The San Francisco Gate newspaper quotes the work of a large study that “three out of 4 [gay] people described non-monogamy as a positive thing…“, and the NEW YORK TIMES mentions this:
…New research at San Francisco State University reveals just how common open relationships are among gay men and lesbians in the Bay Area. The Gay Couples Study has followed 556 male couples for three years — about 50 percent of those surveyed have sex outside their relationships, with the knowledge and approval of their partners.
That consent is key. “With straight people, it’s called affairs or cheating,” said Colleen Hoff, the study’s principal investigator, “but with gay people it does not have such negative connotations.”…
The nation’s increasingly visible and influential gay community embraces the notion of sexual orientation as an innate, immutable characteristic, like left-handedness or eye color. But a major federal sex survey suggests a far more fluid, varied life experience for those who acknowledge same-sex attraction. (from Medved article)
The results of this scientific research shouldn’t undermine the hard-won respect recently achieved by gay Americans, but they do suggest that choice and change play larger roles in sexual identity than commonly assumed. The prestigious study in question (released in March by the National Center for Health Statistics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) discovered a much smaller number of “gays, lesbians and homosexuals” than generally reported by the news media. While pop-culture frequently cites the figure of one in 10 (based on 60-year-old, widely discredited conclusions from pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey) the new study finds only 1.4% of the population identifying with same-sex orientation.
Moreover, even among those who describe themselves as homosexual or bisexual (a grand total of 3.7% of the 18-44 age group), overwhelming majorities (81%) say they’ve experienced sex with partners of the opposite gender. Among those who call themselves heterosexual, on the other hand, only a tiny minority (6%) ever engaged in physical intimacy of any kind with a member of the same sex These figure indicate that 94% of those living heterosexual lives felt no physical attraction to members of the same sex, but the great bulk of self-identified homosexuals and bisexuals feel enough intimate interest in the opposite gender to engage in erotic contact at some stage in their development.
A one-way street
Gay pride advocates applaud the courage of those who “come out,” discovering their true nature as homosexual after many years of heterosexual experience. But enlightened opinion denies a similar possibility of change in the other direction, deriding anyone who claims straight orientation after even the briefest interlude of homosexual behavior and insisting they are phony and self-deluding. By this logic, heterosexual orientation among those with past gay relationships is always the product of repression and denial, but homosexual commitment after a straight background is invariably natural and healthy. In fact, numbers show huge majorities of those who “ever had same sex sexual contact” do not identify long-term as gay. Among women 18-44, for instance, 12.5% report some form of same sex contact at some point in their lives, but among the older segment of that group (35-44), only 0.7% identify as homosexual and 1.1% as bisexual.
In other words, for the minority who may have experimented with gay relationships at some juncture in their lives, well over 80% explicitly renounced homosexual (or even bisexual) self-identification by age of 35. For the clear majority of males (as well as women) who report gay encounters, homosexual activity appears to represent a passing phase, or even a fleeting episode, rather than an unshakable, genetically pre-determined orientation.
The once popular phrase “sexual preference” has been indignantly replaced with the term “sexual orientation” because political correctness now insists there is no factor of willfulness or volition in the development of erotic identity. This may well be the case for the 94% of males and 87% of females (ages 18-44) who have never experienced same-sex contact of any kind and may never have questioned their unwavering straight outlook — an outlook deemed “normal” in an earlier age….
Contemporary research in a less homophobic environment has counterintuitively resulted in lower estimates rather than higher ones. The Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, a gay and lesbian think tank, released a study in April 2011 estimating based on its research that just 1.7 percent of Americans between 18 and 44 identify as gay or lesbian, while another 1.8 percent — predominantly women — identify as bisexual. Far from underestimating the ranks of gay people because of homophobia, these figures included a substantial number of people who remained deeply closeted, such as a quarter of the bisexuals. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of women between 22 and 44 that questioned more than 13,500 respondents between 2006 and 2008 found very similar numbers: Only 1 percent of the women identified themselves as gay, while 4 percent identified as bisexual.
[….]
[….]
The study shows that an estimated .3% of Americans are transgender. Additionally, the Williams study shows 3.5% of American adults are gay, lesbian, or bisexual, including 1.8% of American adults who are bisexual.
I will add #4from my CUMALATIVE CASEbelow, with an addition from Camille Paglia talking about gender politics at the bottom:
➍MUTABLE CHARACTERISTICS — Homosexuality is often times due to trauma early in the person’s life. So, for instance, my mom knew quite a few lesbians throughout her life as a hippie/druggy, who now loves Jesus but through life choices lives in a mobile home park… where a few more lesbians are friends with my mom and her husband. She told me that they had all been abused by some older man (often a family member) when they were young. Also, the men I have known well-enough to intimate to me their early lives also have corroborated such encounters (one was a family member, the other not). Which brings me to a quote by a lesbian author I love:
“Here come the elephant again: Almost without exception, the gay men I know (and that’s too many to count) have a story of some kind of sexual trauma or abuse in their childhood — molestation by a parent or an authority figure, or seduction as an adolescent at the hands of an adult. The gay community must face the truth and see sexual molestation of an adolescent for the abuse it is, instead of the ‘coming-of-age’ experience many [gays] regard it as being. Until then, the Gay Elite will continue to promote a culture of alcohol and drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, and suicide by AIDS” (Tammy Bruce, The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values [Roseville: Prima, 2003], 99).
You see, much like this man who had a sex operation, lived as a woman for 8-years, and then was forced to deal with his early life after taking some courses to get a degree in counseling via U.C. Irvine, his gender problems came because of trauma at a young age (Walt Heyer). To put a stamp of approval via society on a “choice” that is caused by anothers “choice” in making these relationships equal, is doing more harm to the individual that good (as Walt Heyer also points out in his book, mentioned in the link). Many have changed their sexual orientation from gay to hetero, as shown above. But if this is the case, then it is very UNLIKE ethnic origins (an ex-gay tells his story): YOUTUBE; a man raised by lesbians and who’s own early sexuality was in flux tells his story: YOUTUBE).
`...Ex-gays outnumber actual gays` ~ Dr. Neil Whitehead
Alan Shlemon talks about the mutability of homosexuality (via STR):
…One study followed approximately 10,800 adolescents between the ages of 16 and 22 years old. Of the 16 year-old males who had exclusively SSA, 61% had opposite-sex attraction at age 17. For same-sex attracted females, 81% changed to opposite attraction in just one year.
The study also compared sexual attraction at ages 17 and 22, with similar results. For example, 75% of adolescent males with SSA at age 17 had opposite-sex attraction at age 22.
Dr. Neil Whitehead, a research scientist who worked for the New Zealand government for 24 years and the United Nations for another four years, analyzed this study. He notes that although a small percentage of heterosexual adolescents developed homosexuality, the vast majority transitioned in the opposite direction. Based on the data, 16 year-olds with SSA are “25 times more likely to change towards heterosexuality at the age of 17 than those with a heterosexual orientation are likely to change towards bi-sexuality or homosexuality.” That means that heterosexuality is 25 times more stable than homosexuality. It also seems to suggest that heterosexuality is more of a “default” orientation…
THE LOVING thing to do is to allow society to not make the private actions of individual illegal, but not to normalize these actions when there is another root cause, or a combination of root causes, other than genetics.
A liberal society might, then, find it prudent to ignore homosexuality. It might well deem it unwise to peer into private bedrooms. However, this is not the issue before us. Today the demand is that homosexuality be endorsed and promoted with the full power of the law. This would require us to abandon the standard of nature, the one standard that can teach us the difference between freedom and slavery, between right and wrong. (SOURCE)
During a Q&A with Ravi Zacharias and RZIM at Oxford, a homosexual man asks a question but really ends up encouraging those in the faith of the miraculous work of God in peoples changed lives.
Something said during this exchange that really clicks with my understanding of this very important issue. Love. Most often — as I note often in my debates and posts on this topic (see below) — there is abuse or some family issue that drives these young men and women into this lifestyle. While I am more of a political-animal/armchair-philosopher and I deal with this issue in a “cut-n-dry” fashion, love is the motivating factor of change….
….Usually the Christian [at the time of conversion] has this immense connection with their Creator and what He has done for him/her and the depths of their depravity that has been covered. Dorothy Sayers says it best:
“None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can’t teach people that — they have to learn by experience.”
There is love and change available to those who seek it (GREGALOGUE). the problem has become a society that perpetuates the PC status quo, i.e, egalitarianism. To keep the quoting of Mrs. Sayers going, she comments well on tolerance:
“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.”
This is such a great expansion to my video library and writings on this topic. I highly suggest getting the entire Q&A by Ravi.
Debra Soh (sex researcher) joins Dave to discuss her work as a sex researcher, the backlash to her article “Why Transgender Kids Should Wait to Transition,” Harvard’s admissions discriminating against asians, the #MeToo movement, and more.
The title could have been called, “Heroes vs. Zeroes” — in other words, if Milo was a Leftist… he very well may be the apple of the Left’s eye.
Milo Yiannopoulos has said some things in the past that has caused consternation (and rightly so). This got his dissented to C-PAC. But honestly, what should have got him NOT invited in the first place is his repeated admission he is not a conservative. (The latest time was his appearance on the Bill Maher Show.) In case you missed it, C-PAC stands for CONSERVATIVE Political Action Conference.
Here is the offending comment from an old documentary:
“This arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent, which totally destroys the understanding that many of us have of the complexities and subtleties and complicated nature of many relationships. People are messy and complex, and in the homosexual world particularly some of those relationships between younger boys and older men, the sort of coming of age relationships, the relationships in which those older men help those young boys discover who they are, and give them security and safety and provide them with love and, sort of, a rock.”
[….]
“In the gay world, some of the most important, enriching, and incredibly life affirming, shaping relationships between younger boys and older men, they can be hugely positive experiences for those young boys.”
Later Milo tried to correct what he says was his unclear language:
I did say that there are relationships between younger men and older men that can help a young gay man escape from a lack of support or understanding at home. That’s perfectly true and every gay man knows it. But I was not talking about anything illegal and I was not referring to pre-pubescent boys. (Young Conservatives)
In the gay community this is an issue. Years ago one of my favorite gay authors I follow and read, Tammy Bruce, noted:
… and now all manner of sexual perversion enjoys the protection and support of once what was a legitimate civil-rights effort for decent people. The real slippery slope has been the one leading into the Left’s moral vacuum. It is a singular attitude that prohibits any judgment about obvious moral decay because of the paranoid belief that judgment of any sort would destroy the gay lifestyle, whatever that is…. I believe this grab for children by the sexually confused adults of the Gay Elite represents the most serious problem facing our culture today…
[….]
Here come the elephant again: Almost without exception, the gay men I know (and that’s too many to count) have a story of some kind of sexual trauma or abuse in their childhood — molestation by a parent or an authority figure, or seduction as an adolescent at the hands of an adult. The gay community must face the truth and see sexual molestation of an adolescent for the abuse it is,* instead of the “coming-of-age” experience many [gays] regard it as being. Until then, the Gay Elite will continue to promote a culture of alcohol and drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, and suicide by AIDS.
Tammy Bruce, The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values (Roseville: Prima, 2003), 90, 99.
* By the age of 18 or 19 years, three quarters of American youth, regardless of their sexual orientation, have had sexual relations with another person. Gay males are more likely than heterosexual males to become sexually active at a younger age (12.7 vs. 15.7 years) and to have had multiple sexual partners. The ages at the time of the first sexual experience with another person are closer for lesbians and heterosexual females (15.4 vs. 16.2 years).
Ms. Paglia reminds us that within homosexual circles there still exist some critics with clear minds, capable of rational thought, and the ability to express such critical thought clearly, coherently, and entertainingly. (iDolphin)
In a gay private group on Facebook for gays, their friends and family to meet and discuss various topics, I asked a question relating to if the men had homosexual encounters as a young, prepubescent boy with an older family member or some other acquaintance. Almost all the me did. One gay man I worked with was very public about it. Another close gay friend was private bout the issue but confirmed that he had an older family member molest him, repeatedly.
George proceeded to recall that he was 13 at the time, and he was with “an experienced” counselor who was in his late-teens. When George recalled his counselor’s “blond forearm,” Artie insisted he was still comfortable sitting next to him. George went on to say his counselor came to his cabin while he was alone, and the two began kissing before exchanging “hand jobs.” (Gay Patriot)
Mind you, while this equation may be the norm [abuse of some sort], there are acceptations that I think Camille Paglia’s commentary fits well with:
Every single gay person I know has some sort of drama going on, back in childhood. Something was happening that we’re not allowed to ask about anymore… I can see patterns that are similar in my background to that of other women I know who are lesbians, but the biggest patterns are in gay men. Every single gay man I know had a particular pattern where for whatever reason, he was closer to his mother than to his father, and there was some sort of distance between the mother and the father, so that she looked to her son as her real equal or friend, as the real companion of her soul. Sometimes these women were discreet and dignified. Other times, they were very theatrical and in a sense they drafted their son into their own drama. But now, you are not allowed to ask any questions about the childhood of gay people anymore. It’s called “homophobic.” The entire psychology establishment has shut itself down, politically…
Even the gay Leftist hero, Harvey Milk was a victim of this and continued his victimization of other boys. GAY PATRIOT notes this in his quick response to the Milo thingy, saying that Milk [a hero] actually did what Milo merely mentioned:
One of Milk’s victims was a 16-year-old runaway from Maryland named Jack Galen McKinley. As previously mentioned, Milk had a soft spot in his, um, heart for teenage runaways. Motivated by an apparent quid pro quo of prurience, Milk plucked McKinley from the street.
