Exploring the Irrational - Next Chapter

Back here I spent a goodly amount of time dissecting an attempt at a non-religious argument against SGM. A return visit today turns up the next part of this screed posted.

Having already established that the author is not really writing against SGM, but in fact is writing against both feminism and the sexual revolution, there will no doubt be some more amusing assumptions.

3. It will drive a deeper wedge between man and woman. ...In my own lifetime I have witnessed the last petering out of a tradition of song and poetry that had lasted eight hundred years, from the troubadours of Provence to its last and decadent efflorescence among the rockers of the 1960’s.

In the continuing saga of linking unrelated topics, the author is clearly claiming that the elegant poetry and music he so personally admires is dying out, and is blaming it all on feminism and sexual liberty. Quite an amazing reach frankly. Although I don't care for some of the music that today's teens listen to, I'd hardly call poetry and love songs "dead".

Oh, wait, now we get to the author's attempt to link this back to SGM:

It is simple: the acceptance of homosexuality is predicated upon the tacit assumption that male and female are not made for one another. It defines male apart from female, female apart from male; or it leaves those terms free-floating, without definition. Young men and young women already are growing up without understanding what they are to be for one another.

Wow - that's quite a leap. From love songs to gender and social identity, the author then claims that allowing homosexual people to marry is going to rip asunder people's natural sense of self and their attraction to one another. That's one hell of a huge semantic leap to make. Of course, the author is assuming that the social changes he is so worried about can be isolated to a single cause. It is a sadly naive oversimplification to assume such things - human society is far more subtle and nuanced than a single-cause explanation of any phenomenon will allow for. I doubt that SGM is going to cause the 95% of the population that is heterosexual to lose their sense of identity...

Leaping from the politics of music and identity, the author makes yet another tenuous link, blaming declining birth rates on the changes of the last few decades:

In no western country does the birth rate now assure even a replacement of one generation by the next; in many countries, the birth rate is so low as to constitute a slow and numb despair, a resignation to cultural suicide.

The argument that the birth rate is too low to replace the current population is horribly flawed. Among other things, it ignores the "baby boom" population bubble that has been trickling through since WWII ended. While this will no doubt create numerous challenges for society, it seems horrendously naive to blame birth rate issues on the feminist and gender revolutions - and it is virtually impossible to see how allowing homosexuals to marry would cause marriage to end. If marriage is truly as endangered as these people think, then perhaps allowing SGM is the best thing we can do as a society, for the example becomes one that couples get married.

Moving right along, the author then claims:

4. It makes a mockery of chastity.

I just can't get over this one. The "anti-gay" lobby has squawked incessantly about how promiscuous gays are, and when the gays want to enter into marriage, with all of its social implications around fidelity and chastity, they complain about how allowing this will be the end of this "value" - the illogic is astounding. Does this moron think that homosexual spouses don't feel betrayed when one of the pair "plays around" outside of the couple? Look at "standard" Christian marriage vows - among them are clear commitments to monogamy and faithfulness. How in the world is allowing SGM going to change that?

... Chastity is the virtue of using one’s sexual desires properly. Since the act that is biologically designed to produce babies has the predictable propensity to, well, produce babies, and since the desire to perform that act is one of man’s strongest and most violent drives,...

Hang on a second here - once again, we return to the underlying anti-feminism/anti-sexual revolution screed of this argument. Sex might be "about making babies" on some biological level, but that doesn't explain why it is wired into the pleasure centers of the brain of both sexes, does it? God knows, if this were the case, women would _want_ to be pregnant all the time - and I cannot think of a single woman I have ever met that wants to be perpetually pregnant.

Unlike the author's last rant, he does try to tie chastity back to the gay marriage debate:

In particular, how can we even talk about chastity when we accept homosexuality? For a homosexual defines himself or herself by the action. A teenager calls himself homosexual because he has performed homosexual acts. It is utterly incoherent to suppose that we can ever recommend to “straight” teenagers a chastity that must be violated by the homosexual in order for him to define himself as such. What homosexual could possibly “wait until marriage,” even if such “marriages” were made legal?

This paragraph is amazingly rich in its stupidity - allow me to dissect it one piece at a time:

First, is the assumption about homosexual identity. I can't even begin to describe the stupidity of this assertion - how is it that a homosexual would identify themselves in terms of "the act", and a heterosexual would not? The assumption is ludicrously false. Talk to a few homosexuals for a while, and you will quickly realize that they define their sexual identity in terms of romantic interest, not sexual acts. They often struggle with the fact that they are "different" for years, but their core identity as people is hardly centered around mere sexual acts. This is, of course, the classic conservative christian screed that the homosexual identity is a matter of choice and couldn't possibly be rooted in someone's core identity - an assertion that I argue is unreasonable and untenable when confronted methodically.

The next statement is the classic "virgin at marriage" issue. Since society has rarely expected males to be virgin at marriage, it's fairly safe to assume that this really is an anti-feminist argument at its roots. In the past, and in many cultures, not being a virgin at marriage could be fatal to a young woman. It's an amazingly naive assumption to believe that people don't have sex before marriage, and even more naive to believe that women are any less sexual creatures than men. (Of course, there's no "easy" way to tell if a young man is "still a virgin" - and in an era where sex toys are readily available, a young woman might well fail the "standard" virginity test, even if she has never taken a lover. Goodness knows, we can't have women enjoying themselves, can we? I don't deny chastity, nor do I despise it - but I'm also not so incredibly naive as to believe that who someone loves has anything to do with their ability and desire to be faithful to that individual. Chastity is akin to "abstinence" sex ed rules - it's a truism to say that it works, but it is another thing altogether to assume that humanity as a whole practices it. Again, I point repeatedly to the double standard applied to men and women through many societies past and present - and I must conclude that chastity is at best an ideal, and far from being a practical reality.

Once again, the reasoning presented in these latest two arguments is mostly irrational button-pushing that assumes causal relationships that are nearly impossible to prove. Linking, for example, chastity to SGM is possibly among the most ridiculous of connections - based in an understanding of gender and sexuality that predates modern psychology. (and ignores practical, observable reality)

Just as people used to believe that a dead animal generated flies (quite wrongly), the conservatives claim (equally wrongly) that all of society's ills are caused by some specific evil. It amazes me how allowing one social minority group to participate in the greater body of society can be argued as leading to the destruction of all we know.

Society changes - that is perhaps the one constant in our world. No society has remained static for any length of time. Human knowledge grows, and our understanding of the world grows with it. Knowledge itself brings change. Just as we laugh today at the notion of the world as a flat disc, it seems to me equally foolish to blame feminism, the sexual revolution or gay rights of "society's demise" - society is not ending, it is evolving - and like all human endeavors it is imperfect.