Thanks to Mr. Stuttaford & Mr. Hume for their responses. A few points at random.
• (1) Is conservatism coextensive with libertarianism? You’d think so from reading the exchanges here. However, it seems to me there ought to be political room somewhere for good old instinctual hostility to unnecessary change, even if that change increases individual freedom of action. Why change something that works reasonably well — as well as anything does in human affairs? How do you know what the consequences will be? That there is some injustice going on, some wrong to be righted, that was first noticed in 1997, having escaped the attention of absolutely everybody for the previous 10,000 years, seems to me implausible and frivolous. Conservatism is made up of attitudes like mine. Well, I thought it was.
• (2) The discussions here have all been very smart-centric. That’s why they have such a libertarian flavor. It’s not the case that you can’t be a conservative without being a supernaturalist; but I’m beginning to suspect that the number of us who are (a) conservative in temperament, and (b) in the top IQ quartile, yet (c) neither supernaturalist nor libertarian, may be vanishingly small. Perhaps I should start a new blog for Secular Non-Libertarian Smart Conservatives. If there are any others.
Still, arguments that take no account of the left-hand side of the bell curve — which is to say, most of the arguments on these comment threads — are missing some important point. Ordinary unintellectual people depend, much more than do grad-school types, on stable and customary social institutions. Disturb social equilibriums at your peril.
• However: (3) The notion expressed here by Mr. Hume — though as he’s made clear, it didn’t originate with him alone — that we are going through some great collective psycho-social shift which includes a return to some paleolithic values, is persuasive to me. (In fact I’ve written about it here.) This change seems to be happening extraordinarily fast, as Ice Ages are supposed (by some theorists) to come and go in just a few decades. Sell marriage, monotheism, capitalism, patriarchy, sumptuary codes, and law. Buy pleasure-bonding, unstructured spirituality, “primitive communism” (K. Marx), sexual egalitarianism, transient fads, and “empathy” (B. Obama).
Looking at the first derivatives here, I’d say Andrew is probably right that there is no stopping this train. Nothing is ever utterly inevitable, though, and for all anyone knows we might be proscribing homosexual behavior again in 50 years. Or we might have cured it — the Cochran/Ewald pathogenic theory of homosexuality has never been refuted, so far as I know. (Of course, homosexuals don’t believe they have a disease; but then, as Greg Cochran has pointed out somewhere, neither do schizophrenics.)
Ooops, I’ve set off all the political correctness alarms … Bad, bad me!
• (4) I see that Sweden has just become the 7th nation to legalize homosexual marriage. (The list includes, surprisingly, South Africa.) I wonder what Charles XII would have said? (IIRC his sexual orientation has been much debated.)
• (5) The modal attitudes to homosexuality down through the ages have been that male homosexuality is to some degree disgusting (the degree I think being milder among ordinary people than in law), while female homosexuality is comical. To judge from common talk, jokes, sitcoms, and the like, these attitudes are still very persistent. Do pro-SSM people think they will disappear? Go underground? Or what?
Your point about conservatism’s value to the left of the bell curve is, I think, a great one. One that we liberals should pay more attention to.
Attitudes to the comic/disgusting nature of homosexuality will go the way of similar attitudes to people of different races. For better or worse, tv sitcoms like Mind Your Language, On The Buses, Love Thy Neighbour, Til Death do us Part and their American equivalents are unthinkable these days. I laughed at them in 1974 but there are still (happily) plenty of things to laugh about in 2009. I don’t feel any the worse off for their absence.
BTW Bradlaugh, I came here today hoping to read your demolition of Fish’s God Talk nonsense. Where can I find it?
Fish? God? Talk? Nonsense? Um….
And while the sitcoms may be unthinkable, the thoughts sure aren’t. My son, a very ordinary non-pathological 13-year-old, was reprimanded at his school last month for telling a racial joke, which of course he had heard from a coeval.
