Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Pride Month? Seriously?
I don’t understand it. This level of sheer corporate pageantry doesn’t even happen for Black History Month. The US is not a country that undertakes mass PR campaigns celebrating abstract identity groups for an entire month. This seems a bit much for epater la bourgeoisie (the emotional need of certain rich people to constantly shock the sensibilities of the middle class). What is going on?
As a bisexual, I’m expected to think of myself as part of this weird amorphous “LGBT” thing, a category that includes a fantastic number of freaks and weirdos and people I want nothing to do with. Sexual orientation is not the same thing as identity. Seeing sign after sign proclaiming “Pride Month” in every store I go to is surreal. What’s the point?
This almost strikes me as a religious phenomenon. Aside from hardcore pro-binary trans people, most sexual identities are 100% socially constructed. That’s true for queer people, the non-binary, lesbians, and those gay men who have a “sexual identity” (many do not). So is Pride Month just a weird upper-class sexual cult? I don’t know.
Published in General
An odd assumption.
Back when the homosexual politicos were really getting a hold on the country they see-sawed between, “it’s not a choice, I was born this way,” and “How dare you say I was born this way; I chose to be this way.” It was almost funny to watch the arguments as they struggled to contain a consistent message in the movement that the dems glommed onto.
Seeing as how primitive cultures often don’t experience this behavior at all, I’m going to stick with the whole choice part. It might be both, most likely is to some extent, but it’s not like being short or tall. It’s like being normal or being a psychopath. Sure homocidal psychopaths might be perfectly natural in how they get that way, but that doesn’t make it right. Homocidal psychopaths are much worse than homosexuals, of course, if they don’t curb their tendencies — which we as a society demand that they do. We should also demand that homosexuals not groom children and stop forcing us to pretend that they aren’t by definition perverts.
The important difference between a homicidal psychopath and a homosexual is the homicide part. In other words, when one person kills another person, society has an interest in incapacitating the person who killed another person.
But when one person falls in love with a person of the same sex, both people are adults and consent to the relationship, there’s no harm.
Of course, but it’s a matter of degree. They’re both wrong behavior, homosexuality should not be a punishable offense, but it should have a strong element of shame and exclusion from society. No one cared about Liberace, Queen, Elton John, or anyone else for their perversions. They minded their business and all was well. But marxists don’t allow people to live in peace, there must be control and debasement of the individual to promote obedience to them. Everything, especially what is normally very private, must be controlled.
Yeah, love. Sure. (Where’s the sarcasm emoji?) But there is harm when it becomes a political agenda to foist their perversions on us. Are you going to say that grooming children in schools is not harmful? Do you think raising children to want to pretend to change their sex through surgery is not harmful? That is where the homosexual agenda has led us, and it was predicted by many of us.
The agenda thrives because we don’t challenge the premise. Homosexuality is not harmless.
Domestic terrorism. Intimidation via mob action for political purposes. The same is true of people like Waters and Pelosi calling for mob action. Remember people starting scenes in restaurants etc? Seems like small potatoes, but the purpose there is to intimidate people out of their political positions. A church or a restaurant is not a public space fit for hammering out views — both are private spaces for defined purpose.
Boy, here come the left-libertarians who identify as conservative.
LGBTQ apologists have framed gayness in a multitude of ways, among these was the idea that sex attraction is fluid, and that most people aren’t 100% gay or 100% straight. If we assume they aren’t just saying this to get laid, then converting is should be possible in quite a lot of cases.
I don’t think sexual attraction is very fluid, even if some people are attracted to people of both sexes. I don’t think it would be easy to have someone convert from straight to gay/lesbian by putting someone through a 3 week course.
The gay friends I have seem like they not likely to change. They can only be terrorized into not pursuing same sex relationships.
Homosexuality is as harmless as college football. In college football athletes can end up with torn ACLs, broken bones, separated shoulders, brain damage. Yet we encourage people to play college football.
Easy? No.
I’m holding out for people to stop claiming that it is impossible.
Think about how possible it is for someone to persuade you to become a homosexual and then you might get a sense of how possible it is for someone to persuade a homosexual to become a heterosexual.
Sure, it might be possible. But it seems like the chances are very close to zero.
You do understand I am not talking about all or even most homosexuals, yes?
And my concern is that the chances may be very different with teenagers who are still figuring out lots of aspects of who they are, and thus are persuadable in ways that a 30 year old or a 45 year old are not. What a culture celebrates among 30 year olds or 45 year olds (or even what the culture says is “normal”) helps to persuade what a teenager thinks he or she should follow.
What’s interesting about the ancient world is that while as you say same-sex relationships were acknowledged and even celebrated, the idea that such people were therefore “homosexual” literally hadn’t been invented yet. Typically the older man in a man/boy love affair was married with children. Men were more-or-less expected to cheat on their wives, and better that they have an affair with a single boy than one of the neighbor’s wives.
And yet morality cannot be reduced to whether something causes harm, it involves broader questions of human flourishing. See The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt for an explanation.
Who said it was easy? It’s also difficult to cure gender dysphoria, eating disorders, alcoholism, drug addiction, depression, anxiety, and so forth.
The fact that something is difficult neither proves that it is impossible, nor that it is not even worth trying.
It’s still common in Arabic/Muslim societies. When my battalion was gearing up to go to Afghanistan, someone arranged for a cultural briefing. Some Afghan came and gave a talk, and in it he told us that if you walk by a house and hear a little boy screaming, just keep on walking. An uncle is probably having sex with his nephew and if you go in the house, you’ll just embarrass the uncle. I heard him say that with my own ears. After he left, I gathered the Marines in my charge and explained to them to forget what that idiot told them, if someone is being raped whether it be a woman or a boy, you should consider it a crime and act accordingly. We are not police, but we are still humans.
Sure. But human flourishing is more likely to occur if people are free to engage in relationships with other people, rather than be forced into celibacy. Celibacy might be attractive to a small subset of the human population. But for the large majority, engaging in romantic relationships is an essential part of human flourishing.
Sure. You can try. But it is likely to be just as much of a wasted effort as it would be if someone tried to persuade you to become homosexual rather than heterosexual.
Imagine if someone tried to “cure” you of your heterosexuality. They could put you through a conversion program or a series of conversion programs. But these efforts would not only be likely to fail, they would likely cause conflict between you and person trying to convert you.
After all, you are happy as a heterosexual and you don’t see your heterosexuality as a problem that has to be solved. So, having someone say, “You need to stop being romantic with that woman,” is likely to be worse than useless.
All humans are meant to be police.
I am against forced conversion. And I am against forced removal of the opportunity to convert.
Sure. Freedom of religion.
I might view certain religious ideas as foolish, like the idea held in some parts of Appalachia where if you have faith in Jesus you can handle poisonous snakes and not harm will come to you. But people are free to choose, as Milton Friedman said.
No. That wasn’t me. I’m not sure how commenting in a thread makes me obsessed. You are obviously projecting.
Guilty as charged! Totally obsessed.
I’m aware of history and posted in honesty and good faith. I know enough about history and civics to know that the fight over slavery didn’t begin in 1860. It was a major issue from the very beginning thanks to the Christian voices in the convention. It was non-Christians who protected slavery.
Gays have always and always will suffer because of their sin as we all do. Obviously the cultural normalization of all these perversions isn’t making them any less miserable.
That is laughably wrong. The Bible makes no condemnation of slavery and many Christians supported the institution because it saved Africans from paganism.
Anecdotally, the few people I have met in my life that conspiratorially whispered that slavery wasn’t so bad, or that some would benefit from such a “structured” life were born again bible thumping Christians.