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A Letter to My Gay Friends
June is widely recognized as “Pride Month,” and I’m sure we’ll see lots of reminders of that over the next few weeks. Most people aren’t aware that the Pride movement was inspired by, and is in part to commemorate, a specific series of events, the Stonewall Riots in New York City in 1969.
Like members of many other minority groups in American history, homosexual men and women faced discrimination, both legal and cultural, that was overcome only slowly and often at great personal cost. But it was overcome: today people who experience same-sex attraction have the same rights as heterosexuals and enjoy widespread public acceptance.
While the acronym “LGBT” (often with additional letters appended) is now ubiquitous, some in the gay community recognize, correctly I think, a problem with the inclusion of gender identity (trans, etc.) in what has traditionally been a gay rights movement. While the LGB movement sought equality and acceptance, the trans movement attempts to demand more than that and does so in ways that many people reasonably find objectionable.
Many of us don’t want to be told what to say, what pronouns to use, that our daughters must compete against biological males in sporting events, and share locker rooms with them in school. We also reject the seemingly nonsensical notion that we should pretend a boy is a girl simply because the boy declares that he is a girl. We resent the myriad circumlocutions increasingly required to avoid recognizing simple sexual reality: such nonsense as calling mothers “birthing people,” for example.
Beyond that, the trans movement is fundamentally hostile to the notion of basic human sexuality, and in particular of womanhood. It represents the final denial that men and women are different in important ways, in favor of a fictitious equivalence that, predictably, tends to serve men well at the expense of women.
I think there is a growing awareness among some in the gay community that there will be pushback against the increasingly extreme and unacceptable demands of the trans movement, and that, to the extent the gay movement is seen as inextricably bound to the trans movement, that pushback may undermine and threaten legitimate gains made by gay rights activists. It’s perfectly reasonable to encourage tolerance and understanding of people who are different; it isn’t reasonable to demand professions of belief and unacceptable accommodations (e.g., in athletics) based on a fanciful reimagining of human sexuality.
I think it would be prudent to begin to question whether being strongly allied with the so-called “trans” movement is in anyone’s best interests.
Published in Culture
Homosexuality is not an ethnicity. Homosexuals are not a minority as that term was always understood. No one in America was ever denied the right to marry, including homosexuals. Homosexuals often married long before the “gay rights” movement.
So I approve of sodomy while I disapprove of; unwed procreative sex, rape, incest, polygyny and the sexual assault of Angels. Where am I inconsistent?
100% this.
Do whatever you want, but why do I have to love it? And why do you need to teach my kids about it?
I can answer that. Was that a rhetorical question?
As soon as I saw the title, I thought, “Jerry in 3…2…1…” and you didn’t let me down! :-)
Go crazy.
I think you meant ‘married’?
I highly suggest listening to Jerry on his Land of Confusion podcast. I like how he is against Universal suffrage.
In case you get it wrong. Why should your kids suffer?
What if [general] you get it wrong?? Why should my kids suffer?
[For the record, I do not have children. In the interest of full disclosure.]
That actually pretty much shows the totalitarian’s argument in a nutshell. “I am right, and therefore, you lose your right to teach morality to your children.”
It is funny, that the very people who want government out of consenting relationships between adults want to use that same point of a gun to force their way into the parent-child relationship. Once you tell parents what they can and cannot teach their children, or allow their children to be taught, you are a tyrant.
I always find is interesting that people talk about homosexuality as if orientation and sexual activity are the same. They are not. People of either orientation can engage in homosexual behavior.
Me neither. This is totally hypothetical.
But I think that’s the logic of it. What if we get it wrong? Why should our kids suffer?
I am totally okay with stopping parents from doing things like FGM to their kids. Does that make me tyranny adjacent? I don’t care.
Are there psychological things which are FGM adjacent. I think so, but what do you think?
Well who do you risk getting it wrong? I’d go with the parent because they have the second most to lose from messing up their kid. Government isn’t afraid of not having grandkids at their funeral.
I think you might be old enough to have heard that joke? How can you tell if your room mate is gay?
He criticizes your taste in clothes?
No, your mother does that ( and also your life choices).
This is a comment typical of government educrats, that if I don’t teach my children in the way they wish, my children will suffer.
Why we homeschool, reason #173
Do you have references to the experiments with children? I knew the Frankfurt bunch was bad, but I didn’t know they were that bad!
I’m on board with Bryan’s comment #72. A lot of parents are going to get a lot of things wrong. But it’s a certainty that the state will get far more things wrong and do far more damage in the process.
Check out Chapter Five of Kinsey’s book if you want to lose your appetite.
