The Unanticipated Effects of LGBT Utopia — Michael Stopa

 

Liberalism is, in its essence, Utopian. Every liberal policy, no matter how trivial, points to the bright horizon of a better day, like the vanishing points in a surreal de Chirico painting. That liberals can’t agree amongst themselves about the particulars of their earthly paradise — other than that it will be harmoniously rainbow-colored and that we will all eat locally grown produce — does not undermine their faith in it. The arrow of time is taking us to some final society that, whatever it contains, is bound to be just swell.

The fact that Utopia, as they conceive i,t would be mind-numbingly boring does not disturb liberal composure. They don’t, after all, have to live in it. They are driven to construct it — and driven to heights of grandiosity — by their profound incapacity to cope with their own mortality.

Take my word for it. Examine any liberal notion closely enough and you will find in it – lurking in a darkened corner, yellow eyes glowing: a fear of death. Hence the need for a heaven on earth in which to hide.

One of the more explicit and conspicuous aspects of liberal Utopia is that promulgated by the lesbian-gay-transgender-bisexual (LGBT) fanatics. Amidst the recent defenestration of Mozilla’s CEO Brendan Eich, you could hear the LGBT “mafia” (thanks, Bill Maher) regularly describe gay marriage as “inevitable” or “on the right side of history.”

I want to ask: where do they think history is taking us? Because I think that, irrespective of the morality of their cause, they are profoundly mistaken about what the future holds.

Before proceeding, let me say that I find most of the conservative critique of Brendan Eich’s crucifixion to be pusillanimous. The main objection that I have heard conservative pundits raise to Eich’s firing is based on freedom of expression. “Eich is entitled to his views.” “Obama had the same ones not long ago!” Conservatives, in defending Eich, appeal to the sanctity of open discourse in the marketplace of ideas. (And when conservatives start getting sanctimonious we’re really in bad shape).

What the left is saying is that there are certain things, like racism, that have no place in the world of civil discourse. That is their vanishing point. In the Promised Land, certain prejudices will not be tolerated. A man will be judged by the content of his character, not whom he lusts after.

This is a serious argument and deserves to be taken seriously. There are absolutely opinions that cross into the zone of socially intolerable (even if it is conceded that proponents have a 1st Amendment right to speak them).

The point is that you can’t argue against the censure of an opinion purely on the grounds that many hold that opinion or that freedom of discourse is absolute. Eventually, to argue against the censure of an opinion, you have to, in some way, defend the opinion.

I think that a good start to this is to look at the LGBT Utopia. What is it exactly?

Interestingly, there is an amazingly huge genre of gay and lesbian science fiction. (Search for “gay science fiction” on Amazon and you get 2,932 results.) It is not all strictly Utopian, of course. But how people cast the society of the future reveals a lot about what they think of the society of today.

I don’t really think, though, that you need gay science fiction to have an idea of what kind of future LGBT partisans envision. Casually clicking through the Huffington Post or the Daily Kos is enough, I think, to give you an admittedly simplified picture of an LGBT Utopia that looks something like this:

In the world of the future, everyone will be free to “experiment” with their sexuality. Some will end up homosexual, some will end up heterosexual. Some will flit from one to the other. But no social stigma — and therefore no psychic trauma — will attach to any transient liaison. Repression of sexual desire will dissolve into lifelong polymorphous perversity. Adolescence in particular will be a period of exploration to find out whom you were meant to be. (Though you can feel free to change later on in life).

Adolescence will still be a period of uncertainty and growing pains, of course. But societal disapproval of sexual choice will be a thing of the past, and so will any guilt concerning it.

Parents will remark causally to friends: “Oh, Josh has decided to have a boyfriend for a while. His breakup with McKinley left him really down on girls! The new guy, Brad, is a straight A student and he’s a musician too. He’s already asked Josh to the Prom!”

And all that will be Just. Cool.

Intrinsic to this picture and to the LGBT politics of today is the presumption that people are born gay (or not gay). This empirical claim precludes the possibility that people who would otherwise lead happy heterosexual lives could be tempted to “experiment” with homosexuality and in some sense be changed irreversibly by that experiment.