I assume this piece is prompted by the same sex marriage debate. It is all very fine, but has left out one key point. Since homosexuals make up about 2% of the male population (lesbians about 1/3 of 2% of females), a credible mechanism has to be presented demonstrating how the actions of this 2% is going to adversely influence the actions of the other 98% in how they treat marriage. Until this is done, “Bradlaugh’s” arguments amount to little more than hand-waving.
To his credit, Ron Guhname is the only person I know who has presented such a credible argument.
That there is some injustice going on, some wrong to be righted, that was first noticed in 1997, having escaped the attention of absolutely everybody for the previous 10,000 years, seems to me implausible and frivolous..
Africans were considers slaves then later second class citizens until 1965, a scant 44 years ago compared to the previous 10,000 years.
Derb, I still don’t understand what your argument against SSM is supposed to be. So far you’re thrown a bunch of random points out there, some of which are interesting and some of which are not. But they don’t connect in any coherent way. Since you’re usually pretty lucid and clear in your argumentation, I can only assume you have not, in fact, actually developed a coherent position on this issue. The best point you’ve got so far is the suspicion of change and a deference to traditional social institutions. But that’s not an argument against gay marriage per se, only an argument that, if gay marriage IS inevitably going to happen, then we ought to do it slowly and cautiously and carefully, preferably through the democratic process and in a localized, federalized manner. That seems to be the Burkean conservative position, as opposed to a reactionary position.
p.s. re: going back to the paleolithic era, it’s obvious that we’re transforming into a radically different kind of society, but I very much doubt it’s going to be paleolithic. Specifically, I don’t think men are going to be nearly so lucky as you imagine. The overarching social trend of the modern era, since the industrial revolution, has been a massive increase in female economic, political, and culture power at the expense of men. This power shift is only accelerating and it’s naive to think that it will somehow STOP at equality, as if that were the end goal. Rather it’s clear that men are simply not evolutionary well adapted to live in modern society, where their obsession with physical force/violence/domination and aggressive antisocial compulsions are not only not strengths, but crippling weaknesses. Thus stunning declines in male performance in school and in the non-manual labor workforce, and the castration of traditional masculinity in popular culture. The legitimization of homosexuality is just one front of this macro-historical tidal wave of feminism. It’s a mistake to think of gays absent the larger context of straight men who apply makeup and do shopping and cook for the family at home. Prejudice against homosexuals is fundamentally grounded in their transgression of traditional gender roles stretching back to the Neolithic age. But as those roles disappear, so will the prejudice–as it is currently disappearing.
This is mere hysteria. Recognizing natural rights of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, the right to marry and found a family (UN Declaration of Human rights, US Declaration of Independence, US Constitution) to gays is not highly civilized but the end of civilization. Yes, certainly that’s why Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, Norway, Sweden, the UK, Denmark and company are such chaotic, horrible places to live. Canada is just one massive, anarchic orgy in a literal ice-age setting. The most homophobic countries with strict gender roles (Islamic world, part of Africa) are much better models for civilization, much like the until-now conformist and culturally static USA. Maybe Saudi Arabia will accept you as a refugee following the complete collapse of Western civilization in the years following the introduction of marriage equality laws.
@kurt9
The 2% argument doesn’t make a lot of sense politically since it doesn’t even attempt to properly represent what that 2% actually means. Gay marriage as a conservative problem has much more to do with the influence that 2% has on the political lives of the 50% or so that don’t support gay marriage (via the slippery slope of hate crimes laws, conscience issues, etc.). Clearly that influence takes up more than 2% of the political space.
I don’t understand this obsession with hate crime laws among conservatives. No one in any position of power whatsoever is proposing any restrictions on free speech or freedom of association or freedom of religion. Not to mention such restrictions would require an amendment to the Constitution. As for hate crime laws, I don’t think they’re a good thing either, but as a practical matter they don’t actually do anything significant.
So why all the irrational paranoia about how gays are going to take away your freedoms?
“However, it seems to me there ought to be political room somewhere for good old instinctual hostility to unnecessary change, even if that change increases individual freedom of action.”
