Absurd Statements About Gay People
Via Rod Dreher, I see that the Ochlophobist has some mighty wrongheaded views about gays and lesbians (emphasis added).
This is the I’ll have my cake and eat it too phenomenon – I’ll send my $500 to the Christians Rightly Allied Against Perversion (CRAAP) fund to have them lobby against homosexual marriage, but I still want my 4 large screen TVs in the house so that my 2 kids can each play their video games while my wife watches Desperate Housewives and I watch the instruction DVD which explains to me how to operate the DVD players in my new 26 foot long Ford Explosion. What I do not “get” when I do this is that when I live in a manner that assumes the correctness of grossly gratuitous consumption, I live in a manner that assumes that homosexuality should be socially accepted. Why? Because like calls out to like. Homosexuality as a lifestyle and as a moral act is a decadent, gratuitous form of consumption in which the human person becomes commodified. In fact the normative accoutrements which gays and lesbians themselves often heartily embrace as representative of their lifestyle convey a pervasive quality of consumer oriented decadence (yes, there are exceptions; they prove the rule). It would seem that such a false ontology would naturally follow from a relationship based upon a sexual act which can never rise above entertainment.
When I read this kind of nonsense, stated as though it were self-evident, I cannot help but think that there is a significant body of orthodox religious believers whose views on homosexuality require the maintenance of breathtaking ignorance about how actual gays and lesbians live in the real world.
Is it possible to count average gay couples as close friends and to regard all their relationships as gratuitous consumption decisions? Can one be aware that homosexuality exists in every impoverished country on earth, and persist in the belief that it is somehow intrinsically tied to fancy accoutrements? After listening to a long established gay couple discuss the anguish of how to handle intimacy when one partner is HIV positive and the other isn’t, can one possibly describe that sexual act as one that “can never rise above entertainment”?
It is stunning how confident some people are in pronouncing on the nature of homosexuality as though they could reason it out deductively from first principles, starting with the fact that it is verboten in the Bible, and inexorably reaching the required conclusions, worldly evidence to the contrary be damned. These people’s conclusions are about as sound as the insights you’d get if you gave an immortal alien race that never reproduces the story of Abraham and Issac, formal training in theology, and little if any contact with any actual human families, and asked them to make their best effort at stating the nature of the parent child bond among modern Christians.
It would seem to reflect traditional theology and modern critical theory. The critiques of homosexuality and consumerism, after all, would both fall under the broader category of the self-destructive lusts of the disordered soul. This is, shall we say, a fusion of Augustine and Rousseau, Ratzinger after a late night reading Adorno in the Latin translation. You are confident in the authority of your own experience; More doubt! More doubt!, as Oakeshott once said. Although he said it in a tavern near closing time, and an alternate tradition claims that he really said More stout! More stout!
— Withywindle · Nov 25, 01:39 PM · #
Withy: Conor is from Orange County, so he has penetrating insight into the way “gays and lesbians live in the real world.” They live as quiet suburban couples, of course! Just like in American Pie.
— Lasorda · Nov 25, 04:49 PM · #
Withywindle: You’re right that the passage is grooving on its entwinement of orthodox religious and critical theory tropes, but Conor’s criticism points to a deeper affinity with a lot of critical theory: the tendency to argue from definition, the teleological assertions that multiply as the passage goes on. “Like calls out to like”! “Homosexuality as a …moral act”! (Talk about assuming what you need to establish.) All of which concludes with the author declaiming upon a “false ontology” which is a nullity without all these loaded terms he’s snuck into his harangue. This reminds me not so much of Adorno (critical theory narrowly understood (i.e. Frankfurt School)) but lot of Foucault-inspired theorizing upon race/power, gender/power, etc (critical theory broadly defined (i.e. postmodern academics calling themselves ‘critical theorists’)), in which words like “structural” and “inherent” do a lot of the work that would otherwise be done by, like, looking at things.
— Matt Feeney · Nov 26, 01:04 AM · #
Solipsism is the new conservatism. Perhaps that is the only plane modern conservatives can argue upon.
— M.Z. · Nov 26, 04:43 AM · #
Yes, but “like, looking at things” tells you nothing without a theory on what the resulting eyes-sensations are, what they mean, and what they refer to.