Which makes me believe that all the left-wingers who are suddenly up-in-arms because Milo may have said something outrageous about his days as a catamite may be somewhat insincere in their outrage.
Before getting to more about Harvey Milk, I wanted to note that it is the progressive Left that is all about promoting pedophilia. From Obama’s school czar, Kevin Jennings, to the Left’s marches on Washington — of which, here are a couple examples I note in my post on PEDOPHILIA:
In 1977, Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote “Sex Bias in the U.S. Code” for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In it, Ginsberg advocated lowering the age of consent from 16 to 12. She writes:
“Eliminate the phrase “carnal knowledge of any female, not his wife, who has not attained the age of 16 years” and substitute a federal, sex-neutral definition of the offense. … A person is guilty of an offense if he engages in a sexual act with another person. … [and] the other person is, in fact, less than 12 years old.” (Savage; Schlafly; More)
She was an attorney for the ACLU at the time and later appointed to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton. She remains on the Supreme Court today.
1993 “Homosexual” Platform
The implementation of homosexual, bi-sexual, and transgendered curriculum at all levels of education.
The lowering of the age of consent for homosexual and heterosexual sex.
The legalization of homosexual marriage. Custody, adoption, and foster care rights for homosexuals, lesbians, and transgendered people.
The redefinition of marriage to include the full diversity of all family structures.
The access to all programs of the Boys Scouts of America.
Affirmative action for homosexuals.
The inclusion of sex-change operations under a universal health care plan.
1972 “Homosexual” Platform
Repeal of all state laws prohibiting private sexual acts involving consenting persons, equalization for homosexuals and heterosexuals for the enforcement of all laws.
Repeal all state laws prohibiting solicitation for private voluntary sexual liaisons; and laws prohibiting prostitution, both male and female.
Enactment of legislation prohibiting insurance companies and any other state-regulated enterprises from discriminating because of sexual orientation, in insurance and in bonding or any other prerequisite to employment or control of one’s personal demesne.
Enactment of legislation so that child custody, adoption, visitation rights, foster parenting, and the like shall not be denied because of sexual orientation or marital status.
Repeal of all state laws prohibiting transvestism and cross-dressing.
Repeal of all laws governing the age of sexual consent.
Repeal of all legislative provisions that restrict the sex or number of persons entering into a marriage unit; and the extension of legal benefits to all persons who cohabit regardless of sex or numbers.
You see, this is why Salon Magazine promoted this sickness ~ U-N-T-I-L THAT IS ~ Milo was caught speaking from the truth of a sizable portion of the gay community. Leftists are now stuck between a rock and a hard place. SALON hates Trump soo much that is scrubbed it’s site from previous articles supporting pedophilia in order to clear a path to attack Milo [a perceived conservative]. TWITCHY says it all in their headline:
That’s why almost no one in the gay community bats an eyelash when they hear about Harvey Milk’s sexual history (yes, I’m talking about the slain political leader who has taken on iconic status in our culture). To be specific, according to acclaimed gay journalist Randy Shilts, at age eleven, Milk began attending performances of the New York Metropolitan Opera, where he met with “wandering hands” and soon was engaged in “brief trysts [with grown men] after the performances.” While still in junior high, he “dove headfirst into the newly discovered subculture,” and by fourteen, Milk was “leading an active homosexual life.” As he grew older, the pattern reversed itself to the point that, at age thirty-three, Milk hooked up with a sixteen-year-old named Jack McKinley, one of a number of younger men with whom he was intimate.
Has this tarnished his legacy? Not at all. Why? Because it is not that unusual.
As gay journalist and radio host Michelangelo Signorile explained:
[W]e’ve been so focused in recent years on how we’re all the same [meaning as heterosexuals]—we want many of the same things in life, including a job, a home, a relationship—that we’ve obscured some real differences in how we’ve constructed our community and our relationships. Historically, gay men have engaged in inter-generational sexual encounters, brief romances and long-term relationships—among consenting adults—probably much more than straight people have.
And those “consenting adults” were often men in their teens. (The situation that Signorile was defending involved Hollywood screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, age thirty-nine, and British diving champion Tom Daley, age nineteen. Other gay leaders were critical of the relationship.) That’s why it was not surprising to hear that Terry Bean, one of the founders of the influential HRC—and a major player in Democratic politics and gay activism—was arrested on November 19, 2014, “on charges of sex abuse in a case involving a 15-year-old boy. [Bean was 66 at the time.]… The arrest comes after a five-month investigation that began with allegations Bean secretly made video recordings of men having sex in his bedroom.”
As argued by conservative journalist and law professor Matt Barber, “The cases of Bean and [Larry] follow a long-established pattern as old as the ancient Greek bathhouse. It’s not just homosexual priestly predators on the prowl in the Catholic Church. From pedophile “LGBT” hero Harvey Milk, to high-profile “gay activists” like Duke University’s Frank Lombard and USC’s Walter Lee Williams, the homosexual lust for young flesh seems insatiable”
In support of this statement, which some would find extreme and unfair, Barber cited Harry Hay, the iconic pioneer of the gay rights movement, who (in)famously said,
“It seems to me that in the gay community the people who should be running interference for NAMBLA [the North American Man/Boy Love Association] are the parents and friends of gays. Because if the parents and friends of gays are truly friends of gays, they would know from their gay kids that the relationship with an older man is precisely what 13-, 14-, and 15-year-old kids need more than anything else in the world.”
Michael L. Brown, Outlasting the Gay Revolution: Where Homosexual Activism Is Really Going and How to Turn the Tide (Washington, DC: WND Books, 2015), 151-152.
GAY PATRIOT hit the nail on the head years back when he VtheK noted that since “marriage is no longer about creating a stable environment for children, and has become (and this mainly the fault of heterosexual liberals) about personal fulfillment, validation, and access to social benefits, there literally is no constraint on how much more broadly it can be redefined.”
If “love-is-love,” then the Professional Left has a Mack Truck with a payload of reality headed their way.
POST-SCRIPT
One last note. The Left has for YEARS denied what everyone knows, that in the gay (esp. male) community, there is an abuse of younger boys… because the male sexual nature by default wants variety, and wants it often. I will explain a bit more with a portion of a letter I wrote to a cyber-friend whom had announced that he was gay (it actually turned out his Facebook was hacked):
We need all the gay conservatarians we can get! Just know, however, I am here for anything you need.
Adult men fight their nature. Typically we fight against lust (men want variety), and anger issues. I have had to fight my anger issues, which are the predominate issue for me, and I saw the same in my father.
With our sexuality, women help temper this in most men. But this is an additional layer a gay man must acknowledge and battle against. If you ever need encouraging in this area or someone to speak to, I can surely stand in if you need it. I realize we are “cyber-friends” and you may have a strong group of allies to help keep you accountable… but if you ever need to bounce something off my chest, feel free to do so. Mind you that I realize that while I am only-now knowing this, you have lived with it much longer obviously.
There are some gay men who have honed their values well that the unrestrained nature found in the Leftist values of men (gay or straight) bewilder them. VtheK is one of them, for instance, he recently noted as such here. [While I do not know V, I suspect religion has had an influence in his life.]
I will add you to my prayer list of men and women in the gay community whom I dig and want the best possible life for….
Yep, mature men need to fight their nature. But this denial of the issues discussed above by the Left has harmful consequences for children. For instance, in a few states now it is against the law for teachers or school counselors to even begin to suspect anything wrong with a young child starting to exhibit behaviors that they are now told they must accept as the child being “gay.” In other words, if a 9-year old (whatever-age) boy starts to show some effeminate activity, this may very well be the boy trying to cope with sexual abuse in the home by a family member or someone the family knows. It is the natural way a male child will act out.
But this type of reasoning, found for instance in California’s Assembly Bill 1266 (as well as Senate Bill 1172), signed into law by Jerry Brown, ties the hands of counselors to deal with an obvious sign of abuse. I gave some links above, but here are some excerpts from a few studies, controlled as well as anecdotal:
But schools are not allowed to ask questions in the most liberal states that start from the idea that a boy (or girl) shouldn’t be acting out like this. If a boy acts out violently because that is how he is internalizing the issue, a counselor can probe… if a boy starts to act effeminately because that is how this particular boy is internalizing it — hands off! In fact, the school must enable such feelings.
THIS is a great example for when Dennis Prager says “everything the Left touches it destroys.” This includes buffers to protect children from the most heinous crimes against them. AGAIN, this puts them [Leftists] between a rock and a hard place… do they acknowledge that such abuse exists and thus through therapy gay men and women can deal with the abuse of their past — and become heterosexual again? Like any therapy helps victims of violence. Or do they wholly reject this idea of childhood abuse in the gay community (while simultaneously speaking about male priests who are gay abusing boys) and cover-up any deleterious affects on all genders who are sexually abused at such a young age?
Here is a story sure to make parents… most parents… mad. But mad enough to stop voting Democrat? I doubt it. You are digging your own graves. Here is the continuation of the above video via The Blaze (this story is related to intersectional feminism):
The mother of a Tampa, Florida, seventh-grader is speaking out after finding an assignment given to her 12-year-old daughter and other students in Spanish class at Monroe Junior High.
The form asked, “How much privilege do you have? Circle the boxes that apply to you.”
The categories on the form listed “Race,” “Skin Color,” “Religion,” “Sex,” “Gender,” “Sexual Orientation” and “Disability.”
The options under gender included, “cisgendered,” “transgendered” or “genderqueer.”
Moonbattery has this story of a 4-year old being kicked out of preschool because the parents were questioning the pro-gay/transgender materials:
To construct utopia, thought criminals associated with resistance to the LGBT agenda must be dealt with severely — even if they are only 4 years old:
A Colorado preschool has booted a 4-year-old after her parent’s questioned the administration about its curriculum promoting homosexuality and transgenderism.
R.B Sinclair told the Denver Post that she wanted her daughter excused from classroom discussions on sex and gender, because she sees it as sex education.
She feels her daughter is too young for the discussions offered at the Montview Community Preschool & Kindergarten in Denver. …
Sinclair says one day her daughter came home worried that her dad might no longer like girls.
She met with the principal over concerns about the books being read in class, including ones that told the stories about same-sex couples and worms unsure about their gender.
School officials from the privately run parent cooperative explained the stories were part of the school’s anti-bias curriculum, and because the discussions are sprinkled through the day’s activities, they told her that opting out was not possible.
No doubt. Even math class probably features full-throated endorsements of the homosexual lifestyle — always assuming that schools still have math class….
The Resurgent ends their excellent article on this thus:
And for all those parents whose children are in the Colorado public schools, you have been warned. Your teachers have been trained to advance the same agenda in a classroom near you.
I suppose that is not surprising since we know have satanist coloring books available for students in Colorado, thanks to spineless school officials who don’t know the difference between the most influential book in the history of the world and a coloring book that denies the existence of God while encouraging kids to color inside the lines.
In a conversation with someone many yearn ago, I was reminded of a quote that connects to some current issues in the gay community.
Ha, Ha! You just brought to my memory a portion of a book I read from one of my top-twenty authors. Dinesh D’ Souza wrote of his early years on the campus of Dartmouth, which was the breeding ground for today’s conservatism (The Dartmouth Review). Speaking of the politically incorrect atmosphere and a professor (Hart) he had, and a contest:
“In part because of his political incorrectness, Hart was one of the few people I have met whose jokes made people laugh out loud. His sense of humor can be illustrated by a contest that National Review privately held among its editors following the publication of the controversial Bill Buckley column on the issue of AIDS. People were debating whether AIDS victims should be quarantined as syphilis victims had in the past. Buckley said no: The solution was to have a small tattoo on their rear ends to warn potential partners. Buckley’s suggestion caused a bit of a public stir, but the folks at national Review were animated by a different question: What should the tattoo say? A contest was held, and when the entries were reviewed, the winner by unanimous consent was Hart. He suggested the lines emblazoned on the gates to Dante’s Inferno: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’.”
Dinesh D’ Souza, Letters to a Young Conservative: Art of Mentoring (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2002), 20.
Mike Slater went to the San Diego Pride Parade and played “Which Bigot Said It.”