Instinctual hostility toward change is and always was the weak point of conservationism. This very instinct was responsible for denying the vote to blacks and women for countless years.
Instinctual hostility toward change is so ingrained that some conservatives are driven to deny that change has ever happened. For example there was a move to deny that the revolutionary war was really a revolution. It was just a big tax protest.
Conservative reliance on instinct has been the downfall of conservatism. Liberals at least know that they are creating a big government. Conservatives create a bigger more evil government without even knowing that that is what they are doing. Following instinct rather than logic is why.
In the end you need more than an instinct to inject government into peoples lives. You need a positive argument for an overriding public need. Thats kinda the meaning of limited government.
BTW I consider myself a secular non-libertarian conservative. I am not gay but I use gay issues as an acid test for honest conservatives willing to follow the logic.
Re Mr. Derbyshire’s point 2, I’m a secular non-libertarian smart conservative (I’m sure at least about the secular and non-libertarian parts), so you’ll have one reader of your new blog. But the smart/dumb thing is one of the points I was making. One of the best and apparently most effective arguments against homosexual marriage is that it goes against the Bible. Anybody can understand that argument.
Secular arguments against homosexual marriage are convincing to cognitive elite types like you and me, but most of those arguments are too dry and academic to persuade the masses. Compare with the secular arguments in favor of gay marriage, which anybody can understand, especially when they’re constantly beamed into our skulls from TV, movies, etc. If you’re into stable and customary institutions for the masses as you say you are, then you can’t do better than traditional religion.
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At least in the classical period, it was a more a matter of social roles than sexuality per se. Passive homosexuals were seen as either innately deformed or broken by habit (this was Aristotle’s view). However, “tops” were generally seen as just regular men with a different appetite. (The problem with homosexuality was a fear of feminization.)
In this instance, I don’t see how the secular case is all that different from the (orthodox Christian) religious case: It has long been the received wisdom of Western civilization that it is best for both societies and individuals when the expression of sexual urges are confined to lifelong monogamous relationships in which children are viewed as a blessing (from God or nature, take your pick).
This arrangement (when it was still considered the de rigeur social norm for sexual activity) had the wonderful effect of harnessing male sexual desire as a spur towards working hard in the economic arena (to this day, married men have higher incomes than single men) to attract/support a spouse and the resultant children.
The gay marriage movement is only the latest development in our long, slow drift away from this view of sex which had been regnant in the West for centuries.
“Why change something that works reasonably well — as well as anything does in human affairs? How do you know what the consequences will be? That there is some injustice going on, some wrong to be righted, that was first noticed in 1997, having escaped the attention of absolutely everybody for the previous 10,000 years, seems to me implausible and frivolous.”
You continue to miss the point. Widespread hostility towards gays and lesbians hasn’t worked at all, “reasonably well” or otherwise, for centuries in most societies for those individuals that have been the targets of such hostility. Think of how many have been beaten or killed simply for having a different sexual orientation (or even being suspected of such)? And the many more who were frightened into living unhappy, closeted, often self-loathing lives as a result? I assure you, the injustice had not escaped the notice of those people, or of the many people living in less progressive societies today that still experience that brutal oppression. Your reasoning of what works fails utterly to take into account the experiences of the minority that is agitating for change; and until you rectify this there seems little reason to take your arguments seriously. (I mean really, anti-abolitionists thought that southern slavery worked reasonably well, as did men who argued against giving women voting rights.)
“The modal attitudes to homosexuality down through the ages have been that male homosexuality is to some degree disgusting (the degree I think being milder among ordinary people than in law), while female homosexuality is comical. To judge from common talk, jokes, sitcoms, and the like, these attitudes are still very persistent. Do pro-SSM people think they will disappear? Go underground? Or what?”