This is a highly static view of neurobiology. In this view, sexual inhibition results from “homophobia” which is a purely social construct, rather than a taboo (which is genetic). In fact, that “eewww reaction” that heterosexuals often have to homosexual behavior is not fear. It is revulsion. There is a difference.

This is not to say that I am opposed to gays or even gay marriage. (For the record, I prefer civil unions or else having government get out of the marriage business altogether). And I am happy that the view of homosexuality as a moral failing has mostly fallen by the wayside.

But I believe that lingering resistance to full, uncompromising acceptance of the gay lifestyle is rooted in the fact that, for whatever reason, most parents would rather their children not grow up to be gay, and that they think that societal mores have an influence on that outcome.

In point of fact, the proposition that people are “born gay” has some empirical support. One hypothesis, based on both human and animal studies, is that prenatal hormones, (specifically a deficiency, or not, of testosterone in the mother’s uterus at a particular stage of gestation) is determinative of sexual orientation of the baby later in life.

The origin of sexual orientation is probably not this simple. But suppose it were. (Whatever the origin or origins of homosexuality turn out to be, there is a similar argument). Then, if you believe in scientific progress, doesn’t a view of the future rather different from the LGBT Utopia emerge? Imagine a scene like this in the not too distant future.

An expectant woman and her husband enter a doctor’s office holding sweaty hands. The doctor clears his throat and begins.

“Mrs. Johnson, we have your latest blood tests back from the lab and they reveal that there’s an endocrine imbalance, ah, er, that’s a hormone imbalance in your womb.”

Mr. and Mrs. Johnson clutch hands more tightly. “Why is that doctor? Is it dangerous?” Mr. Johnson asks. “Well, we really don’t know how such a deficiency comes about – maybe something as simple as Mrs. Johnson’s recent bout of the flu. And it is not dangerous per se. But we now know that there is a close correlation between testosterone deficiency – which is what Mrs. Johnson has – and the likelihood that your boy will, later in life, become homosexual. It has to do with the hormonal role in brain development at this stage of pregnancy. It is not yet clear what other consequences, if any, this hormone imbalance has or will have.” Mr. Johnson puts his arm around Mrs. Johnson’s shoulders. The doctor continues.

“In the past, we couldn’t even test for this condition, let alone treat it. But, we are able nowadays to compensate for Mrs. Johnson’s hormone deficiency with an IV twice a week for the next month. There is no danger to it, we are just supplementing the same hormone that your body naturally produces, Mrs. Johnson. And studies have shown that this endocrine regularization procedure as we call it does indeed essentially eliminate the incidence of homosexuality later in life.”

“The question is, Mrs. Johnson, do you want that IV?”

Where do you think history is headed?

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  1. user_517406 Inactive
    user_517406
    @MerinaSmith

    I think that the leftist utopia is a recipe for utter confusion and perpetual adolescence.  And I think you are absolutely right about parents–they want their children to grow up, marry someone of the opposite sex, then give them grandchildren.  That is what parents want.  In addition, all societies have sexual mores and must have them because this is the power that produces children and holds parents together to raise them.  Unchecked it is chaotic and disruptive to individuals, families and society as a whole. This is all pretty elementary stuff, but the left is blind to the obvious these days–which is nothing new.

    • #1
  2. raycon and lindacon Inactive
    raycon and lindacon
    @rayconandlindacon

    Or, equally realistic;  “Mrs Johnson, with many birth defects, such as Downs, we recommend termination of pregnancy.  And we acknowledge that many, especially very early terminations, are chosen to select the sex of your child.  You already know that your child is a boy, and we accept that homosexuality is not a bad thing, but do you want a boy at this time?

    The same goes for girls, but the decision is easier in most cultures.

    • #2
  3. Kozak Member
    Kozak
    @Kozak

    Yeah. As soon as detection of Homosexuality in the womb becomes possible, the Left will

    suddenly decide a woman doesn’t have a total right to “choice”.  I hope I live to see the day so I can laugh ….