Currently, leftists are in the grip of a romantic movements that sometimes expresses itself in philosophical tenets. Among these tenets are that people can be perfected and that they should be perfected through government power. Not using government power to perfect people, children in particular, is a violation of the freedom and dignity of children. The family is at most, a useful unit to cooperate with government and at worst, a hindrance to government’s beneficent power.
Humans have a yearning for control over others and a yearning for goodness and romantic beliefs coincide quite well with both of those.
Furthermore, sexuality and sexual identity are among the most important parts of who and what we are according to the romantic view of the world. People objecting to your sexual appetites, is an not merely rude but it is an infringement of your most important freedoms. This is why some transactivists say that, “You are denying my existence.” You can’t be permitted to disagree because it denies them their freedom to define themselves. I haven’t entirely understood why sexual identity is now the most important thing ever but Scott Yenor retraces some of the history.
I know that sexuality has always been connected to spirituality. I think that without religion in order to redirect the human impulses people worship funny things. Apparently we are worshipping how we feel now.
Here’s how:
Nobody knows what makes sexual attraction. You can’t find the thing particular thing that gets you hot somewhere in the genetic code and see that it is different from the the guy who gets off on something else. Some of it, the details, undoubtedly come from the environment, some trauma or fixation that developed in childhood, or maybe even infancy. Some of these become full-blown fetishes, but most of them just inform “how we like it”.
But none of that is responsible for the innate desire itself; that has to be wired in somehow from the get-go, or we would be too indifferent to have ever gotten off the ground.
This desire is primarily wired to make us attracted to the opposite sex, which is understandable. But (obviously) sometimes the wiring makes a few attracted to their own sex. This is hardly unusual in the distribution of traits among any group.
These people have a normal, healthy sex drive. The object and focus of their attraction happens to be for the same sex. They are no more in control of that reality, or able to change it, than you or I are in our attraction to the opposite sex. Nor would they want to change it, any more than I would.
I believe this because I know that if events were such that I had to change to being homosexual, even for the good of the tribe, even to save my children, I couldn’t do it. I could certainly go through with the act, have the sex (to save my children of course ;-)), but I could not ever actually switch my preference. And it would be hellish to have to live that way and pretend. I assume it is exactly this way for homosexuals also.
To answer your question then:
It conforms to Darwin’s theory because in the whole “natural selection/mutation” game, every population has all kinds of subsets, some of them not conducive to the propagation of the species. As long as none of these subsets become too large a percentage of the whole, the species will do just fine. We don’t need everybody participating.* Priests, nuns, homosexuals, etc., all have other valuable ways of contributing to a quirky and interesting society than just reproducing.
If we were a small tribe of twenty, and we needed everybody to be reproducing like mad, it might be different. But even then if that one guy put on a hell of a musical, then why not? The more the merrier.
*As far as we know, that is. Vonnegut, in Slaughterhouse Five, had the Tralfamadorians reveal the truth about human reproduction to Billy Pilgrim:
“There were five sexes on Tralfamadore, each of them performing a step necessary in the creation of a new individual. They looked identical to Billy–because their sex differences were all in the fourth dimension.
One of the biggest moral bombshells handed to Billy by the Tralfamadorians, incidentally had to do with sex on Earth. They said their flying-saucer crews had identified no fewer than seven sexes on Earth, each essential to reproduction. Again: Billy couldn’t possibly imagine what five of those seven sexes had to do with the making of a baby, since they were sexually active only in the fourth dimension.
The Tralfamadorians tried to give Billy clues that would help him imagine sex in the invisible dimension. They told him that there could be no Earthing babies without male homosexuals. There could be babies without female homosexuals. There couldn’t be babies without women over sixty-five years old. There could be babies without men over sixty-five. There couldn’t be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or less after birth. And so on. It was gibberish to Billy.”
Slaughterhouse-Five: Or The Children’s Crusade, A Duty Dance With Death pp. 145-146
I can’t find my original source. I’m not good at documenting reference material and this was from 10 years ago at least.
What I can find is the Kinsey experiments:
http://www.drjudithreisman.com/archives/chapter7.pdf
Please re-read what I wrote. I wrote it explicitly around teaching, but on purpose, did not mention things like FGM or abuse, knowing that you would not disappoint.
When you want to talk about telling parents what they can and cannot teach their children, get back to me. Otherwise, you have done nothing but try to change the conversation to another topic.
Also, this youtube doc is a good resource.
Don’t use the “______-adjacent” construction, please. Things are either tyranny or they aren’t. The “______-adjacent” construction removes clarity from discussion, which is frequently the intent.