Here’s the study from the Center for Disease Control: “…Results—Based on the 2013 NHIS data, 96.6% of adults identified as straight, 1.6% identified as gay or lesbian, and 0.7% identified as bisexual…”
As I am want to do at various times and seasons, is debate hot topic issues. I do not normally do this but rather those who wish dialogue find me out. Case in point, a post elsewhere on the Net about water bottles quickly led to talk about female hormones and HIV/AIDS. I know, its crazy right? Here is where the conversation gets good:
...RPT (Me)
AIDS is largely confined to the drug culture and the homosexual. Since this is the way it is most easily passed on to others. Most heterosexual cases can be tied back to some infection passed through this community.
Which is why I have to sit in amazing disgust about the “barebacking” and “bug chasers” are a sad phenomenon and puzzle to us — gay or straight — whom take a common sense approach to life.
That second article says: “The number of gay men looking to become positive seems to be growing. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control (The CDC) reports a new surge in the incidence of HIV among gay males, in part due to this unthinkable practice. But what can drive such a desire? Why would a life with HIV be desirable to some?”
Something I have pointed out Tammy Bruce says in her book The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values. A great read by the way. You get to see why a conservative gay person is so concerned about our culture and maybe how morally equating all choices and actions hurts it rather than helps it:
….What a difference treatment makes! As researchers succeeded in developing ever more effective drugs, AIDS became—like gonorrhea, syphilis, and hepatitis B before it—what many if consider to be a simple “chronic disease.” And many of the gay men who had heeded the initial warning went right back to having promiscuous unprotected sex here is now even a movement—the “bareback” movement—that encourages sex without condoms. The infamous bathhouses are opening up again; drug use, sex parties, and hundreds of sex partners a year are all once again a feature of the “gay lifestyle.” In fact, “sexual liberation” has simply become a code phrase for the abandonment of personal responsibility, respect, and integrity.
In his column for Salon.com, David Horowitz discussed gay radicals like the writer Edmund White. During the 1960s and beyond, White addressed audiences in the New York gay community on the subject of sexual liberation. He told one such audience that “gay men should wear their sexually transmitted diseases like red badges of courage in a war against a sex-negative society.” And did they ever. Then, getting gonorrhea was the so-called courageous act. Today, the stakes are much higher. That red badge is now one of AIDS suffering and death, and not just for gay men themselves. In their effort to transform society, the perpetrators are taking women and children and straight men with them.
Even Camille Paglia, a woman whom I do not often praise, astutely commented some years ago, “Everyone who preached free love in the Sixties is responsible for AIDS. This idea that it was somehow an accident, a microbe that sort of fell from heaven—absurd. We must face what we did.”
The moral vacuum did rear its ugly head during the 1960s with the blurring of the lines of right and wrong (remember “situational ethics”?), the sexual revolution, and the consequent emergence of the feminist and gay civil-rights movements. It’s not the original ideas of these movements, mind you, that caused and have perpetuated the problems we’re discussing. It was and remains the few in power who project their destructive sense of themselves onto the innocent landscape, all the while influencing and conditioning others. Today, not only is the blight not being faced, but in our Looking-Glass world, AIDS is romanticized and sought after…
Tammy Bruce, The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values (Roseville: Prima, 2003), 96-97.
Gay Patriot makes this “moral equivalence” claim as well:
Anyway, the Times, perhaps after failing to find a celebrity to comment on the issue, goes to the next best source for information on epidemiology and behavioral psychology… an English professor from SUNY-Buffalo. Who provides this analysis:
What I learned in my research is that gay men are pursuing bareback sex not just for the thrill of it, but also as a way to experience intimacy, vulnerability and connection. Emotional connection may be symbolized in the idea that something tangible is being exchanged. A desire for connection outweighs adherence to the rules of disease prevention.
And some guys are apparently getting intimate, tangible, emotional connections 10-20 times a night in bathhouses.
It also seems that the readers of the NY Times, based on the comments, are in complete denial that this phenomenon exists, and think the author is just making it up to attack the gay community. Liberals choose to blame the recent dramatic increases in HIV infection rates on “the stigma attached to HIV.” Um, excuse me, but don’t stigmas usually make people avoid those things to which stigmas are attached?
In the real world, stigmatizing a behavior results in less of it: Which is why people don’t use the N-word in public any more and smoking has declined as a social activity. When the social stigma is removed … as with HIV infection and teenage pregnancy … you get more of those things.
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To which my young antagonist responded:
….But hold on a sec. You think gay people WANT AIDS? I hope you’re able to see that this really makes no sense at all. Sometimes it seems like you believe gay people are some subhuman race of self hating suicidal maniacs who are addicted to sinful pleasures just so that people like you can hate them for it. They are people. Just like us. They want AIDS just as much as you do.
And i don’t see you complaining to the porn industries every time some poor girl has to take one that way for a film shoot. I’m not sure if you want to believe that this is some kind of plague from god, but the truth is, homosexuals make up a small portion of people infected with AIDS. Most studies conducted found numbers as low as 3% of the total population. A New York times study in 1965 found a prevalence of 10%, which is the largest ever found.
Sorry dude. But AIDS is everyone’s problem.
As you can seer this convo is rolling along now. Not only do I have to deal with an engrained myth of 10% of the population is gay, I have to answer the topic of “the porn industry.” Fun time!
The 10% is a myth. There are entire books on Kinsey’s craziness, the least of which was his study accuracy. I have written and posted great audio about the transition of human sexuality, here is a great example of this idea from my post:
So with such a low number of gay men it is a tragedy that they make up for about 70% of AIDS cases. And as I have pointed out previously both from Tammy Bruce’s book and other studies… there is a growing segment within the gay community who practice unsafe sex and bug chasing as a badge of honor? That is a fact.
Yes, AIDS is transmitted through sex the easiest, so the porn industry, as you rightly point out, is a vehicle for passing it I imagine. However, even this most recent AIDS scare in the porn industry had its genesis in Derrick Burts:
✦ But that didn’t put the matter to rest. The new question became: How did Derrick Burts, who says that outside of work his only sex partner was his girlfriend, get infected? The answer to that question may reveal some hard truths about the porn industry. Burts’ girlfriend tested negative. And no HIV-positive performer has stepped forward to admit to working with Burts. When it comes to working in a sex industry, however, “straight” is a flexible term. Like many male porn actors, Burts sometimes went “gay for pay,” performing in both straight porn with women under the name Cameron Reid, and gay porn with other men under the name Derek Chambers. The reason for two distinct names is that in the porn industry, doing both gay and straight porn—called “crossing over”—is both relatively common and also fairly taboo. Many female performers believe that the risk of contracting HIV during a scene is vastly increased if their male partner participates in gay porn. In October, when the alarm bells were first sounded about the still anonymous Patient Zeta, porn star Courtney Cummz told The Daily Beast she was “terrified” by stars who cross over, and thought the Occupational Safety and Health Administration should step in to prevent it…. For one thing, according to a recent study by the CDC, men who have sex with men are 44 times more likely to contract HIV than men who don’t. But perhaps the larger perceived problem is that HIV testing standards are completely different in gay porn than they are in straight porn. While most of the straight porn industry mandates a monthly HIV testing regimen, a significant portion of the gay porn world uses condoms—yet doesn’t require its performers to get tested. (Daily Beast)
So even in this industry, it seems that the homosexual side of it is masochistic.
Here is the response to my post:
The article i posted showing the results of numerous studies could be worth taking another look at. You say the 10% is a myth (even though most studies find somewhere between 3-6% prevalence) yet you offer me nothing substantial to back that claim up. I understand you get some info from books, but if the studies exist and have credibility, they should be as available as the studies I found. I question your understanding of the disease and its impact on the human race. You may have a bias to condemn people you see to be sinful, but if this were an act of god, then why is it striking Africa harder than any other country? why are 50% of all people with AIDS black. Did they somehow piss god off too?
Maybe if we look at HIV/AIDS for what it is, a non discriminatory disease, the big picture will make a little more sense.
Firstly, one should note God was never part of our discussion. This is telling. I used references to gay authors, court cases, articles, and the like. The fact still remains that in America the gay population is 1.7% but make up over 70% of the AIDS cases. Now the antagonist in the picture is bringing in worldwide statistics on AIDS, not only that, but also has imported God into the picture! I never used theology or my faith to make any of the points. In fact, I will post here the referenced blog I did on the stats aspect of this:
The nation’s increasingly visible and influential gay community embraces the notion of sexual orientation as an innate, immutable characteristic, like left-handedness or eye color. But a major federal sex survey suggests a far more fluid, varied life experience for those who acknowledge same-sex attraction. (from Medved article)
The results of this scientific research shouldn’t undermine the hard-won respect recently achieved by gay Americans, but they do suggest that choice and change play larger roles in sexual identity than commonly assumed. The prestigious study in question (released in March by the National Center for Health Statistics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) discovered a much smaller number of “gays, lesbians and homosexuals” than generally reported by the news media. While pop-culture frequently cites the figure of one in 10 (based on 60-year-old, widely discredited conclusions from pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey) the new study finds only 1.4% of the population identifying with same-sex orientation.
Moreover, even among those who describe themselves as homosexual or bisexual (a grand total of 3.7% of the 18-44 age group), overwhelming majorities (81%) say they’ve experienced sex with partners of the opposite gender. Among those who call themselves heterosexual, on the other hand, only a tiny minority (6%) ever engaged in physical intimacy of any kind with a member of the same sex These figure indicate that 94% of those living heterosexual lives felt no physical attraction to members of the same sex, but the great bulk of self-identified homosexuals and bisexuals feel enough intimate interest in the opposite gender to engage in erotic contact at some stage in their development.
A one-way street
In other words, for the minority who may have experimented with gay relationships at some juncture in their lives, well over 80% explicitly renounced homosexual (or even bisexual) self-identification by age of 35. For the clear majority of males (as well as women) who report gay encounters, homosexual activity appears to represent a passing phase, or even a fleeting episode, rather than an unshakable, genetically pre-determined orientation.Gay pride advocates applaud the courage of those who “come out,” discovering their true nature as homosexual after many years of heterosexual experience. But enlightened opinion denies a similar possibility of change in the other direction, deriding anyone who claims straight orientation after even the briefest interlude of homosexual behavior and insisting they are phony and self-deluding. By this logic, heterosexual orientation among those with past gay relationships is always the product of repression and denial, but homosexual commitment after a straight background is invariably natural and healthy. In fact, numbers show huge majorities of those who “ever had same sex sexual contact” do not identify long-term as gay. Among women 18-44, for instance, 12.5% report some form of same sex contact at some point in their lives, but among the older segment of that group (35-44), only 0.7% identify as homosexual and 1.1% as bisexual.
The once popular phrase “sexual preference” has been indignantly replaced with the term “sexual orientation” because political correctness now insists there is no factor of willfulness or volition in the development of erotic identity. This may well be the case for the 94% of males and 87% of females (ages 18-44) who have never experienced same-sex contact of any kind and may never have questioned their unwavering straight outlook — an outlook deemed “normal” in an earlier age….
(Nope… not God in that post.) It is obvious to anyone that when backed in a corner many liberals merely start to use ad hominem attacks, creating straw-man arguments, and the like. I will come back to the African connection, as it is very important for the reader to be able to respond to such positions/”facts”. However, let us return to the conversation as found on the Net. So picking back up, here is my first response:
If you do not know about Kinsey, I suggest – in the least – reading the second chapter of a book entitled “Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas.” The second chapter which deals with Kinsey is entitled “‘SCIENCE: How a Pervert Launched the Sexual Revolution.” This is where the 10% myth came from, Kinsey.
I have read the major biography of him (“Alfred C. Kinsey: A Life”) as well as two great books entitled:
1) Sexual Sabotage: How One Mad Scientist Unleashed a Plague of Corruption and Contagion on America (there is a generous preview of the book at Amazon) 2) Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences: The Red Queen and the Grand Scheme
All this is to say, I know where the 10% myth came from. And, I linked to one of my posts which not only had audio regarding the study PROVING my point, but also a link to the largest most in-depth study to date. I would listen to the audio portion as well, a gay man calls at the very end of the show making the point supported by the best evidence available yet.
I suggest you listen to the 16-minute audio also found in the post in regards to this study.
More modern survey data has modified even that claim. In fact, an overwhelming majority of the population are exclusively heterosexual. However, of the small number of people who have ever experienced homosexuality on any of the three measures of sexual orientation (attractions, behavior, and self-identification), the number who have been exclusively homosexual on all three measures throughout their lives is vanishingly small—only 0.6% of men and 0.2% of women. Even if we go by the measure of self-identification alone, the percentage of the population who identify as homosexual or bisexual is quite small. Convincing evidence of these has come from an unlikely source—a consortium of 31 of the leading homosexual rights groups in America. In a friend-of-the-court brief they filed in the Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas sodomy case in 2003, they admitted the following:
✦ The most widely accepted study of sexual practices in the United States is the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS). The NHSLS found that 2.8% of the male, and 1.4% of the female, population identify themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. See Laumann et al., The Social Organization of Sex: Sexual Practices in the United States (1994). So it’s fair to say that the “ten percent” myth has been discredited even by pro-homosexual groups themselves.