    • #3
  4. Fredösphere Inactive
    Fredösphere
    @Fredosphere

    I wrote an SF story that explored how people would react if pregnant women could buy pills that supposedly decreased the gayness of the unborn child. I think the idea is obvious (as evidenced by the comments above) and ought to be well-covered in the SF literature, but oddly enough, I’ve never seen such a story.

    I’ve also written a story where changes in technology have undermined the rationale for the pro-abortion postion. I’ve never seen a story with that premise get published. The SF world leans left, especially editors, and I think that has something to do with it.

    The SF genre prides itself on its open-mindedness and free speculation. Consider the controversial topics raised in SF going all the way back to the New Wave in the 1970s. But when it comes to examining issues of life and gender from a certain direction, there’s a blindness. If I’m wrong, and such stories exist, I’d love to hear about them.

    • #4
  5. Pilli Inactive
    Pilli
    @Pilli

    One can also see women prevented from having children after the woman has passed a certain age because the odds of a non-normal birth are increased.  This includes the amount of testosterone available during pregnancy.

    • #5
  6. St. Salieri Member
    St. Salieri
    @

    Or…

    a point in the future when this information is not allowed to be shared with the parents, because they might act to prevent the increased likelihood of a homosexual future for their child.

    Or…

    depending on their reaction the state removes said child from such bigots.

    • #6
  7. Nick Stuart Inactive
    Nick Stuart
    @NickStuart

    I’ll take the bait. If someone in their thought life is a racist, anti-semite, sexist, or whatever; and they don’t make themselves notorious; and it doesn’t affect their job performance at all; but they make a contribution to an organization congruent with their beliefs why does that disqualify them from their job?

    I had a manager who was a Nation of Islam (Louis Farrakhan’s group) adherent. NOI is noisomely racist. She hired, a white guy from the burbs because she wanted my skill set. And never let her theological views adversely affect her job performance of fairness of treating me (actualy we got along famously, still do).

    There are some virulently anti-Christian people out there in the workplace, should they be barred from their jobs? I don’t think so.

    • #7
  8. Sandy Member
    Sandy
    @Sandy

    Where is history headed?  If the West continues its decline and extremist Islam and its allies continue to rise,  Ls, Gs, Bs, and Ts will go back into the closet.

    • #8
  9. Zafar Member
    Zafar
    @Zafar

    Kozak:Yeah. As soon as detection of Homosexuality in the womb becomes possible, the Left willsuddenly decide a woman doesn’t have a total right to “choice”. I hope I live to see the day so I can laugh …. 

    That’s pretty much exactly what happened in India (and China?) when technology made sex selective abortions possible.  In India there are fewer girls than boys being born  in many social groups which have the money to access sex selective abortions – to the extent that it’s now illegal to find out the sex of your unborn child because they fear you’ll abort it if it’s a girl.

    So ‘family planning’ in overcrowded India now is arguing with ‘every girl has a right to be born’.

    The law has had a limited impact – with some unexpected social consequences of sex selective abortions still playing out.

    • #9
  10. A Beleaguered Conservative Member
    A Beleaguered Conservative
    @

    The world the sexual left seeks to bring into being, as described in your excellent post, is a world where bodily pleasure is the primary aim of life.  It is aptly described in Brave New World.   Everything that hinders bodily pleasure is immoral.  Everything that advances it is good.  The young are trained not to put any depth into relationships — just go from one pleasure to the next, sometimes male, sometimes female, who cares.   Gender is immaterial since the only thing that counts is the bodily pleasure the other can provide you.   As I recently read somewhere, the body is not a temple, it is an amusement park.   The greatest threat this impoverished and inhuman view creates is that it will come to dominate all thinking.  There will come a point when we read Brave New World and are not repulsed by it.  The decay will be so pervasive that we will be unable to see it.  We will lose the ability to understand that our souls and our experiences point to something higher, to an end more noble than bodily pleasure.  This is the true danger of the Eich affair.  It reveals the ugly impulse to subsume everything and everyone, to stifle all thought and all activity that questions the LGBT point of view.  The totalitarian instinct is always present, but now it has become respectable.