I can’t speak for all pro-SSM advocates, but I for one have no expectation that such attitudes will disappear. Nor is this at all the point. For the billionth time, what we are seeking through SSM is equality under the law, not the attainment of a politically correct culture. I’m happy to have everyone else still retain their free-speech rights to express any disgust they might feel towards same-sex marriages. Although I do hope that by creating a space within civil society for gays and lesbians to live openly on an equal footing with their peers and without fear of discrimination, we can eventually erode the ignorance and fear on which anti-LGBT bigotry is based, in much the same way that racial bigotry has been eroding over previous generations.
@nosis
It must be lovely to be able to so easily distinguish the rational from the irrational. First of all, hate crimes law is one of the better examples of what conservatives mean when they anticipate that new laws will have “unintended consequences.” Here’s a paragraph from the Alliance Defense Fund’s (oh no!) letter to Conyers re: HR 1913:
“In short, hate crimes laws have been used in foreign countries to prosecute and silence people of faith genuinely and peacefully opposed to homosexual behavior. Similar laws in this country that elevate “sexual orientation” and/or “gender identity” to a protected status are being used to silence and punish those who oppose homosexual behavior on legitimate moral and religious grounds. The passage of H.R. 1913 will contribute to and exacerbate this environment and will lead to censorship and fear among people of faith.”
http://www.telladf.org/UserDocs/HR1913Letter.pdf
If they’re not completely wrong about the first two sentences, why is it irrational to follow it up with the third sentence? As the letter further points out, hate crime laws do do something: they allow the government to become involved in determining and judging what people “think, feel, or believe.”
There is sadly little new in this latest post, but the last point poses a question about visceral attitudes towards homosexuality that is worth discussing.
From these very pages this comment:
A different anecdotal experience to that of Mr Derbyshire, but the polling indicates both are valid and representative of their age groups.
One recalls in the original Kinsey report how “lower class” men were often disgusted by kissing, because they considered it a form of oral sex. The sodomy statutes in 10 states in 2003 still criminalised heterosexual sex that was not penile-vaginal, and this revulsion to various forms of heterosexual non-procreative sex has a cultural history as long as the Christian tradition and a juridical history stretching from the 16th century (as a capital crime).
In other words, attitudes to sex and sexuality are considerably more plastic than often portrayed.
Perhaps, Mr Derbyshire, it is time you made the intellectual effort to look beyond your self-described “homophobia” and applied some critical scrutiny to the same tired arguments you have been rehearsing over the past few years. They don’t seem to be very convincing, except to those who share your personal prejudices.
One can make a logical and secular case to justify all sorts of personal prejudices, from racism to eugenics to economic systems like communism. Simply because there is a sound logical argument for something, does that make it right or ethical?
These arguments may be an interesting intellectual exercise, or an attempt to force out the opinions of secular conservatives, but a lot of it starts to sound like the early 20th century arguments for racially pure societies, forced sterilization of undesirables, and institutionalization/medication of those that don’t strictly conform to some arbitrary set of social norms.
The tiny subset of strictly non-religious people who wish to prevent expansion of gay rights seem to forget that atheists presently enjoy many rights and privileges which simply did not exist for much of human history. Indeed, atheism is still a crime in parts of the world, punishable by death in some, and being an atheist prohibits you from holding public office in several parts of the US (there have been few challenges to these laws, but typically it’s part of the state constitution). Has our tolerance, and the governmental recognition of atheists over the past 50 years destroyed society, mangled tradition, and stirred up this slobbering mental underclass that we’re supposed to be so concerned about?
@ Tony
The Alliance Defense Fund’s statements are not factual. There are three sets of laws to be considered here:
1 – Hate crimes laws (AKA ethnic intimidation laws): Hate crimes are laws which lengthen sentences for violent crimes when those crimes are a form of low-level terrorism. A hate crime is a violent assault or murder in which the victim is chosen at random in order to send a threatening message to all the members of the community (based on ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, religion) to which the victim belongs. I.e. a random Jew being stabbed by neo-Nazis, or a random gay being stabbed while walking in a gay neighborhood. These laws exist and will continue to exist independently of rights for gay couples.