…More:
The CDC reported that a 2002 National Survey of Family Growth set the number closer to 2.8% of adults claiming homosexuality.
In 1993, USA Today reported that only 2.3% of males ages 20 to 30 said they had a same-sex experience in the last decade.
In 1991, the National Opinion Research Center found that respondents who claimed they were active homosexuals only numbered .7%.
As far back as 1988 a Canadian survey found that 98% of first-year college students under 25 indicated they were heterosexual.
And the 2000 Census found that only .42% of American households consisted of same sex, unmarried couples as heads of households. This is less than 1%.
Still, the largest and most thorough study done yet puts the number of firmly gay people at 1.7%. Some studies put it at slightly more, some less.
So what about Africa? One of my favorite columnists/authors is Michael Fumento. He has some great insights into the problem of Africa. I will post his article on the issue, as, i think it is an important topic… I will highlight portions I think are fitting for this discussion. you will see Michael’s true care and concern near the end:
Ninety-nine percent of AIDS and HIV cases in Africa come from sexual transmission, and virtually all is heterosexual. So says the World Health Organization, with other agenciestoeing the line. Some massive condom airdrops accompanied by a persuasive propaganda campaign would practically make the epidemic vanish overnight. Or would it?
A determined renegade group of three scientists has fought for years – with little success – to get out the message that no more than a third of HIV transmission in Africa is from sexual intercourse and most of that is anal. By ignoring the real vectors, they say, we’re sacrificing literally millions of people.
These men are no crackpots. John Potterat is author of 140 scholarly publications. He began working for the El Paso County, Colorado health department in 1972 and initiated the first U.S. partner-tracing program for AIDS/HIV.
Stuart Brody, who has just accepted a full professorship in Psychology at University of Paisley in Scotland, has published over 100 scholarly publications, including a book called “Sex at Risk.” Economist and anthropologist David Gisselquist has almost 60 scholarly publications to his name and is currently advising the government of India on staunching its potentially explosive epidemic.
These renegades point out that a reason we know vaginal sex can’t be the risk in Africa it’s portrayed to be is that it hasn’t been much of one risk in the U.S. Here 12 percent of AIDS cases are “attributed to” heterosexual transmission, meaning they claimed to have gotten it that way. Of these, over a third are males.
Yet San Francisco epidemiologist Nancy Padian evaluated 72 male partners of HIV-infected women over several years, during which time only one man was infected. Even in that case, there were “several instances of vaginal and penile bleeding during intercourse.” So even the small U.S. heterosexual figure appears grossly exaggerated.
So if vaginal intercourse can’t explain the awful African epidemic, what can? Surely it’s not homosexuality, since we’ve been told there is none in Africa. In fact, the practice has long been widespread.
For example, German anthropologist Kurt Falk reported in the 1920s that bisexuality was almost universal among the male populations of African tribes he studied. Medical records also show that African men who insist they’re straighter than the proverbial arrow often suffer transmissible anorectal diseases.
Yet almost certainly greater – and more controllable – contributors to the African epidemic are “contaminated punctures from such sources as medical injections, dental injections, surgical procedures, drawing as well as injecting blood, and rehydration through IV tubes,” says Brody.
You don’t even need to go to a clinic to be injected with HIV: Almost two-thirds of 360 homes visited in sub-Saharan Africa had medical injection equipment that was apparently shared by family members. This, says Brody, can explain why both a husband and wife will be infected.
For those who care to look, there are many indicators that punctures play a huge role in the spread of disease. For example, during the 1990s HIV increased in Zimbabwe at approximately 12 percent annually, even as condom use increased and sexually transmitted infections rapidly fell.
Or consider that in a review of nine African studies, HIV prevalence in inpatient children ranged from 8.2% to 63% – as many as three times the prevalence in women who’d given birth. If the kids didn’t get the virus from their mothers or from sex, whence its origin? Investigations of large clinical outbreaks in Russia, Romania, and Libya demonstrate HIV can be readily transmitted through pediatric health care.
Good people can differ on exactly how much of the HIV in Africa is spread vaginally – including our three renegades themselves. Nevertheless, their findings readily belie the official figures. AIDS studies in Africa, Potterat says, are “First World researchers doing second rate science in Third World countries.”
There’s no one reason for the mass deception. In part, once people have established any paradigm it becomes much easier to justify than challenge.
“These guys are wearing intellectual blinders,” says Potterat. “Only a handful are even looking at routes other than sex. They have sex on the brain.” Other reasons:
● Grant money goes to those who follow the dictates of the paradigm, not to those challenging it. “Sex is sexy,” notes Potterat. ● There’s fear that blame for the epidemic will fall on the medical profession. ● To the extent vaginal sex does play a role in spreading the disease, there’s fear people will stop worrying about it.
Finally, says Brody, for researchers to concede they were wrong would be “to admit they’re complicit in mass death. That’s hard to admit that to yourself, much less to other people.” Hard, yes. And too late for many. But not too late for millions more in Africa and other underdeveloped nations – if we act now.
So what has been done in the above. The porn industry example was annihilated, the Africa example decimated, and the 10% myth blown apart, and the best available evidence puts AIDS as an epidemic in the bi-sexual, gay, and drug culture, except in Africa, where it is partly the medical fields issue as well. Why is this a problem with anal intercourse?
Homosexuals also continue to contract and spread other diseases at rates significantly higher that the community at large. These include syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, hepatitis A and B, a variety of intestinal parasites including amebiases and giardiasis, and even typhoid fever (David G. Ostrow, Terry Alan Sandholzer, and Yehudi M. Felman, eds., Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Homosexual Men; see also, Sevgi O. Aral and King K. Holmes, “Sexually Transmitted Diseases in the AIDS Era,” Scientific American). This is because rectal intercourse or sodomy, typically practiced by homosexuals, is one of the most efficient methods of transmitting disease. Why? Because nature designed the human rectum for a single purpose: expelling waste from the body. It is built of a thin layer of columnar cells, different in structure than the plate cells that line the female reproductive tract. Because the wall of the rectum is so thin, it is easily ruptured during intercourse, allowing semen, blood, feces, and saliva to directly enter the bloodstream.
This is why any anal sex should be rejected even in hetero relationships/marriage.
Ahhh, just another day in the trenches… this one just a bit deeper than others.
(Updated! This post is now married — ha — to this post of dietary laws in Leviticus. Also, posted some excerpts from a book at bottom.) After posting the above graphic, Jonathan Lewis [I believe Jonathan closed his FB down since last checked] said this in response to a post a friends post:
The point of this, for me, is that marriage has been something that changes. I hate when people use the bibles example to deny my friends the right to get married when marriage today is nothing like marriage was in the bible. On top of all this, almost all marriages where arranged. Just as it used to be illegal for a black man to marry a white women. That had to change and it did. And people used the bible to try to stop it from changing. It’s just here to show that marriage has changed. And needs to change again to allow the LGBT community rights.
There are a few things wrong with how Jonathan has come at this issue. The first is how one should approach any historical document, this is called Hermeneutics. This way of approaching any document of antiquity pre-dates Christ [by about 500-years] and can be summed up in the “eight rules.”
✦ Rule of Definition. Define the term or words being considered and then adhere to the defined meanings.
✦ Rule of Usage. Don’t add meaning to established words and terms. What was the common usage in the cultural and time period when the passage was written?
✦ Rule of Context. Avoid using words out of context. Context must define terms and how words are used.
✦ Rule of Historical background. Don’t separate interpretation and historical investigation.
✦ Rule of Logic. Be certain that words as interpreted agree with the overall premise.
✦ Rule of Precedent. Use the known and commonly accepted meanings of words, not obscure meanings for which their is no precedent.
✦ Rule of Unity. Even though many documents may be used there must be a general unity among them.
✦ Rule of Inference. Base conclusions on what is already known and proven or can be reasonably implied from all known facts.
Another important term that is often missed in a post like Jonathan’s to engender emotional responses and not critical thinking, is Etymology:
“the study of the origins of words or parts of words and how they have arrived at their current form and meaning” (Encarta Dictionary).
So, what does a historical thinker say about the above?
They [the critics] start with some improbable presumption; and having so decreed it themselves, proceed to draw inferences, and censure the poet as though he had actually said whatever they happen to believe, if his statement conflicts with their notion of things…. Whenever a word seems to imply some contradiction, it is necessary to reflect how many ways there may be of understanding it in the passage in question…. So it is probably the mistake of the critics that has given rise to the Problem…. See whether he [the author] means the same thing, in the same relation, and in the same sense, before admitting that he has contradicted something he has said himself or what a man of sound sense assumes as true…. The objections, then, of critics start with faults of five kinds: the allegation is always that something is either (1) impossible, (2) improbable, (3) corrupting, (4) contradictory, or (5) against technical correctness. The answers to these objections must be sought under one or other of the above–mentioned heads, which are twelve in number.
So taking the above from Aristotle and applying this thinking to one area, say, language, will afford us a great deal of help:
LANGUAGE GAP
…Consider how confused a foreigner must be when he reads in a daily newspaper: “The prospectors made a strike yesterday up in the mountains.” “The union went on strike this morning.” “The batter made his third strike and was called out by the umpire.” “Strike up with the Star Spangled Banner.” “The fisherman got a good strike in the middle of the lake.” Presumably each of these completely different uses of the same word go back to the parent and have the same etymology. But complete confusion may result from misunderstanding how the speaker meant the word to be used…. We must engage in careful exegesis in order to find out what he meant in light of contemporary conditions and usage.
So these are just some quick, higher educational deep-thinking skills/points, to apply to the graph. There is a history gap not mentioned in the graph or following conversations about the graph. For instance, King David in the Old Testament had many wives. Why would someone take this event (fact) and rip it from its historical context and apply modern day thinking to it? If this is done then there is another purpose behind doing so, an agenda. Sure, the Bible states that God “gave David Saul’s wives” (2 Samuel 12:8),but that is just a figure of speech. In ancient times, it was commonplace for a new king to take possession of everything owned by the former king, including his wives. So let’s take the “cultural gap” here and open it up a bit:
8. I gave thee thy master’s house, and thy master’s wives-The phraseology means nothing more than that God in His providence had given David, as king of Israel, everything that was Saul’s. The history furnishes conclusive evidence that he never actually married any of the wives of Saul. But the harem of the preceding king belongs, according to Oriental notions, as a part of the regalia to his successor.
Knowing now that culturally speaking (using the understanding of idioms and ideas as known in a particular time-period) that it was commonplace for a new king to take possession of everything owned by the former king, including his wives, is not the same as God saying go out and take many wives to fulfill the lust of man. In-other-words, just because a great man in the Bible had more than one wife does not mean we should. The Bible faithfully records — as a true history book would — both the advances and the failures of people. Not only that (e.g., ripping something from its historical, cultural, geographic, etymological, and theological understanding), but context is important as well, context in a book recording evil deeds done along side righteous ones, and how to regulate man’s inhibitions.
The only direct command against polygamy is given to the kings that were to rule Israel, as they are told not to “multiply wives” to themselves (Deuteronomy 17:17). It is also interesting to note that polygamous relationships seem to be regulated in the commands Moses gave to the nation of Israel. Leviticus 18:18 instructs that a man should not marry sisters, and Deuteronomy 21:15 talks of assigning an heir to a man with two wives. Many commentators suggest that the passages do not endorse polygamy but rather prohibit it. Deuteronomy 21:15 may also be translated as “has had two wives” in succession rather than at the same time. The sisters in Leviticus 18:18 are understood by some to be any Israelite women. Regardless of the interpretation of these passages, the taking of multiple wives is not in accord with God’s design from the beginning.
An analogous understanding is that the Bible gives commands on how to treat slaves, even having an entire New Testament book written with regards to this understanding. Does this mean the Bible supports slavery? Of course not, however, slavery was an institution around almost as long as man, so the Bible treats the reality of this institution in a way that will create the most fair actions of “owners” of slaves towards the humanity of current affairs. The Bible was the first historical document to say such a radical thing as “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). And this radical change in direction led to women and slavery being defeated (see my chapter in my book on Feminism, and, Listen to Thomas Sowell’s chapter from his book on slavery).
Now, in Christian thinking, Christ is understood to be God, bringing something new to man. He taught on many aspects of this “something new,” and even dealt with this topic – marriage.