    • #10
  11. user_3444 Coolidge
    user_3444
    @JosephStanko

    Michael Stopa: And I am happy that the view of homosexuality as a moral failing has mostly fallen by the wayside.

    Has it though?  The Catholic Church certainly hasn’t changed her teaching on this question, and there are still millions of Protestants who believe the Bible is perfectly clear on the matter.

    That is where I think we get into uncharted waters.  The campaign to include a good chunk of traditional Christian sexuality morality in “the zone of socially intolerable” views represents a serious threat to religious liberty.

    • #11
  12. user_22932 Member
    user_22932
    @PaulDeRocco

    LGBT? I would think that homosexuals would object to being so casually lumped together with transsexuals. Whatever one thinks of homosexuality, it at least has the virtue of being real, while transsexuality is a fantasy of mentally unbalanced people which the left is trying to make real by compelling the rest of us to go along with the fantasy. If I were gay, I’d regard equating me to a transsexual to be an insult.

    • #12
  13. user_428379 Coolidge
    user_428379
    @AlSparks

    Nick Stuart:

    I had a manager who was a Nation of Islam (Louis Farrakhan’s group) adherent. NOI is noisomely racist. She hired, a white guy from the burbs because she wanted my skill set. And never let her theological views adversely affect her job performance of fairness of treating me (actualy we got along famously, still do).

    Ok, I’ll take the bait.  To put it another way, “Some of my best friends are racists.  But that’s ok, because they’re not white (or male?).”

    • #13
  14. user_22932 Member
    user_22932
    @PaulDeRocco

    The LGBT utopia boils down to an anger at the fact that there are two sexes, and a desire to escape from that fundamental fact. When you tally up all the demands of feminist, homosexual and transgender activists, the ultimate vision they’re all pointing to, whether they realize it or not, is the absolute draining of all meaning and significance from sexuality–in short, the abolition of gender.

    Why normal people would find that appealing is hard to fathom. And the left’s unquestioned assumption that such a society would function better than this one is also peculiar. It can only be attributed to the fact that leftists believe in living ideologically. The only thing they hold sacred is the intellectual abstraction at the heart of their ideology, and they will follow it to the ends of the Earth, no matter how grim or bizarre a path it leads them on.

    • #14
  15. user_22932 Member
    user_22932
    @PaulDeRocco

    Michael Stopa:

    Intrinsic to this picture and to the LGBT politics of today is the presumption that people are born gay (or not gay). This empirical claim precludes the possibility that people who would otherwise lead happy heterosexual lives could be tempted to “experiment” with homosexuality and in some sense be changed irreversibly by that experiment.

    Human sexuality is amazingly malleable. (Consider the customs of ancient Sparta.) One’s sexual nature by the end of one’s life isn’t cast in stone by birth. Allowing oneself to indulge certain sexual urges can cause those desires to grow to where they seem central to one’s life, while suppressing them in the first place would have kept them at the periphery of consciousness. Renouncing them would be vastly more painful than initially avoiding them.This is true of many things in life besides sexuality. Indulging a desire is tantamount to cultivating it.

    • #15
  16. Zafar Member
    Zafar
    @Zafar

    Paul DeRocco:The LGBT utopia boils down to an anger at the fact that there are two sexes, and a desire to escape from that fundamental fact.  

    I don’t know about this utopia, but I have no problems with the fact that there are two sexes.  Just with the insistence that because there are two sexes I have to be a certain way.  Why must I?  Why must you or anybody else?  Just be yourself.

    There can be two sexes and I still don’t have to be heterosexual.  In fact there are two sexes and I am not heterosexual.

    Perhaps there really is no connection? People should just be themselves.

    • #16
  17. captainpower Inactive
    captainpower
    @captainpower

    Wow. Get this guy on the podcast. Great post.

    @Nick stuart, @joseph stanko: good points that prevent me from 100% agreement with OP (original poster), but OPs post is still great for focusing the issue and brainstorming good arguments.