2 – Hate speech laws. These forbid expressions of hate or prejudice towards groups. These do not exist in the US, because the US has a first amendment that guarantees freedom of expression. But they exist in most of Europe and in other countries. They exist and cover gay with or without the recognition of civil unions or same-sex marriage. In some countries, it is illegal to make homophobic statements even though gays have no civil unions or marriage or any recognition as couples at all. Not affected by the SSM debate.
3 – The debate about gay couples rights – civil unions, marriage equality, etc.
The ADF is trying to blur the distinction for political ends but these are three separate and unrelated sets of legal concepts. Any of them can exist in the absence of the others. Number 2 should be categorically impossible in the US.
“(5) The modal attitudes to homosexuality down through the ages have been that male homosexuality is to some degree disgusting (the degree I think being milder among ordinary people than in law), while female homosexuality is comical.”
Have you considered that it may not have been homosexuality people had a problem with, but rather anal sex? I’m sure a decent guy like yourself doesn’t watch much porn, but the fact is that anal sex is pretty much the norm in porn these days, indicating that popular attitudes toward it are relaxing, at least among those segments of society likely to be sexual libertines in the first place. Even prime time sitcoms slip in an occasional reference to anal sex these days.
Anal sex is not just for gay men anymore. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that people stopped thinking male homosexuality was disgusting right around the time they stopped thinking heterosexual anal intercourse was disgusting.
The so-called “hate speech” laws in Canada and Western Europe are indeed anti-freedom and discriminatory. Hate is not (that is, should not be) a crime. Fortunately, we in the U.S. have ironclad First Amendment protection, so it’s not something to worry about here.
As Danilo points out, “hate crime” laws will only effect people who commit violence crimes. Still unfortunate, but as long as you’re not going around beating up gays, the law will have no effect on you whatsoever.
I do think there is a legitimate worry about anti-discrimination laws that are applied overly broad (i.e. the Employment Non-Discrimination Act). For example, it would be illegal for a company to refuse to hire a gay person just because they’re gay, or fire them for that reason, or refuse gay clients. That is a real restriction on freedom and one I do not support. However, it’s hardly the creeping road to totalitarianism. We already have such legal statutes with respect to blacks and women. Extending those protections to gays seems pretty mild, all things considered.
“However, it seems to me there ought to be political room somewhere for good old instinctual hostility to unnecessary change,”
That’s ridiculous. We can’t control the whole universe – we can’t even control much of it. And of the tiny fraction of the things we can control, most of them wouldn’t be worth the effort required to keep them from changing.
It’s a constant and an inevitability. Our duty is to examine what the world presents us with, determine what ought to be preserved and maintained, and letting the rest go.
Really nosis, you are in favor of workplace and pay discrimination? ENDA has to be the least controversial piece of gay rights legislation ever proposed, supported by 80%-90% of Americans
Danilo: Got any support for that claim about “80%-90%” of Americans supporting ENDA? To put it mildly, I find that number to be highly dubious.
I’d like to point out that, despite your little wordplay there, a lack of support for the invitation to mind-reading witch hunts (aka ENDA) does not mean that one is “in favor of workplace and pay discrimination.”
@Mike I
Actually Danilo’s claim is correct. 89% of Americans believe that “Homosexuals should have equal rights in terms of job opportunities” as of May 2007.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/27694/Tolerance-Gay-Rights-HighWater-Mark.aspx
Gay marriage as a conservative problem has much more to do with the influence that 2% has on the political lives of the 50% or so…
You are making the politics of the issue an end in its own right. This is nonsense. The issue is this: will allowing the 2% who are gay to get married in any way CAUSE a change in the way that the other 98% treat marriage, especially the half of the 98% who are on the left side of the IQ bell curve? This is really Derbyshire’s argument and it is a legitimate one. However, he fails to support his argument with a detailed mechanism of how this could occur.