In Matthew 19:4 (and Mark 10:2) we find the Pharisees challenging Him by asking if it is lawful for a man to put away his wife:
(vv. 3-8) Some Pharisees came to him. In order to test him, they said, “Does the Law allow a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?” Jesus answered, “Haven’t you read that at the beginning the creator made them male and female? And God said, ‘Because of this a man should leave his father and mother and be joined together with his wife, and the two will be one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, humans must not pull apart what God has put together.” The Pharisees said to him, “Then why did Moses command us to give a divorce certificate and divorce her?” Jesus replied, “Moses allowed you to divorce your wives because your hearts are unyielding. But it wasn’t that way from the beginning. I say to you that whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.”
Christ took it back to Adam and Eve one man one woman as did Paul in 1st Corinthians 7:1-2 ~
(vv 1-2) Now, about what you wrote: “It’s good for a man not to have sex with a woman.” Each man should have his own wife, and each woman should have her own husband because of sexual immorality.
Oneness is clear here as is it here Malachi 2:14 ~
But you say, “Why?” Because the LORD testifies about you and the wife of your youth against whom you cheated. She is your partner, the wife of your covenant.
Notice how the practice of many wives just does not fit into the passage? Context. We know that God intended for one man, one woman and that this relationship was to be for the duration (Matthew 19:4) the only allowable cause for divorce is fornication God then sought to regulate the polygamous practice (Exodus 21:10). So, again I reference my thinking on the matter of regulating versus abolishing institutions:
In Scripture, God sometimes allowed what was less than ideal because people’s hard hearts made the ideal unattainable (e.g., Ex 13:17; 1 Sam 12:12-13). To be able to exercise some degree of restraint over human injustice, Moses’ civil laws regulated some institutions rather than seeking to abolish them altogether: divorce, polygyny, the avengers of blood, and slavery (Keener 1992: 192-96). Jewish lawyers in fact recognized that God had allowed some behavior (marrying a Gentile captive in Deut 21:11-13; according to some, slavery) as a concession to human weakness (Daube 1959); some of their own rulings, such as the prosbul, conceded human weakness in hopes of improving the situation of justice (Daube 1959: 10). Nevertheless, Jesus’ opponents here assume that whatever the law addressed it permitted (19:7; cf. ARN 24, §49B); Jesus responds that Moses permitted this merely as a concession to Israel’s hard hearts.14 That his questioners exploit this concession thereby implies their own hardness of hearts, a charge ancients would easily enough apply to those deficient in love toward family members (Epict. Disc. 3.3.5). Thus in Matthew (in contrast to Mark), the Pharisees even exploit Moses’ concession as a command (Gundry 1982: 380). Jesus, by contrast, uses Scripture differently (cf. 12:7), here probably seeking to protect an innocent Jewish wife from her husband wrongfully divorcing her….
Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rpids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2009), 465.
I wish also to posit another idea completely missed by this chart, or the conversation that insued, and that is “is it wrong?” For instance, Christopher Wolfe makes the point that “arguments about whether homosexuality is biological or inherited are secondary to arguments about whether or not it is moral.” He continues,
Dallas declares that “even if it can be proven that genetic or biological influences predispose people toward homosexuality, that will never prove that homosexuality is in and of itself normal.” I have argued elsewhere that “it is an epistemological error to base value decisions on empirical data alone. For example, parents may reject dishonesty or homosexual behavior on moral grounds, regardless of what percentage of the population happily engages in those behaviors.”
Christopher Wolfe, ed., Homosexuality and American Public Life (Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing, 1999), 83-84.
Not only this, but the chart points out another fact, that is, no where in the Bible or in all religious history and cultural history, that homosexuality was never normalized. Therefore, the radical change is coming from those who support this idea. that is, that homosexuality should be normalized via marriage “rights.” In fact, this is one of the main strains of thought in comparing political worldviews. In the book A Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell makes this point in comparing the two models for coming to decisions:
While the constrained vision sees human nature as essentially unchanged across the ages and around the world, the particular cultural expressions of human needs peculiar to specific societies are not seen as being readily and beneficially changeable by forcible intervention. By contrast, those with the unconstrained vision tend to view human nature as beneficially changeable and social customs as expendable holdovers from the past. Ideals are weighed against the cost of achieving them, in the unconstrained vision. But in the unconstrained vision, every closer approximation to the ideal should be preferred….
Continuing Dr. Sowell quotes Hayek and then makes his point:
The growth of knowledge and the growth of civilization are the same only if we interpret knowledge to include all the human adaptations to environment in which past experience has been incorporated. Not all knowledge in this sense is part of our intellect, nor is our intellect the whole of our knowledge. Our habits and skills, our emotional attitudes, our tools, and our institutions— all are in this sense adaptations to past experience which have grown up by selective elimination of less suitable conduct. They are as much an indispensable foundation of successful action as is our conscious knowledge.
In this vision, it is not simply that individuals rationally choose what works from what does not work, but also— and more fundamentally— that the competition of institutions and whole societies leads to a general survival of more effective collections of cultural traits, even if neither the winners nor the losers rationally understand what was better or worse about one set or
the other. Values which may be effective at the tribal level will tend to be overwhelmed by values that permit or promote the functioning of larger aggregations of people. From this perspective, “man has certainly more often learnt to do the right thing without comprehending why it was the right thing, and he still is better served by ‘ custom than understanding.” There is thus “more ‘intelligence’ incorporated in the system of rules of conduct than in man’s thoughts about his surroundings.”
Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (New York, NY: basic Books, 2007), 28, 37-38.
Which explains the almost elitist “I know better than all of human history” mentality:
The following are excerpts are from the following book, click to enlarge:
Meet Sheikh Abdul Wahab. He’s a top cleric in Saudi Arabia. And he’s from the Wahabi sect that believes homosexuality should be punished by death. Well, turns out, he’s gay.
From the British blog, theMuslimissue.wordpress, DESCENDANT OF WAHABI FOUNDER ARRESTED IN BURKA SOLICITING GAY SEX IN SAUDI ARABIA:
(PART 2 discusses homosexuality and biblical dietary law) I was graciously invited to a site that is a depot for many conservatively minded homosexuals as well as supporters of these Republican leaning folk. For the record there are many independents and libertarian leaning guys and gals in the group as well. The person that invited me to the Facebook group, JK, soon after posted a link to one of my blog posts to help submerge me into the site’s ethos a bit. Which I did. I have to say, it makes my heart joyous that good, calm dialogue — even in disagreement — can happen. Why can it happen? Because they are conservative. No matter if I talked to heterosexual or homosexual persons from the Left about this, almost always you are hit with name-calling, pigeonholing, and straw-man arguments. So kudos to the guys and gals on the Facebook group.
Which leads me to the below. While being a bit long, I must post this dialogue here in the hopes that others will a) find what I am arguing for persuasive, and b) be able to incorporate these arguments into ones apologetic. And I must say, that the only positive argument I have seen put forth is one from the Left. That is “equality” (not liberty) being the main driving force. It is an ethic closer to the French Revolution which denied [capital “N”] Natural [capital “L”] Law but almost an earlier form of “legal positivism.” Here is Francis Canavan speaking to this topic just a bit for the person interested in this dichotomy, after which I will post the dialogue from FB:
Liberty, equality, fraternity was the slogan of the French Revolution. Liberty and equality were the Revolution’s operative goals, and fraternity was brought in as a cement to hold them together. For liberty and equality are not necessarily in harmony and, in fact, are often at war with each other. Keeping the peace between them therefore became the role of fraternity. Alas, fraternity has not been terribly successful at it, as the history of class struggle since the French Revolution has shown.
In the evolution of democratic theory in the past two centuries, two main currents have emerged from the same wellspring of radical individualism: the liberal stream, emphasizing liberty while acknowledging equality of civil rights, and the egalitarian stream equality of civil rights, emphasizing equality while preaching the liberty guaranteed by civil rights.
Liberal democracy understands rights as immunities from governmental interference. Their function is to prevent government from unduly restraining any individual’s liberty. The egalitarian conception of rights is much broader than the classical liberal one and includes a wide range of positive benefits to be conferred by government. It tends toward an equality of results rather than merely of opportunities. To put it crudely, it means not only that you are free to apply for the job, but that you get it and you keep it.
Liberal democratic thought has as its economic counterpart the ideology of capitalism and a free-market economic system. The egalitarian stream ushers in the ideology of socialism and a government dedicated to bringing about substantial economic equality among all citizens.
Liberalism as it exists in the United States today is an effort to have the best of both ideological worlds. It assigns to government the duty of fostering, not complete economic equality, but general and a more equal share in it for all citizens. At the same time, through an ever-expanding array of civil rights, it seeks to emancipate the individual from religious, moral, and social restraints that are not of his own choosing. The contemporary liberal ideal would be a country in which everyone was employed at high wages in work which he/she found fulfilling, without distinction of race, color, creed, gender, ethnic origin, educational background, or sexual preference, and could live by any “lifestyle” that he/she chose.
Contemporary American conservatism is largely a reaction to this brand of liberalism, and therefore is a mixed bag of views. Among its adherents we find “conservatives” who are really nineteenth-century liberals eager to get government off the back of business. We also find “social-issue” conservatives angered by the liberal dissolution of our public morality. Still others are “libertarians” who want no public morality at all but oppose liberalism because of the large role it gives government. Another group of conservatives are regionalists or “states-righters” who are against not government as such, but the federal government.
The ideological conflict between and among liberals and conservatives is carried on in terms of liberty and equality.
Francis Canavan, The Pluralist Game: Pluralism, Liberalism, and the Moral Conscience (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), 127-128.
What is the founding zeitgesit of our country?
Remember, if marriage is just about happiness or love, then why not polygamy, polyandry, or the like (“I’ve married my sister – now we’re having our second baby” ~ Daily Mail). Because, marriage is NOT about those things. JK is the person who invited me to the group, and who promptly posted a link to one of my excerpts from a book I posted on my blog (see, right). (*Caution, RAW Language*) Without further adieu:
JK: I have not found many gays that were molested. I can only think of two that were in fact. Have you known many? I’m just wondering.
AC: I “think” I was at a YMCA camp when I was very young,I DO remember sitting on the head (lol) dudes lap and being felt up after that its a blank,I do remember crying that I didn’t want to go the next year and I was able to NEVER go back,wish I could sue LOL
JA: Yep… when I was 10 here, 17 year old next door to grandma’s got me. No entrance but got froddled. I held a long grudge until I talked to a psycologist that suggested the same sex attraction was going to happen anyways, but the event was the first same sex stimulus, etc. I think it was reported the percentages of perfectly straight men that were molested is 17%… it happens to be the same 17% for gays which indicates molestation is not the shooting gun for guys being gay.
AC: I KNOW I always have been gay,even “thought” of stuff I wanted to do BEFORE I knew what gay was and what sex was……it was like natural?
JA: On the other hand of that above statement from me. We know the act of writing, which hand we use, language or languages spoken, at young ages the brain physically modifies itself to adapt to be able to do what is taught well. I believe there may be some genetic capability to go gay, but actually playing with other boys or being molested at ages under 15 can actually concrete in the gayness and once the brain molds itself into same sex attraction, it is irreversible.
AC: I wore a pink ballarina dress to kindergarden LOL yes escaped from the nanny and ran to school in it and refused to take it off THANK GOD I aint into drag LOL but what straight boy would do that LOL
JA: Maybe because you had that gay potential, it made you more vulnerable to being used? I think that’s what happened here. The older kid asked if I wanted to do what the big kids do and took out what looked like a 12 inch dick to me, I never had an erection before then but looking at his made me get one and I was intrigued. I had no idea was sex was or that boy/boy stuff was wrong.
JPC: I only know one that was molested. And he had a very difficult life as a young man.
KC: My (maternal) first cousin (4 yrs older than me) lived with us for about a year when I was about 12 (he was in high school) and he used to fondle me. He made me jerk him off while he did me. I was afraid at first but I didn’t see that it was wrong … also, whenever I would spend the night with my school mates, we slept in the same bed and the same thing would happen. Then, in high school, I remember riding in the back seat of the coach’s car going to an away game and some of the guys would fondle each other. As far as I know, I’m the only one who has admitted of being gay. The rest are all “happily” married (or divorced). My older cousin (the one that fondled me first) is also still married. We’ve not had communication in over 20 years. Looking back, I now realized my cousin actually molested me but the fact that I liked it, is that still considered molestation?
[….]
What’s the difference in “molestation” (my cousin) and “experimentation”?
GC: I consider molestation to be an abusive situation with an adult over a child. Most of what I’ve read here falls under the experimentation category.
This is where I finally wade in. So far, as you can see, many have had a sexual encounter during a young age with someone older involved in leading these people (adult or teen) to be fondled or to fondle them.
PAPA GIORGIO:
About me. I have over 5,000 books in my home library (politics, religion, philosophy, science, history, ethics, theology, economics, and the like) as well as many DVD documentaries/lectures/presentations that are not “Time to Kill” with Prince’s protege movies (“The Last Dragon” or “Time to Kill”). Some could argue they need to be these types of movies and I should lighten up a bit. But so be it.