— Victor Morton · Nov 26, 06:42 PM · #
“worldly evidence to the contrary be damned”
What “worldly evidence” could ever prove something moral or immoral? You cannot derive an “ought” from an “is” in a godless world.
Honestly, when I read this kind of nonsense, stated as though it were self-evident, I cannot help but think that there is a significant body of secularists whose views on religion require the maintenance of breathtaking ignorance about how actual orthodox religious believers reason in the real world.
— Victor Morton · Nov 26, 06:56 PM · #
This must be self-evident nonsense, unless of course one has ever had the occasion to actually see a gay pride parade.
Also, it’s clearly self-evident nonsense that there could be a correlation between the concentration of homosexual populations and urbanized centers of consumer culture. Nor could there possibly be any economic evidence that homosexuals tend to be more affluent than heterosexuals, or more likely to spend larger proportions of their income on consumer goods.
And there couldn’t possibly be any data collected from surveying male homosexuals to indicate that they have a higher incidence of extreme promiscuity, or a higher desire for novelty in sexual partners, both indicators of a commodified and decadent sexual culture. Nor could it be true that compared to heterosexuals there is a higher percentage of urban male homosexuals that literally commodify sex by paying for sex with prostitutes, and that this is also a significant element in mainstream American homosexual culture.
All of these things are self-evidently ridiculous, so long as one has some “average gay couples” as friends.
— Ethan C. · Nov 28, 01:37 AM · #
I’ve seen Tea Party parades, too. Does that make it self-evident that all conservatives are birthers?
It does seem self-evidently nonsensical to suggest that gay people all live at Target, yes.
I don’t know that there “could not be”, but there isn’t; the idea that gay people are more affluent is a myth.
Than men in general? Doubtful. And what of lesbians, who are less promiscuous than straight couples? Or do they not count?
Or, you know, uses one’s brain. What’s next, “gay bowel disease”?
— Chet · Nov 28, 08:42 AM · #
1. By “extreme promiscuity”, I mean things like having hundreds of sexual partners, or cruising around in cars or in parks seeking anonymous sexual encounters. By all means, show me your evidence that gay men don’t do this far more than heterosexual men.
2. As to affluence: the article you link to doesn’t prove what it asserts. Badgett and Gates both seem to neglect that self-identification as “gay” and activity within the specialist homosexual media and political culture is what defines the “gay community”, so the marketing studies that they disparage do in fact represent a meaningful assessment of that community.
3. Perhaps it’s significant that you didn’t say anything at all about gay male prostitution.
— Ethan C. · Nov 30, 08:21 AM · #
LOL! You’ve got the burden of proof backwards, I think. Show me your evidence that that they do. Many sexual partners? Cruising for anonymous casual sex? You’ve just described the life of the average heterosexual frat boy. Gay men are promiscuous – when they are – because they’re men, not because they’re gay.
You say that like it’s supposed to be self-evidently true. In fact nothing about your post is convincing to someone not already ideologically committed to believing in the myth of homosexuality as “deviancy.”
You can’t artificially narrow the scope of the term “gay community” to uphold mythical constructions of it on one hand and then turn around and apply those constructions to literally everyone who is gay, regardless of activism or not. Either “gay community” means everyone who is gay, or it means less people than that. You can’t have it both ways.
What was I supposed to find significant about “gay prostitution”? That it exists? Many, many more women are prostitutes than gay men. And obviously way less straight men are prostitutes for straight women, because women are so much less likely to pay for sex in the first place. It’s a substantially narrower market.
And perhaps it’s significant for you that, in your world, lesbians apparently don’t exist.
— Chet · Nov 30, 05:26 PM · #
“Also, it’s clearly self-evident nonsense that there could be a correlation between the concentration of homosexual populations and urbanized centers of consumer culture. Nor could there possibly be any economic evidence that homosexuals tend to be more affluent than heterosexuals, or more likely to spend larger proportions of their income on consumer goods.”
Hogwash. It’s rather that this type of person is more likely to come out as openly gay or lesbian because they are less dependent on other people to survive. Lower-class gays and lesbians are more invisible because they are poor and uneducated and live among poor and uneducated people.
Several studies have shown that gay people are, on average, significantly poorer than straights. Pay and promotion discrimination is legal against gay people
— placemo · Dec 2, 06:36 AM · #