Derb,
Re female homosexuality, according to the hetero men who have been running things, if it occurs between two hot chicks (as opposed to a Rosie O’Donnell type), it’s not comical at all but a major turn on.
I think most hetero men likewise are probably disgusted by the idea of being used as a woman in a homosexual relationship. BUT (something few will admit, but many of you know to be true) if it’s a younger, smoother, prettier man, many normal heterosexual men can actually enjoy using those men as women while still retaining their overall heterosexual makeup.
More straight guys would engage in homosexual behavior in this society if they realized they could do so and truthfully retain their heterosexual identity. One major disincentive that straight guys have against opportunistic homosexuality is they don’t want the stigma of a “gay or bi” identity. In much of the rest of the world that doesn’t quite understand homosexuality as an “identity” the straight guys (at least the ones with no religious hangups against sodomy) have no problem using younger, smaller or prettier guys as women without it affecting their identity as “real heterosexual men.”
The man who plays the feminine role, he is understood to be “different.” This dynamic benefits both parties — the heterosexual men having opportunistic sex and the homosexual man having sex with said heterosexual man. The hetero man gets his temporary, stop gap release in which he is looking for. And the homosexual man — well, many are especially attracted to masculine, manly bona fide real men who are especially willing to play the “active” role. One issues that sometimes occurs between gay male relationships is both parties want to play the passive role. (Though most gay men feel comfortable being “versitle” even if they prefer the passive role.) That’s not a problem with sex between gay and straight men, where the roles are more clearly defined.
So let’s hear it for more sex between straight and gay men.
jesus fucking christ, people think the death penalty is more “morally acceptable” than premartial sex. That is some warped shit.
Danilo, obviously I don’t think we should be discriminated against. But there’s a difference between support for equality in principle and having the government come in and heavy-handedly mandate how people should and should not associate among themselves in private. I don’t think that’s the role of government. Even if that cost me a job, which i doubt it would.
Carlo: There is a difference between believing, as a broad, general, principle, that homosexuals should have equal job opportunities and believing that the power of the state ought to be brought to bear against individuals who don’t share that belief.
Andrew Sullivan, for instance, while supporting “equal employment opportunities” does not support ENDA. I agree with Mr. Sullivan on that general principle, although I don’t think that those who reject that principle are somehow bigots who are totally beyond the pale of right opinion.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly morally odious involved in a religious school refusing to hire out-and-proud homosexuals, nor do I feel that, other factors being equal, parents looking to hire a nanny who choose a 25 year old female heterosexual over a 40 year old male homosexual ought to thereby expose themselves to legal action.
@kurt9 This is really Derbyshire’s argument and it is a legitimate one. However, he fails to support his argument with a detailed mechanism of how this could occur.
It’s actually worse than that. We are not even told what terrible changes are likely to occur in the marital behaviour of this “underclass”, never mind how (the mechanism), and on that basis it is no argument at all, let alone a “legitimate” one.
At least in the classical period, it was a more a matter of social roles than sexuality per se. Passive homosexuals were seen as either innately deformed or broken by habit (this was Aristotle’s view). However, “tops” were generally seen as just regular men with a different appetite. (The problem with homosexuality was a fear of feminization.)
I think there is a kernel of truth here; see what I wrote in my above post. But I think you are mistaken that “tops” were viewed as having a different appetite. “Tops” in a homosexual relationship were I think (or at least in many cultures are considered) normal HETEROsexual men who used other men as women for stop gap relief, but eventually went on to marry women and sire families. Opportunistic homosexuality, where the actor was expected to settle down with a woman and sire families was not considered “different,” but “normal.”
However, Plato and a few other wise men also understood the real homosexual orientation as longing for that “other half” of your soul who happened to be of the same sex. See the metaphor for EROS in The Symposium.
