Once More Down The Rabbit Hole

Well, I see that the next chapter in Esolen's diatribe about the evils of homosexuality upon society is up. This guy's unreasoning gets more amusing everytime I read it.

7. It seals us in a culture of divorce.

In the United States, nearly half of all marriages will end in divorce. It is hard to see how any community can survive the resulting breaking up of homes, the smashing of friendships, the jumble and shuffle of neighborhoods, and the underlying assumption that human beings are not to be trusted.

That's quite a leap - divorce has been around for almost as long as the human concept of marriage has been. The Church of England was created because the Pope at the time refused to grant King Henry a dispensation for yet another divorce and remarriage.

I somehow think that blaming gays for the problems that married couples routinely encounter is a wee bit of a stretch.

And again, that is exactly what the no-fault divorce laws failed to do. Divorce swept the land like a plague, and brought untold misery in its wake. And no-fault is patently unjust: very often it subjects the wronged party to the whim of the guilty; it rules out of bounds the most commonsense considerations in matters of the custody of children; and it reduces marriage to a status some miles below that of a business contract.

Spoken from a position of utter ignorance, I'm sure. Contrary to this nitwit's claims, the "no fault" laws have served some very positive purposes - such as enabling both parties to remain a part of their children's lives even after a divorce has been finalized.

In a few, very fortunate cases, the no fault provisions in divorce law have enabled both partners to build new relationships in the aftermath that are every bit as healthy and productive as the happiest marriage.

Those who claim that it is always better for the children for a couple to remain together have no idea just how screwed up a family can become in those circumstances. The kids know that their parents aren't getting on with each other, and possibly even resent each other as a result. Children are not stupid, and either way pay the price. Some couples can make the "stay together" routine work, others cannot.

Moving along, the author then goes into what he supposes happens in gay relationships:

And what about homosexual adultery? We have been informed by the homosexual activists themselves that people’s expectations in this regard will have to change. Male homosexuals do not remain faithful to one another, in the sense that they do not so severely restrict their sexual activity. But if a certain looseness is granted to the male homosexual, when his jealous lover chooses to “divorce” him, why should the same benefit not be accorded the male heterosexual?

This is a truly amazing statement. I have no idea where he pulled this fiction from. Once again, it is the classic "argument by supposition" that you couldn't possibly support in any real sense. I don't have any population studies at my fingertips that examine the stability of gay relationships, there are clearly plenty of cases of long term, extremely stable gay relationships that have lasted decades - until one of the partners died.

Considering the frequency with which heterosexual relationships collapse due to infidelity of some sort or another, one has to suspect strongly that sexual infidelity is hardly a trait unique to homosexuals, and it is silly to condemn gay relationships because of it.

Then, he moves onto his next point:

8. It normalizes an abnormal behavior.

That it is an abnormal behavior is clear to any disinterested observer. It hardly needs mentioning that the male and female bodies are made for one another, in obvious ways, and in more subtle ways which medical science is only beginning to discover.

This is a doozy. Starting with the obvious hints - once again - at regulated sexuality, the assumption that homosexuality is "abnormal" is a very flawed argument. Starting with the fundamental notion that it's abnormal simply because only a minority of the population applies.

I will turn to the words of Olive Skene Johnson to elegantly debunk this:

The Myth of "Majority Means Normal"

This is based on the belief that large numbers are superior to small ones. "If the majority of people are a certain way, then obviously that must be the right way to be; why else would most people be like that?" It's inevitable that the next step is to brand those who aren't in the majority as the abnormals. "Isn't it obvious? If this were a normal guy like me and practically everybody else, he'd be cruising chicks instead of other deviates."

Curiously, it rarely occurs to these people to apply the same logic (illogic) to the right- and left-handed people. "Practically everybody's right-handed, so left-handers must be abnormal, disgusting. Let's force them to be normal." Most Western people, of course, no longer hold that view of left-handers, whereas disapproval of homosexuality is still thriving.

p. 216 The Sexual Spectrum, by Olive Skene Johnson

Then he goes on to play theoretician:

will discuss below what causes the behavior. For the moment, let us remember what is required of a scientific theory.

My goodness, this man is truly full of himself. Over a century of modern psychology / psychiatry has yet to even scratch the surface of the most basic of human behaviours, much less something as complex as our relationships and sexuality. Let's see what he has to say...

Now the theory that homosexuality is caused by one’s genes is based on the simple, though shaky, assumption that human behavior is wholly determined by genetics. Otherwise it violates every qualification for sound science.

Setup part #1 - let's set up the straw man of "it's all genetic". First of all, twins studies have long ago called question upon a purely genetic explanation - after all identical twins are genetically identical - if one was gay, the other should be as well if we were dealing with a purely genetic issue. No big deal, I've never been impressed by purely genetic explanations of human behaviour - there's usually a lot more involved in something as complex as a human being.

