of their lifestyle is extremely triggering and if you don't accept their proposals you are LITERALLY endagering the lives of psychologically vulnerable trans kids and complicit in their eventual suicide (this is the motte). They want it both ways: their lifestyle to be celebrated as healthy or normal, without being subject to reasonable criticism the way every other lifestyle is.
But you can't have it both ways. If trans is just an alternative lifestyle choice (like veganism or being a hippie), then there's no intrinsic problem with it being promoted as a normal way to live one's life - but equally, the lifestyle itself is open to criticism, the people who practise it should be not be assumed to be any more or less likely to be in grave mental distress than anyone else, and are entitled to no special accommodations (as, by their own admission, there's nothing wrong with them). Conversely, if trans is a mental disorder which causes distress, then society should try to be considerate and accommodating towards those suffering from it and should try to help them get the treatment they need - but it shouldn't be promoted or glamorized, any more than anorexia should.
I think a lot of people are getting wise to this style of argumentation and recognising that a lot of the handwringing and rending of hair about "protecting vulnerable trans kids" is just naked emotional manipulation designed to shore up a lifestyle/community from external criticism. If it's a normally healthy lifestyle, it can be promoted but can just as equally be criticised by reasonable people. If it's a mental disorder, it's irresponsible to promote it. You can't have it both ways.
I agree that people often equivocate between these two worldviews. But I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I think It's pretty likely that some people don't have gender dysphoria but would just prefer to live as the other gender. And many of those would benefit from transiting.
Imagine some future where we can swich gender just by pressing a button. I think there would be very little reason to object to people just changing their gender. If I could, I'm sure I would want to sometimes live as a woman sometimes as a man maybe sometimes as a non binary person, just for fun.
The problem is transitioning is hard and often cannot be fully reversed. Maybe like going into debt. Ideally we would have some genie that could tell every person who wanted to transition if it was positive or negative expected value for them, because we dont have a genie we should probably let every one transition who want's to and try to make sure that they are well informed and don't do something they might regret. (This is just for adults for children it's a different topic.)
>But I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I think It's pretty likely that some people don't have gender dysphoria but would just prefer to live as the other gender.
If this is the case, the truth doesn't lie "somewhere in the middle": trans is just a lifestyle choice, not a medical condition causing intense distress and anguish. As such, the lifestyle choice and the people who practise it should not be immune from criticism or uncomfortable questions.
>Ideally we would have some genie that could tell every person who wanted to transition if it was positive or negative expected value for them, because we dont have a genie we should probably let every one transition who want's to and try to make sure that they are well informed and don't do something they might regret.
I'm an absolutist and fully support the right of adults to make any changes to their body that they want to, up to and including gender reassignment surgery. But again, "trans as lifestyle" vs. "trans as medical condition" implies two different approaches. If trans is a medical condition, then gender reassignment surgery is a treatment intended to alleviate distress and anguish, and we should be compassionate and caring towards people who undergo it, and not mock their clownish or ghoulish appearances. But if trans is a lifestyle choice, then gender reassignment surgery is no different from undergoing any other kind of cosmetic procedure. No one thinks making fun of the Bogdanoffs' creepy appearances is off-limits, so why should Caitlyn Jenner's?