@ John Rowe
What you are describing is the traditional way Mediterranean cultures have treated homosexuality. Mediterranean languages have a separate word for the gays in the feminine role and those in the “active” role; sometimes there is no word for the one in the “man” role. Even today, particularly in North Africa but also southern Europe, it is very common to meet macho guys who have a regular sexual relationship with a younger, cuter partner and claim to be “completely straight in bed”. They also tend to behave in a “sexist” way with their partners in terms of power dynamics, jealousy, control, according to the national customs. There are also more egalitarian “gay” couples. There are both kinds of couples everywhere I think. It is a mistake however to view the “man” as not gay – he is still attracted only to males and experiences extensive discrimination for not having a wife or girlfriend.
I haven’t read the text of ENDA, my understanding was that it is a “vanilla” bill that would make it illegal to consider sexual orientation in pay rates, promotions, hiring and firing, in the same way we do for religion and race now. Of course I do not support anything that goes further than what is currently done for other groups (religious and private schools and organizations have every right to do religious or other discrimination – their raison d’être is to provide a specific religious environment).
We are not even told what terrible changes are likely to occur in the marital behaviour of this “underclass”, never mind how (the mechanism), and on that basis it is no argument at all, let alone a “legitimate” one.
No, it IS a legitimate argument IF he can provide a convincing mechanism of how this would occur.
@kurt9 : But my question is WHAT is supposed to occur?? No point to talking about the mechanism is we are not even told what effect is to be explained.
Hmm. I see your point, and I’m willing to concede that perhaps support for ENDA specifically is not as strong as suggested earlier. Most claims of ENDA’s popularity referred to that May 2007 poll, perhaps that was what Danilo referred to as well.
Your argument raises an interesting contradiction, however. If one believes that LGBT people should have equal job opportunities, how does one expect this to come about in the absence of government interference? Favoring the former but not the latter seems little more than a nebulous wish for some future era where nobody discriminates out of the goodness of their hearts. In reality, if a person opposes bringing to bear state power against employers who would discriminate against gays and lesbians, then he effectively ensures that gays and lesbians will in fact experience that discrimination, simply because bigoted employers do exist.
I’d be interested in reading Andrew Sullivan’s take on this. I’ve read his blog on many occasions, but I don’t recall him stating the position that you describe.
Employment discrimination is the most banal ordinary step. You can’t even apply to the EU if you don’t have it. Even the ex-Soviet countries ban employment discrimination against gays. But the US manages to humiliate itself in creative ways these days.
Carlo: There’s no contradiction. I agree that in most cases (i.e. generally) it would be unjust to discriminate against a homosexual. But I do feel that there are cases where such discrimination could be justified, or at least morally neutral, and I don’t trust Congress, much less a bunch of trial lawyers, to be able to make the necessary distinctions. And I feel that the injustice done to employers who are forced to hire a homosexual in circumstances that would warrant discrimination (or those who hire another candidate for reasons truly unrelated to homosexuality, but are nonetheless forced to deal with frivolous lawsuits) is outweighed by the potential benefits of ENDA.
You may be right re: Mr. Sullivan; it looks like he has changed his mind on ENDA (in keeping with his ever growing obsession of recent years with gay issues all and sundry): “I haven’t always supported [ENDA], and my libertarian heart is not thrilled by it.”
“Sell marriage, monotheism, capitalism, patriarchy, sumptuary codes, and law. Buy pleasure-bonding, unstructured spirituality, ‘primitive communism’ (K. Marx), sexual egalitarianism, transient fads, and ’empathy’ (B. Obama).”
God help us.
“The pathogenic hypothesis of homosexuality?” Of course us queers are queer. But so are you and most folks. We’re just queer in different ways.
I’m neither pro- nor anti-SSM. I pick my fights carefully and it’s not my fight but it does seem to me that you are either being polemical for the sake of being polemical or you are thinking about sodomy too much and are grossed out by the “feces factor” which is only to be expected.