    @raycon/lindacon: i think OP was aware of your examples and purposely bypassed the tangential discussion of abortion by inventing an in vitro “cure” for homosexuality. Your analogy is too constrained by the present. A truer analogy would be to offer a scifi in vitro cure for down syndrome, or some kind of scifi special enzyme to allow you to choose what sex your child is born with. [edit] My mistake, I meant “in utero” when I wrote “in vitro.”

    @A Beleaguered Conservative: We wont even recognize. Wow.

    @kozak. Two Dennis Prager quotes: Have to laugh or I will cry. Being on the left means never having to say you are sorry.

    • #17
  18. captainpower Inactive
    captainpower
    @captainpower

    Crap. I spent so long on that comment and still so many errors. With how it loses formatting when i try to edit, I don’t have it in me to fix the spelling in that other comment using android. Sorry.

    [update from the next day]  Got in front of a PC and fixed it. Resisted temptation to change any of the actual content.

    • #18
  19. kmtanner Inactive
    kmtanner
    @kmtanner

    About this Brendan Eich case. For non americans, its hard to understand why California’s Proposition 8 is needed. Why not just vote against a law that allow gays to get married?

    • #19
  20. Michael Stopa Member
    Michael Stopa
    @MichaelStopa

    @captainpower Great comments! I think I read through the spelling. I am “OP” right?

    (and “Great lost” is “Great post” ? … not “Get lost”!?)

    • #20
  21. TG Thatcher
    TG
    @TG

    Fredösphere:…I’ve also written a story where changes in technology have undermined the rationale for the pro-abortion postion. I’ve never seen a story with that premise get published. …  

    I’m quite late to this conversation, and haven’t yet read all the comments (shame on me!), but I can point out to you a SF novel in which a change in technology that obviates any “need” for abortion is specifically identified – and is part of a significant plot point):  Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold  (The technology is also a significant portion of the plot in the next-book-chronologically, which is Barrayar).

    • #21
  22. user_3444 Coolidge
    user_3444
    @JosephStanko

    kmtanner: About this Brendan Eich case. For non americans, its hard to understand why California’s Proposition 8 is needed. Why not just vote against a law that allow gays to get married?

    That is a great question, and as a lifelong CA resident I forget sometimes that others don’t know the full background of this proposition.

    In May 2008 the California Supreme Court ruled 4-3 In re Marriage Cases that the current state law defining marriage as between one man and one woman violated the California state Constitution.  On June 16, 2008 the state began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.  The Prop 8 simply took the language of the statutory law and turned it into a state Constitutional amendment, as this was the only remaining avenue for the voters to overrule the Court.

    Same-sex marriage has been legalized in the U.S. primarily by judicial activism.  When the question is put to the voters, even in liberal “blue states” like CA, they prefer traditional marriage.

    • #22
  23. captainpower Inactive
    captainpower
    @captainpower

    Michael Stopa:@captainpower Great comments! I think I read through the spelling. I am “OP” right?(and “Great lost” is “Great post” ? … not “Get lost”!?)

    Yes, I have corrected the spelling so it should be easier to read now.

    http://ricochet.com/lgbt-utuopia/comment-page-1/#comment-2048870

    OP is short for “Original Poster” and refers to the author of a post. It is in common informal use at various internet forums such as reddit, imgur, etc.

    Re-reading some of the post, I admire particularly the highlighting of the aversion our side has to addressing the central argument from the Left here (anti-SSM is an odious and evil position like being pro-slavery) rather than merely defending it in the abstract (I respect the right of people to have odious opinions).

    Dennis Prager and others have said “we think they are wrong and they think we are evil.” It’s not a fun task to identify oneself with the “evil” position and try to defend it to people who aren’t listening and feel morally justified in dismissing you. I think that’s why many take a more circuitous (pusillanimous?) approach to argument, trying to incrementally push back toward the other direction, and I’m not convinced they are wrong. However, I really like your approach of attacking ideological foundations by bringing underlying assumptions up for inspection. “The best defense is a good offense.”