“By-the-by, for those reading this I will explain what is missing in this type of discussion due to the media used. Genuflecting, care, concern, one being upset (does not entail being “mad”), etc… are all not viewable because we are missing each other’s tone, facial expressions, and the like. I afford the other person I am dialoguing with the best of intentions and read his/her comments as if we were out having a talk over a beer at a bar or meeting a friend at Starbucks. (I say this because there seems to be a phenomenon of etiquette thrown out when talking through email or Face Book, lots more public cussing and gratuitous responses.) You will see that often times I USE CAPS — which in www lingo for YELLING. I am not using it this way, I use it to merely emphasize and often times say as much: *not said in yelling tone, but merely to emphasize*. So in all my discussions I afford the best of thought to the other person as I expect he or she would to me… even if dealing with tough subjects as the above. I have had more practice at this than most, and with half-hour pizza, one hour photo and email vs. ‘snail mail,’ know that important discussions take time to meditate on, inculcate, and to process. So be prepared for a good thought provoking discussion if you so choose one with me.”
About me. I have over 5,000 books in my home library (politics, religion, philosophy, science, history, ethics, theology, economics, and the like) as well as many DVD documentaries/lectures/presentations that are not “Time to Kill” with Prince’s protege [movies]. Some could argue they need to be movies and I should lighten up a bit. But so be it.
Dialogue is important, and I will discuss my many years of research on this and any topic. But if we, discuss, say rape ~ there are two levels we can discuss this on. The emotional, or the legal/ethical/etc level. When I talk rape, and universal absolutes, I will bring up books like,
▼ Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 1997). ▼ Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
showing that if evolution (atheistic, philosophical naturalism) rules the day, that “rape” is a process used by our species (in the past, and in nature) as a way to propagate our kind. It is therefore, ethically speaking, merely [currently] “taboo.” In theism it is morally wrong at all times and places in the universe. So when we are talking “foundational aspects” of worldviews (side-note: all 10,0000 religions in the world can be broken down into 7-at-the-most worldviews), we leave the emotional and deal with the many other aspects of the issue.
RAPE:
✂theism: evil, wrong at all times and places in the universe — absolutely;
✂atheism: taboo, it was used in our species in the past for the survival of the fittest, and is thus a vestige of evolutionary progress… and so may once again become a tool for survival — it is in every corner of nature;
✂pantheism: illusion, all morals and ethical actions and positions are actually an illusion (Hinduism – maya; Buddhism – sunyata). In order to reach some state of Nirvana one must retract from this world in their thinking on moral matters, such as love and hate, good and bad.
ALL THAT [above] makes no difference to a woman who was raped. Especially the closer you are to the event. It is emotional. And I would never talk about the above with a women versus doting over her emotional needs. Agreed?
SO, if you cannot get into the weeds with me if you truly want to see the hurdles that need to be jumped in this discussion with thoughtful conservatives. Then you shouldn’t engage in polite, but sometimes emotional, topic such as what JK has really given his blessing to. (Never thought you would be a priest, huh JK?)
Are you — who are reading this — tracking? Sound fair? Reasonable? Take note, I am a federalist, and lean libertarian (small “l” on this). If states pass these initiatives by the consent of the people in those states (same-sex marriage), then so be it. It is how our Constitution was set up. If we want to codify marriage as between a man-and-women, legally binding for all the states. Then we need 2/3rds of Congress and 3/4ths of the states. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. So I am only here talking about societal impacts and reasons behind many of the “choosing” of this lifestyle.
To better explain, here are two calls from gay listeners to conservative talk radio (full audio upload):
And this is just the call:
So know as well that I believe a very small minority (but still due to environmental reasons) do not truly “choose” this lifestyle.
We all on the same page? Somewhat? Decorum being the word in the face of personal subjects.
JK:
So when I was about 10 I was kissed on the lips by a kid 3 or 4 years older. Was I molested? I was certainly surprised and knew I didn’t like it. That girl really pissed me off. When I was 12 I went to church camp as I was a very pious child. Living with, being with and showering with boys helped me to know my place in the world.
PAPA GIORGIO:
Just got to work… I will share that I have talked to Walt and he has mentioned that the many people he helps and deal with in his ministry have sexual trauma when they are young. I shared with you two co-workers that I love (one when I worked at Borders, the other at Whole Foods). One friend had his “coming out experience” when he was 12, by a family member. The other, who was very flamboyant with his past (and shared it with anyone who would listen) had his “coming out experience” by a stranger when he was thirteen.
Also, I shared with you that my mom has known quite a few lesbians that are fellow trailer-parkers (I am sure there is some colloquial term to use better than that?) and they have all confided sexual acts done by close family or close confidants to the family.
There is also this from a favored author of mine, Tammy Bruce:
✿ Here come the elephant again: Almost without exception, the gay men I know (and that’s too many to count) have a story of some kind of sexual trauma or abuse in their childhood — molestation by a parent or an authority figure, or seduction as an adolescent at the hands of an adult. The gay community must face the truth and see sexual molestation of an adolescent for the abuse it is, instead of the ‘coming-of-age’ experience many [gays] regard it as being. Until then, the Gay Elite will continue to promote a culture of alcohol and drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, and suicide by AIDS. (Tammy Bruce, The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values [Roseville: Prima, 2003], 99.)
This may not be everyone’s experience JK, but it is enough for some to say that unlike color/ethnicity [immutability], that homosexuality is mutable.
I believe there are a whole strain of environmental causes (abuse, issues in the home, hormonal influence in and out of utero, etc.) But you must admit that one cause CAN BE taking an adolescent when they are sexually vulnerable, and damaging this delicate time in a youths life? Right? In other words, if this life (the gay life) is something you (the general you, not you specifically) didn’t choose, and it has been hard, you would want to then try to make sure the ideal environment to teach young men and women the proper relationship between their sexuality and the world they live in (while respecting peoples choices and private matter) would be your goal. Yeah?
Just a side-note. There seems to be an unhealthy dislike for the sexes in the gay community. This has worked its way into many areas of the same sexes who happen to be gay. For instance, when I was in jail many years ago I was a trustee (worker) that fed the jail masses. Some of those masses were the gay men, who were pretty normal in appearance and attitude. A separate group were the very feminine gay men, and the third group were transvestites. I asked why they were separated and the officer said that they would kill each other if not. Similarly, there is some good work showing that the very “butch type” female gays and men were key in helping incarcerate the many effeminate homosexuals in the camps during WWII. While the next response isn’t as extreme, it does offer up some insight into gay community and its biases brought on by nurture [or nature]? (I will emphasize where someones experience and scholarship is rejected do to gender):
JK: I believe that the clergy and social service types would get more stories like this naturally and from my own experience I never hang out with lesbians. Lesbians stay to themselves mostly as many do not like men. I love Tammy, but I will bet she doesn’t hang with the boys too often.
PAPA GIORGIO: By-the-by, just to explain why I posted those two calls
I am making clear that I believe some — a very small minority — are born with no desire for the opposite sex. But in a person, like Walt Heyer’s life, much of what happened to him likewise was not his choice either. Choice sometimes comes later in life. One example from faith is this, and Ravi mentions Henri Nouwen in his response:
[….]
Ravi refers to Henri Nouwen as a Saint. Many of us cannot keep a “lid on it” like Henri did (that is Saint status in my book), but society as a whole should seriously discuss what IT should normalize or keep in the private sphere. I believe a mutable attraction is one of them. this is what serious discussion should be over.
Just saying “Tammy doesn’t know” is not good enough. She knows a lot of gay men in the field she has chosen to be in over the years. As she even states in that quote. Time to get to work. Love your way JK.
JK: I have lived in L.A. all my life and don’t know any gays that know Tammy Bruce other than listening to her on the radio. I have been in all the bars since I was a kid and have never seen her or heard her mentioned, but let’s say she is a huge fag hag lesbian. Her experiences like mine are probably skewed. I know I have slept with far more men that Tammy Bruce and the subject rarely comes up. That’s why I am trying to get some dialogue here to see what other peoples experiences have been.
[….]
Ravi also says that being a polygamist wouldn’t work in Christianity. We it worked for Solomon, Abraham, Gideon, Elkanah, Saul, and David. David had many wives and loved Jonathan more than any of them btw.
PAPA GIORGIO: @JK, you mentioned Bible camp. But have you studied the Old Testament (New as well) as an adult? Maybe with some reliable Bible helps by people who know the language, culture, history they comment on? Or….
and I am not trying to demean you in ANY way, these are serious questions
… have you traversed the internet to liberal and gay sites to see that the Bible has stories of polygamy? I do not mean to get religious, but since you quoted characters from the Bible, I will lightly touch on the same issue in it that I have talked about above. that is, “ideals” vs. the “private.” This same subject/object distinction takes place in your mentioning these stories.
But the question I am curious about is if you have gone to reliable sources on the matter. in other words, if you are to share stories that challenge an ideal about good music and you share stories of, I don’t know, say John Lennon. Would you have a wider more trusting conversation with the person you are conversing with if they knew you got much of your information from “John Lennon: The Life,” by
Philip Norman, who had unprecedented access to archives, interviewed over the years the Beatles, wrote the previously definitive book on the Beatles, “Shout.” Or the book “The Lennon Prophecy,” where author Joseph Niezgoda says Lennon made a pack with the devil, lauded by the once good WND site. Now crap.
So. like my analogy, have you [honestly, and this is not to judge you, I truly am curious and want an honest answer] done the hard work to see if the above statements about polygamy in the Bible make your case?
Side-note, I dealt with a popular meme in an older post on this topic. I explain some of the “hard work” here:
JK: Thanks so much Papa Giorgio. I love your insight.
[….]
I don’t actually want to change biblical marriage, but state sanctioned marriage. Nobody straight or gay should have a tax benefit over another as we are all guaranteed equal status under the law. Marriage is between you and God. The government should not be involved.
HH: Papa, Anyone who reads the OT will be horrified to read some of the strange tales it harbors.
PAPA GIORGIO: No, that wasn’t my question JK, I will ask again:
⚑ “So. like my analogy, have you [honestly, and this is not to judge you, I truly am curious and want an honest answer] done the hard work to see if the above statements about polygamy in the Bible make your case?”
I will continue to the main point after you respond openly/honestly to this simple question. Yes or no will suffice.
I continue, but in response to HH.
PAPA GIORGIO: @HH, I would recommend a book for you, two actually:
Ideals vs. Practice (per God [Jesus & YHWH]). You do not have to respond to this, consider it as a short lesson in what God has designed as an ideal (or if believing in neo-Darwinian non-God guided evolution, what nature has set as an ideal), and how we dilute that ideal. All men/women, not just homosexuals.
The interesting thing about the Bible JK, is that it records many of the foibles, murderous acts, and missteps men and women make. UNLIKE comparable writings of the day that re-wrote their histories to display a sense of perfection in both battle and life in order to lift whichever king to an almost deistic level. For instance, if the Apostles had been attempting to create a story about (lie) about Jesus’ Resurrection, they would have not inserted the first people to find the tomb empty, women. In that day and custom women’s testimony was not allowed or accepted.
This goes a long way to realize God set up an ideal. Which Natural Law does as well (which is the spirit and philosophy our Founding documents were written):
—————————————— In Matthew 19:4 we are told by Jesus that God created one “male and [one] female” and joined them in marriage. Mark 10:6-8:”But from the beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, ‘and the two shall become one flesh’; so then they are no longer two, but one flesh.” The two as one is the pattern on how marriage was to be conducted from the start. NOT three or four as one.
The Hebrew is very specific, God always spoke of man’s “wife,” as singular, not wives. Notice it also states one father one mother. It wasn’t until sin made man fall (Gen. 4:23) that polygamy occurs. Cain was cursed, Lamech is a descendent of Cain and the first to practice polygamy. The first time polygamous relationship is found in the Bible is with a thriving rebellious society in sin; when a murderer named “Lamech [a descendant of Cain] took for himself two wives” (Gen.4:19, 23).
The same Godly pattern of one man and one wife is lived by Noah. At the time of the Ark (Gen. 7:7), Noah took his one wife into the ark, all his son’s took one wife; God called Noah’s family righteous and pure. If polygamy were ordained of God, it would have made sense that Noah and his sons would have taken additional wives with them to repopulate the earth faster from the cataclysm.
This was to be a permanent union between man and woman that they might be helpful to one another (Genesis 2:18). Marriage represents a relationship of both spiritual and physical unity.
[….]
God never condoned polygamy but like divorce he allowed it to occur and did not bring an immediate punishment for this disobedience. Deut. 17:14-17: “I will set a king over me like all the nations that are around me,’ “you shall surely set a king over you whom the LORD your God chooses; one from among your brethren you shall set as king over you; you may not set a foreigner over you, who is not your brother. But he shall not multiply horses for himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt to multiply horses, for the LORD has said to you, ‘You shall not return that way again.’ “Neither shall he multiply wives for himself, lest his heart turn away; nor shall he greatly multiply silver and gold for himself.” This is the command of God, and he has never changed it.