I know.. heteros are clueless about the sex part. They imagine gay sex is always anal sex .. with the men standing up with one of them bent over! lol they have no clue do they.. plus if you have proper hygiene is no factor any more than there is a blood factor for women or a smegma factor for men. You can’t argue with aesthetics but they don’t even have a realistic idea of the sexual aspect. Who knows what their rationale is for lesbians.. they alaways seem to forget about them even though the majority of married same-sex couples are actually women
“Derb”, I see you’re narrowing in on the bottom line basis for your own opposition to SSM: you are disgusted by homosexuality. Why not simply “come out” & say that in the first place? The tortured anti-SSM arguments you originally gave were pretty easily shot down (although not as easily as Heather’s I’m-just-doing-it-for-the-blacks nonsense) but your real feelings on the matter can’t be refuted or debated, they just are what they are.
Not that I doubt your sincerity with regard to tradition but you have to admit you can’t hang your hat on that one alone. After all, if tradition trumped all you wouldn’t be carrying on with all this secular jazz in the first place.
Well, you are correct in stating that homosexuals don’t believe they have a disease – and obviously neither do all of the peers of Cochran/Ewald who wouldn’t review the “pathogenic theory” paper you link in your post. So the theory has not be refuted – neither has it been proven. And I find it interesting the paper seems to focus solely on male homosexuality……
Sorry – that should read “has not been refuted”
In fact several writers on this site remind me more of the Italian futurists or fascist modernism from the 1920s rather than Anglo-Saxon conservatism. That’s not hyperbole. An enthusiasm for new technology, authoritarianism (which Derb calls “not libertarianism”), secularism, a misapplied social Darwinism, all the elements are there, as well as the anti-gay obsession, the racialism, the anti-communism. The parallels go very deep. Interestingly fascists and right-wing modernists had the utmost contempt for the traditional, conservative free-market right and the “bourgeois” liberal state. This temperament is actually rather revolutionary and historically opposed to the conservative tradition
A more convincing biological mechanism than the pathogenic has been proposed for homosexuality: it’s genetic, but the gene is for sexual attraction for men. Women with this gene end up with more children, which overbalances the effect of men who have none, and thus the gene persists. Also note that the expression of this gene may be variable. Most “homosexual” men aren’t incapable of being aroused by women, they’re just more aroused by men, or have found it much easier to get sex from men. Therefore, in some circumstances, a man having the gene won’t actually be a reproductive dead-end, though it is likely he’ll have fewer children than men who don’t.
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Derb, first off, had to chuckle about your point about the rarity of non-libertarian non-supernaturalist conservative right-bell-curvers. I wonder which is rarer, your type or my own libertarian supernaturalist conservative right-bell-curver. Still, the point about the socital values benefiting Mencken’s “four-fifths” is well-taken.
Mostly, though, I was going to comment on the last bit. My impression is that most people in general find homosexuality, male or female, to be funny. The act of anal sex seems to be the focus of general disgust, being in a real biological sense unnatural and, unless I’m very much mistaken, unhealthy. Hysterical screams of the activists aside, most gays of my aquantance seem to be at ease with the laugher and the jokes, recognizing it as folks making allowance for the other as best they can.
Of course, on the larger issue of SSM, a libertarian supernaturalist like me has no dog in that fight at all. Marriages are recognized by God or otherwise worthless. Why again is the dang guberment involved?
@Commodore “Why again is the dang guberment involved?”
Because we are talking about the legal definition of marriage. Whether or not you believe some Iron Age sky pixie sanctifies these arrangements is irrelevant.
@JohnC
Ah, perhaps I was a bit unclear. What I mean is, obviously, we are not about to disolve the legal benefit system for marriages. I’d rather just call any such agreement a civil union (with benefits/legal protections same be it man/woman, man/man, woman/woman, TG/furry). Let marriage revert to a social contract, less a legal one.
I’ve just been re-pointed to Megan McArdle’s essay about same sex marriage from 2005. It’s a much better exposition of the conservative non-religious case against same-sex marriage than any I’ve seen by Ms. MacDonald or Ms. Gallagher, and I think the marginal behaviour problem that McArdle identifies is more likely to lead to problems than the marginal behavior problem that Derb has identified in the past.