    Cheers,

    CaptainPower

    http://ricochet.com/profile/23320

    • #23
  24. Penfold Member
    Penfold
    @Penfold

    In the LGBT utopia SciFi story, what really happens is that the parents are shocked that the doctor would even make such a backwards, bigoted suggestion.  They are proud that their unborn child has already made such an enlightened decision.  They would report the doctor to the local commissar and he would be sentenced to being “pressed” under a cement wall till dead.

    • #24
  25. user_22932 Member
    user_22932
    @PaulDeRocco

    Zafar:

    I don’t know about this utopia, but I have no problems with the fact that there are two sexes. Just with the insistence that because there are two sexes I have to be a certain way. Why must I? Why must you or anybody else? Just be yourself.There can be two sexes and I still don’t have to be heterosexual. In fact there are two sexes and I am not heterosexual.

     I’m not attributing the difficulty with their being two sexes to homosexuals, I’m attributing it to feminists and other gender-related activists. The people who hounded Eich out of his job are offended at the assertion that homosexuality is meaningfully different from heterosexuality, which is a logical consequence of men being meaningfully different from women, which is simply a fact of life for our two-sexed species.

    • #25
  26. Zafar Member
    Zafar
    @Zafar

    They probably do see opposition to SSM as a proxy for opposition to gay people and their acceptance in society – iow a refusal to see gay relationships and gay people as equal to straight people.

    The question is: are there any opinions that justify losing your job if you express them?  How about expressing anti-semitic views? Or racist views?  Should you still be able to keep your job, or are people justified in demanding that you be fired?

    Anti-semitic views (Christ Killers) and racist views (the curse of Ham) were common fifty years ago – expressing them was no big deal.  But society has changed, and you’d find very few people today defending your right to express them and to keep your job no matter what.

    • #26
  27. kmtanner Inactive
    kmtanner
    @kmtanner

    Has this all ended, if its has, how?

    • #27
  28. user_22932 Member
    user_22932
    @PaulDeRocco

    Zafar:

    I don’t know about this utopia, but I have no problems with the fact that there are two sexes. Just with the insistence that because there are two sexes I have to be a certain way. Why must I? Why must you or anybody else? Just be yourself.

    Is this a principle that you would only apply to gender? Or would it extend to your humanity itself? Would you ask why society expects you to be a certain way as a person, and bemoan the fact that it won’t let you just “be yourself”?

    Human culture is all about coalescing around some common idea of how we ought to live. To say that society has no right to impose any common idea on how we should live is to say that culture itself is illegitimate. And if you accept that society has some right to prefer one way of living to another, then why should that not also apply separately to the two sexes? The only answer I can imagine is that sex is a meaningless distinction, like race or hair color. And that is in fact the claim at the heart of modern feminism, and the error at the bottom of its various offshoots like gay marriage or transgender rights.

    • #28
  29. J Flei Inactive
    J Flei
    @Solon

    It’s always good to take a position you don’t agree with seriously and p0int out where it leads If it were the ‘gay couples who just want to marry’ movement, I might even be on board; but it’s “LGBT”, and they want this whole Utopia deal, and I’m definitely not on board with that.  . 

    • #29
  30. Zafar Member
    Zafar
    @Zafar

    Paul DeRocco:

    Zafar:

    I don’t know about this utopia, but I have no problems with the fact that there are two sexes. Just with the insistence that because there are two sexes I have to be a certain way. Why must I? Why must you or anybody else? Just be yourself.

    Is this a principle that you would only apply to gender? Or would it extend to your humanity itself? Would you ask why society expects you to be a certain way as a person, and bemoan the fact that it won’t let you just “be yourself”? 

    Paul – sometimes social expectations make sense (be honest, be kind, don’t be violent, care for your parents and your children) and sometimes they don’t (act straight even if you’re not, you can only get married if you’re the same religion/race, you can only get married if you’re opposite genders). In the past some social expectations have been downright evil (treat people of different skin colours or religions differently, women have fewer legal rights than men).If expectations have any intrinsic worth they’ll survive being questioned.  If not, then not.

    • #30
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