1 Kings 11:3 says Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines violating the principle of monogamy that he was given through the law of Moses. Consider that Solomon at one time was the wisest man in the world. In I Kings 11:4: “For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods: and his heart was not perfect with the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father.” Notice Solomon became a polytheist because he was influenced in polygamy. In his case many wives, became many gods. Scripture has always commanded monogamy (Ps.128:3; Prov. 5:18; 18:22; 19:14; 31:10-29; Eccl. 9:9).
The fact is that God never commanded polygamy or divorce. Scripture says (Bible) He only permitted it because of the hardness of their hearts (Deut. 24:1; Matt. 19:8). Matt. 5:31-32: “Furthermore it has been said, “Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce. But I say to you that whoever divorces his wife for any reason except sexual immorality causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a woman who is divorced commits adultery.” God hates divorce as well as polygamy, since it destroys the family (Mal. 2:16). Whatever the patriarchs or any Christian did wrong does not change the fact the Bible condemns it….
JK posted a video he quickly mentioned to me at a dinner meeting with like minded conservatives:
PAPA GIORGIO: I have already dealt with the non-sequitur of comparing the mutable aspect of homosexuality with the immutable characteristic in color/ethnicity of one’s skin color. There is no difference between a black man and a white man. There are differences between male and female. Ann Coulter notes one black women who was questioning John Kerry:
////////////
When gay marriage was first thrust on the nation by the Massachusetts Supreme Court during the 2004 presidential primary campaign, Senator John Kerry said what was at stake was “somebody’s right to live equally under the same laws as other people in the country.”
But of course, gays do live equally under the same laws as other people. There are no special speed limit laws or trespassing laws or murder laws for gays. What gays can’t do is get married to members of the same sex. Nor can heterosexuals, immigrants, whites, blacks, the rich, the poor or the homeless.
The Democrats’ comparison of gay marriage to civil rights ultimately led to the ridiculous spectacle of Kerry basically accusing a black woman of being a bigot because she did not appreciate the comparison of gays to blacks under the equal protection clause. It had to happen.
At a “town hall” meeting in Mississippi during the campaign, a black woman in the audience asked Kerry to reject the comparison of gay marriage to civil rights. “I don’t care what they say,” she said, “there is no correlation between gay rights and civil rights in terms of what black Americans have gone through.”
In response, Kerry said it was important to recognize that “we have a Constitution which has an equal protection clause.” (Because black people had probably forgotten that.)
The woman “was not satisfied” with Kerry’s answer, in the delicate phrasing of the New York Times. She said: “My point is, homosexuality is an idea. You have never heard a doctor say, ‘Mr. and Mrs. John Doe, you have a bouncing baby homosexual.’ It’s an idea.”
Ann Coulter, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama (New York, NY: Sentinel [Penguin], 2012), 149-150.
/////////////
Similarly, through abuse or hormonal influence one cannot “become” “black” or “Asian,” etc. Again. Mutability vs. Immutability. Ted Olson is wrong in his view of the 14th Amendment.
[….]
I also reject the idea that marriage is a religious institution. My chapter on the matter (✌http://tinyurl.com/8unujfs✌) in my book is where I explain how civil law recognizes the already codified nature of marriage, in nature. The state does not create the ideal of one-man one-woman ideal. Just as it does not create the First and Second Amendments in the Constitution. These are…
…truths [that are] self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…
So, for instance, Nature and Natural Law (since Grecian/Roman days) have recognized a pattern (ideal) in nature. Robert George notes this in a more modern way — analogy:
——————————– However, there is a “created order,” or, even a natural order (if you do not believe in God). My argument for heterosexual (between a man and a woman) unions is usable both by the atheist (non believer in God) and the theist (a believer in God – in the Judeo-Christian sense). Here is the crux of the matter in regards to “nature’s order:”
✂ “…take gold as an example, it has inherent in its nature intrinsic qualities that make it expensive: good conductor of electricity, rare, never tarnishes, and the like. The male and female have the potential to become a single biological organism, or single organic unit, or principle. Two essentially becoming one. The male and female, then, have inherent to their nature intrinsic qualities that two mated males or two mated females never actualize in their courtship… nor can they ever. The potential stays just that, potential, never being realized…..
✂ “….Think of a being that reproduces, not by mating, but by some act performed by individuals. Imagine that for these same beings, movement and digestion is performed not by individuals, but only by the complementary pairs that unite for this purpose. Would anyone acquainted with such beings have difficulty understanding that in respect to movement and digestion, the organism is a united pair, or an organic unity?”
So you see, the two heterosexual organisms that join in a sexual union cease being two separate organisms for a short time and become one organism capable of reproduction. This is what the state and the church are sealing in a marriage, this intrinsic union. The homosexual couple can never achieve this union, so “natures order” has endowed the heterosexual union with an intrinsic quality that other relationships do not have or could never attain. Both the atheist and theist can argue from this point, because either we were created this way or we evolved this way. Either way, nature has imposed on the sexual union being discussed.
Remember, the Constitution was written with Natural Law as its ethos. Do you wish to undermine this understanding of Nature and man’s relationship to it (It)?
[…] Small Talk […]
HH: I don’t know why anyone wants to get married with the divorce rate well over 50%. Of course, there are economic factors when it comes to end of life or catastrophic illness decisions or taxes (can’t forget taxes). I have been saying for years the homophobes need to shut up. It’s beneficial to the economy to have weddings and divorces. It’s all about $$$.
PAPA GIORGIO: I am with you (in many examples, and if I ever get on a high horse), just ask my wife to knock me down from it. And I understand many a persons frustration in talking about issues with me, it is not too often I have met people who have read 2,000 books (or so) cover-to-cover and have another 3,000 (or so) for reference/future reading. Often times this knowledge can come across as prideful, and I admit that whether my fallen nature tends that direction or I inadvertently come across as an asshole — I apologize.
I have to laud YOU however JK. Many will have already broken down to personal attacks. These are tough, personal issues. And I would only want YOU to “know that which you reject.” What do I mean? Often times (and you know this from dealing with Leftists I am sure), that there is little understanding of the better arguments out there. For example, I would want a Democratic friend or family member (someone I care about) to read the following:
☮ The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek;
☮ Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy, Thomas Sowell;
☮ The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, Thomas Sowell;
☮ A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, Thomas Sowell;
Etc.
Likewise, I would want you to chase after the cream of the crop arguments making the case FOR MARRIAGE (hetero) so the case for homo-marriage can begin to respond. However, as you know from dealing with the Left, often times we are left with trying to fill in fallacious thinking we encounter in order to properly respond.
This may be YOUR clarion call to revisit the issue with a new mind or drive.
I will recommend a book to start: “What Is Marriage?: Man and Woman: A Defense”
It will set you on a path to see what will surely be used as a resource in the upcoming SCOTUS review of marriage.
Much Thought and Love your way JK, Papa G
[….]
PAPA GIORGIO: @HH, if I can show what you have done to the dialogue. You are attempting to mute it, a sort of non-intellectual “fascism”
⌛ “I have been saying for years the homophobes need to shut up.”
No one here is a homophobe. The following is via Prager:
——————– Here is a list of terms liberals apply to virtually every idea or action with which they differ:The “Sweep Under the Rug” Argument
And here is the list of one-word descriptions of what liberals are for:
✪ Peace ✪ Fairness ✪ Tolerance ✪ The poor ✪ The disenfranchised ✪The environment
These two lists serve contemporary liberals in at least three ways.
FIRST, they attack the motives of non-liberals and thereby morally dismiss the non-liberal person.
SECOND, these words make it easy to be a liberal — essentially all one needs to do is to memorize this brief list and apply the right term to any idea or policy. That is one reason young people are more likely to be liberal — they have not had the time or inclination to think issues through, but they know they oppose racism, imperialism and bigotry, and that they are for peace, tolerance and the environment.
THIRD, they make the liberal feel good about himself — by opposing conservative ideas and policies, he is automatically opposing racism, bigotry, imperialism, etc. ———————
You can see this played out in higher education via Indoctrinate U (full movie): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHyvRHrYYBA
[…] Small Talk […]
PAPA GIORGIO: @ SMW, JK, and GC, and MA. Since I do not know you, and my viewpoint of man (me included) tends toward selfishness, pride, and our fallen nature, I will kindly allow people I do not know — and the fact that my close friend refused to share with me his experience until we were friends enough for him to feel comfortable enough to share them with me, to tell me nothing untoward happened to them as a child. Fine. You have read in my very specified thoughts above the following:
⚤ I believe there are a whole strain of environmental causes (abuse, issues in the home, hormonal influence in and out of utero, etc.) But you must admit that one cause CAN BE taking an adolescent when they are sexually vulnerable, and damaging this delicate time in a youths life? Right?
Father issues seem to be a major CONTRIBUTOR. So do gene expressions through hormonal output in utero, diet (low cholesterol stagnates testosterone growth, high soy [milk, tofu, etc] also may have be CONTRIBUTING factor. I do not know the magic soup, but even if one were born that way, the question remains “what IS marriage.” It is not — as Danial said — happiness. [Added: the high rate of mutations in our genome since the fall: Most of the deleterious mutations in the human population arose in the last 5,000 to 10,000 years, a survey claims.]
The ideal need not be replaced. Granted, laws need to be much more open and fair to gay couples (shared property, visitation, etc) — as Ryan Anderson said in his interview (http://youtu.be/g8S9_O9Ln0M). But we are talking the big picture.
In order for the gay community to succeed you have to come out with something more than non-sequiturs and straw-men and labeling.
JK: As a preacher you are concerned foremost with religion Papa, and it’s views. As a constitutionalist I care about the views of the founding fathers when it comes to law, but I don’t really worry about things too much. Staying happy is my foremost concern.
PAPA GIORGIO: @JK, I am not a preacher? And I made the case for Natural Law, Biology, and the like? You brought up Solomon [religion], I merely corrected you on your self-admitted knowledge about the Biblical ideal. Religion has nothing to do with it.
[…] Small Talk […]
GC: I had a very strong father figure and a quite Catholic mother. She did moderately drink and smoke while pregnant with me, but that was in 1959 when that was common. My brother is ‘supposedly’ straight (unmarried), although effeminate and all his friends are gay. My sister is straight, but was a tomboy as a child. I definitely think my gayness is genetic, although I know of no aunts/uncles/first cousins who are also gay (I think one lesbian 2nd cousin). But even if environmental or by choice – as an American I do have that choice between consenting adults – right?
ES: I was molested at the Age of 11 by a 35 year old man. He dressed me up like a girl and did things to me I still detest to this day. No one knows. I feel like I can share with this group.
PAPA GIORGIO: @GC – Yes, in all my rantings lets be clear. I think you can have any relationship you want. But matrimonial law and Natural Law since Grecian/Roman/Church times has noted the new organism created when the two become one (if you haven’t read my posts above you may…. it is a lot though, I sympathize). I am also a Federalist, so I think the states have the right to make the choice themselves, or for them to change their mind on same-sex marriage. What this does is get it out of the courts and a few judges opinions and makes your community have to make a strong case. And making a strong case entails having one. Which is why many WANT unelected officials jumping in.
You can see my little “l” come out (*No* that isn’t a name for anything) in my libertarian streak in many issues that fall to the purview of the state. For instance, where conservatives should stand on marijuana: “Marijuana and the Conservative: Where Should We Stand?“
But society as a whole should not fully endorse or put their stamp of approval on the behavior either, for reasons enumerated in the post.
GC, you also asked, “Why no one turned in Sandusky?”
Shame. Guilt. A feeling that they themselves caused the situation. In the many cases of Buddhist monks, Catholic priests, school counselors, dentists, teachers, etc. (often males molesting males [per capita, males-on-male is astoundingly high], but also males molesting females), these people have often sought out positions of authority over youth where they have the opportunity of privacy and leadership over these youth.
Schools and the church try also to hide their shame by merely shuffling around these teachers due to contractual reasons, and the Church due to embarrassment. Only to prolong the abuse.