The author spends most of the next few paragraphs debunking his straw man before moving onto his ideas:

I accept the word of male homosexuals who say that they have always felt attracted to other males. There is no reason to doubt them on this. They believe that this attraction makes them different from their brothers -- and this is where they go wrong. The plain fact is that all boys have a deep need (again, this is something hard to explain to women) for male acceptance and affirmation. All boys are attracted to the athletic, the popular, the gregarious, the cheerful, the clever boy, or man, as the case may be.

There's a few things here that are real whoppers. First of all, his supposed "universal need" on the part of boys for "male acceptance and affirmation". Recalling a bit of first year formal logic, "for all X" arguments are extremely dangerous to use when making sociological or psychological arguments - usually because it's not terribly difficult to dig up at least one exception to the supposed rule.

Second, is his generic statements about being "attracted" to the popular/gregarious/etc. This merely demonstrates that Esolen is arguing solely from his own boyhood memories.

Third, this sounds suspiciously like a variation upon the mechanics of some of Freud's theories about sexual identity. While I respect Freud's works, I've always found some of his generalizations a bit troubling.

Then, he proposes that homosexuality is therefore a problem with childhood trauma:

That is the single assumption I make; and even homosexuals unwittingly testify to it. From it, all else follows. For suppose the boy has a cruel father, who makes fun of him for being slow or fat or clumsy. Or suppose the boy is naturally shy, and is rejected by the local boys -- and can only watch their rough games resentfully yet longingly from the kitchen window. Or suppose the boy’s older brothers ignore him, and he watches in envy as they catch the football or flirt with the pretty girl. Whatever the cause, suppose a boy who is rejected by the most important males in his life: the neighborhood boys, or his brothers, or, most perilously, his father.

My god, I can't even begin to express my astonishment at this resurrection of a long dead set of assumptions. Among the more brain damaged attempts at logic that I've ever seen, this is the classic - and incorrect screed - that you can imagine. For example, using his logic, homosexuals are social isolates, and utterly unathletic. Nothing could be further from the truth - it's hard to imagine Olympic Swimmer Mark Tewksbury grew up living on "the outside" of a relatively normal boyhood.

Proceeding along his merry little way, assuming the correctness of his ill-chosen assumptions, he leaps into the following conclusion about male homosexual desires:

What the male homosexual longs for, sexually, is what every male needs, and that is simply affirmation by other men. It is to know that you belong, you are a man, you can be relied on in a fight, you have what it takes. If a boy is given this affirmation, then, barring a rape or something else unspeakably bizarre, he will not become a homosexual. This too is a plain fact: it is a sufficient condition for the nonappearance of the syndrome. If a father affirms his son physically (for the rough touch of a good father’s love is never forgotten by the son), then the son will identify with the father. He will know he is a boy, to follow his father in marrying a woman and having children by her.

So, you've been inside the head of every male homosexual out there, have you? Horsefeathers.

The assertion here is amazingly simplistic - gay males must have grown up in an environment where their fathers didn't treat them "quite roughly enough" or something equally silly that prevented them from "bonding" correctly with other males. Explain to me then, how it is that a family can raise some number of sons, and arbitrarily one of them is gay? Or among twins, how one is gay and the other isn't?

Really, if you are going to play psychologist here, you could at the very least read a little of the material out there beyond the crap that people like Paul Cameron spew.

Thus male homosexuality is a corruption not of the relations between men and women, but of the relations between men and men: it is an aberrant eroticization of male friendship. And that explains the unimaginable promiscuity.

Once again, I refer back to my quote from Olive Skene Johnson earlier - why is it he insists on arguing that this is abnormal. Millenia of human history have repeatedly shown that it occurs in every society throughout recorded history - why on earth would we possibly believe that it is abnormal? Worse, he then tries to turn it into a "socialization problem", and then claims that somehow that links it back to promiscuity.

Since heterosexuals are rather promiscuous beings themselves (as evidenced by the seemingly unending stream of "sexual experiments" between couples, whether they are married to one another or not; "swinger clubs", and goodness knows what else that goes on that I've not heard about, it seems utterly baseless to claim that homosexual promiscuity is unusual sexual behaviour.

On the topic of human identity - gender and sexual identity in particular - Esolen errs repeatedly by assuming that he has even the faintest idea of the thoughts and feelings of sexual minorities that he criticizes; worse, he makes blanket assertions about the population that are not sustainable when put up against the observable evidence that is available. He claims to make a "scientific" argument, but then turns around and fails to substantiate a single assertion with credible data. It's obvious that he hasn't even read the "popular psychology" materials on the subject, much less anything even vaguely academic.