Jimmy Savile was an equal opportunity guy:
————————————————- ☁ A total of 18 girls and 10 boys under the age of 10 were abused by Savile, with 23 girls and 15 boys aged 10 to 13…. Of the 34 rape offenses, 26 victims were female and eight male. (http://tinyurl.com/ahzmgbd)
This is about where the substantive discussion petered out. I wanted to add this larger thought to elucidate the crux of the issue. that is, this debate revolves around some very important questions one should be asking, rather than simply defining marriage as “happiness,” or claim that “love” is the binding factor of what marriage “is,” or that some warped progressive view of “equality” is the way Republicans should head. Questions like these:
Disagreements over public policies regarding homosexual conduct and relationships certainly reflect different, incompatible understandings of sexual morality connected to different ‘comprehensive views.’ Underlying and informing these different understandings are, once again, profound differences about the nature of human persons and values. Is pleasure intrinsically good and, as such, a non-instrumental reason for action? Or can pleasure, in itself, provide nothing more than sub-rational motivation? Is the body an aspect of the personal reality of the human being whose body it is? Or is the body a sub-personal part of the human being whose personal reality is the conscious and desiring self which uses the body as an instrument? Is the idea of a true bodily union of persons in marital acts an illusion? Or are marital acts realizations of precisely such a union? Do non-marital sexual acts instrumentalize the bodies of those performing them in such a way as to damage their personal integrity? Or are mutually agreeable sexual acts of whatever type morally innocent and even valuable means of sharing pleasure and intimacy and expressing feelings of tenderness and affection? (Full context embedded at end)
These are questions I see none of these conservative gay men ask themselves in all my hunting around at this group. Instead, many are happy with court room interference, much to the delight of their liberal foes.
The excerpt of questions came from the book by Robert P. George, In Defense of Natural Law (New York, NY: Clarendon Press-Oxford, 1999), 213-218:
EXCERPT
III. HOMOSEXUAL ACTS, MARRIAGE AND PUBLIC REASON
If abortion is the most explosive issue in our ‘culture war,’ questions pertaining to the legal treatment of homosexual acts and relationships are emerging as the second most incendiary. Assuming that public policy issues regarding sex and marriage go to matters of constitutional essentials and basic justice, Rawlsian political liberalism offers itself as the morally best, or most reasonable, way to resolve political issues concerning homosexual acts and other questions of public policy pertaining to sex and marriage. This way avoids, indeed rules out, appeal to underlying moral and metaphysical questions in dispute among people who give their allegiance to competing comprehensive views. If Rawls is right, reasonable people who reject comprehensive liberalism in favor of views which include more conservative positions on homosexual acts and other questions of sexual morality ought reasonably to be able to join comprehensive liberals in an overlapping consensus on the proper political resolution of these questions.
Disagreements over public policies regarding homosexual conduct and relationships certainly reflect different, incompatible understandings of sexual morality connected to different ‘comprehensive views.’ Underlying and informing these different understandings are, once again, profoundly differences about the nature of human persons and values. Is pleasure intrinsically good and, as such, a non-instrumental reason for action? Or can pleasure, in itself, provide nothing more than sub-rational motivation? Is the body an aspect of the personal reality of the human being whose body it is? Or is the body a sub-personal part of the human being whose personal reality is the conscious and desiring self which uses the body as an instrument? Is the idea of a true bodily union of persons in marital acts an illusion? Or are marital acts realizations of precisely such a union? Do non-marital sexual acts instrumentalize the bodies of those performing them in such a way as to damage their personal integrity? Or are mutually agreeable sexual acts of whatever type morally innocent and even valuable means of sharing pleasure and intimacy and expressing feelings of tenderness and affection?
People’s judgments and understandings regarding these and related issues, judgments and understandings that are rarely formal and are usually merely implicit, determine their places on the spectrum ranging from various forms of sexual liberationism to strict forms of conservative sexual morality. Some proponents of moderate liberalism on questions of sexual morality oppose promiscuity and adultery but maintain that the judgment of traditional natural law theorists and others that fornication and sodomy are intrinsically non-marital and immoral is misguided. They believe that non-adulterous and non-promiscuous sexual acts and relationships between loving and devoted partners, whether of opposite sexes or the same sex, can be morally good even outside of marriage. Moreover, they argue that the state should, to be fair to people who are homosexually oriented, make marriage licenses, or at least benefits equivalent to those conferred by legal marriage, available to otherwise eligible same-sex couples.
Together with a co-author, Gerard V. Bradley, I recently debated issues of marriage and sexual morality, including the question of homosexual acts and relationships, with Stephen Macedo in the pages of the Georgetown Law Journal. Professor Macedo argues that government has an obligation in justice to its homosexually oriented citizens to issue marriage licenses on a nondiscriminatory basis to same-sex couples. If I understand Macedo’s argument correctly, he defends a conception of marriage as essentially an emotional and, possibly, spiritual union of two loving and devoted persons who may be of opposite sexes or the same sex. The intimacy and overall value of their union is, or may be, enhanced by the partners’ cooperation in the performance of mutually agreeable sexual acts. Professor Bradley and I defend an alternative conception of marriage—one which we believe to be reflected in traditional American and British marriage law, especially in the law governing consummation of marriage. We argue that marriage is a one-flesh (i.e., bodily, as well as emotional, dispositional and spiritual) union of a male and a female spouse consummated and actualized by sexual acts that are reproductive in type. Such acts consummate and, we maintain, actualize the intrinsic good of marriage whether or not reproduction is desired by the spouses in any particular marital act, or is even possible for them in a particular act or at all.
Macedo is no sexual liberationist. He evidently opposes promiscuity and believes that even consensual sex acts can, in some cases, violate personal integrity or some other moral value. Nor does he maintain that marriage is a mere social or legal convention that lacks a nature of its own and can therefore legitimately be manipulated to serve the subjective ends of individuals or the state, whatever they happen to be. He shares with people such as Bradley and me the view that not all forms of consensual sexual association ought to be recognized as marriages by the state.103 He disagrees with us, however, on questions of the nature of marriage and the role and value of sex within it.
Bradley and I summarize our argument as follows:
Marriage, considered not as a mere legal convention, but, rather, as a two-in-one-flesh communion of persons that is consummated and actualized by sexual acts of the reproductive type, is an intrinsic . . . human good; as such, marriage provides a non-instrumental reason for spouses, whether or not they are capable of conceiving children in their acts of genital union, to perform such acts.
In choosing to perform non-marital orgasmic acts, including sodomitical acts—irrespective of whether the persons performing such acts are of the same or opposite sexes (and even if those persons are validly married to each other)—persons necessarily treat their bodies and those of their sexual partners (if any) as means or instruments in ways that damage their personal (and interpersonal) integrity; thus, regard for the basic human good of integrity provides a conclusive moral reason not to engage in sodomitical and other non-marital sex acts.
Macedo denies these claims. He argues that the organic bodily union of persons we believe to be possible in marital intercourse, whether or not procreation is possible, is illusory. Thus, the reproductive-type acts of spouses cannot possibly have the unitive value and significance we ascribe to them. Marital intercourse cannot be what we claim it is, namely, the biological matrix of the multilevel reality of marriage. The most sex can do for people, beyond making it possible for them to become parents, is to enable them to share pleasure, thus enhancing and enabling them to express in a special way the caring, affectionate and intimate emotional bond between them.
Macedo also argues that, by confining humanly valuable and morally upright sex to marital intercourse, natural law theorists such as Bradley and I unreasonably exclude sex acts which, though non-marital (at least in our sense), are nevertheless humanly valuable in their capacity to express and enhance the emotional bonds between lovers. Moreover, he maintains that we are wrong to deny, as we do, that pleasure is an intrinsic good, or that the instrumentalizing of the body to the end of gaining or sharing pleasurable sensations is intrinsically bad. Thus, he denies that non-marital sex inevitably damages personal or interpersonal integrity. Bradley and I respond to Macedo’s critique of our views by arguing that his understanding of sex and marriage implicates him in a philosophically untenable person-body dualism. This is most apparent in his denial that human males and females unite biologically when they mate, and in his related understanding of sexual organs as ‘equipment’ that serves the goods of pleasure and procreation but cannot make possible a truly personal union of spouses as the biological matrix of the multilevel (bodily, emotional, dispositional, spiritual) reality of their marriage. Implicit in these denials, we believe, is the idea that the body is a sub-personal aspect of the human being that serves the conscious and desiring aspect—the true ‘self’—which inhabits and uses the body. Were Macedo to acknowledge what we believe to be the case, namely ‘that the biological reality of human beings is “part of, not merely an instrument of, their personal reality,”‘ then it is difficult to see how he could resist our claim that ‘the biological union of spouses in marital acts constitutes a truly interpersonal communion,’ whose value is intrinsic, and not merely instrumental to pleasure or the sharing of pleasure, the expression of tender and affectionate feelings, or any other extrinsic goal.
My point in recalling the debate between Macedo and Bradley and myself is not to try to settle the issues but merely to illustrate that the arguments advanced on both sides plainly implicate a body of assumptions reflective of our respective commitments to very different ‘comprehensive views.’ As a result, I suspect, people whose comprehensive view is essentially liberal will find Macedo’s argument much more persuasive than ours; those with non-liberal comprehensive views—including traditional Christians, Jews, and other believers—are likely to find our argument more compelling. Still, neither side makes any appeal to principles or propositions that are not publicly available to rational persons. Neither side invokes any form of secret knowledge or revelation. Each side offers people on the other side reasons, which such people may or may not find persuasive, for changing their minds.
My concern for now is not with the truth or falsity of the claims made on either side, or the validity of the arguments advanced on either side to support its claims, but with the relevance of the truth or falsity of these claims to the resolution of questions of public policy pertaining to sex and marriage and particularly to questions of homosexual acts and relationships. My claim is that political liberalism does not provide a workable alternative to the conflict of comprehensive views on such questions. On the contrary, law and policy in this area should be shaped in accordance with the truth and will inevitably be shaped by people’s ideas about the truth of the moral and metaphysical claims at stake in the debate among advocates of competing comprehensive views.
The case for resolving policy questions in this area on the basis of ‘political liberalism’ is articulated by Macedo himself. Although he contends that the view of marriage and sexual morality that Bradley and I put forward as a ground for public policymaking ought to be rejected as unreasonably narrowing the range of morally valuable sexual conduct and relationships, he argues, in the alternative, that our view constitutes an illegitimate ground for public policy even if it is true and the competing moral view he defends is false. The upshot of his position for questions of public policy pertaining to homosexual acts and relationships is that justice requires the state to grant marriage licenses to same-sex partners and to recognize their relationship as marital even if, in truth, their sex acts cannot be marital (or morally upright) and their relationship cannot, morally speaking, be a marriage. That is the proposition I am interested in here.
Noting that ‘it may be, indeed, that Bradley and George and I disagree . . . deeply in our understandings of what it is to have reasons for action, about the nature of goods, and perhaps even about the relationship between mind and body,’ Macedo argues that, ‘if our disagreements indeed lie in these difficult philosophical quarrels, about which reasonable people have long disagreed, then our differences lie precisely in the territory that John Rawls rightly . . . marks off as inappropriate to the fashioning of our basic rights and liberties.’ He continues:
It is inappropriate to carve up basic rights and principles of justice on the basis of reasons and arguments whose force depends on accepting particular religious convictions. So too it is inappropriate to deny people fundamental aspects of equality based on reasons and arguments whose force can only be appreciated by those who accept difficult to assess claims about the nature and incommensurability of basic goods, the relationship between intrinsic and instrumental value, and the dispute over whether pleasure is a reason for action.
Macedo’s Rawlsian argument is certainly appealing on its face. The deep moral and metaphysical questions to which he refers are indeed difficult ones about which reasonable people have long disagreed. Claims on either side of these questions are, as he says, difficult to assess. How could it be right, then, to ‘deny people fundamental aspects of equality’ on the basis of such claims? I certainly do not think it is ever right to deny people fundamental aspects of equality. The question is whether we can identify fundamental aspects of equality pertaining to marriage while prescinding from questions of the nature and value of marriage which, inevitably, implicate deeper moral and metaphysical questions of the sort that Rawls and Macedo wish to rule out of bounds as grounds for public policymaking. Macedo implicitly supposes that we can; I think we cannot.
Macedo’s claim about ‘denying fundamental aspects of equality’ can be sustained only if we presuppose the truth of his own comprehensive liberalism. If the nature and value of marriage are, in truth, what Macedo’s comprehensive view supposes them to be, then it is indeed a violation of equality to deny marriage licenses and the full legal benefits of marriage to same-sex partners. This violation occurs, however, only because homosexual partners can in fact realize in their sexual acts and relationships the same constitutive value or values (pleasure, intimacy, the expression of tender feelings) that can be realized by heterosexual spouses. No principle of equality is violated, however, if, in truth, homosexual sexual acts and relationships cannot realize the constitutive value or values of marriage—if marriage truly is, as Bradley and I contend, a bodily communion of persons consummated and actualized by sexual acts which are reproductive in type.
On Macedo’s view and on mine, marriage is an important value which society and government have an obligation to help make available to people and which the government should not deny to people who are capable of fulfilling its requirements. What follows from this, in my view, is society’s obligation to ‘get it right,’ that is, to embody in its law and policy a morally sound conception of marriage. This obligation seems to me especially stringent in view of the fact that whatever understanding of marriage is embodied in law and public policy will profoundly shape the public’s understanding of the nature and value of marriage, and, thus, affect people’s capacities to live out true marriages and participate in their value. This is an area in which moral neutrality strikes me as not only undesirable, but unattainable. The conflict of comprehensive views is unavoidable.
