When You Start From False Premises

...you will inevitably arrive at false conclusions.

The next chapter in Esolen's tirade has been posted, and he continues his illogical reasoning in grand style.

He starts off with the following doozy - which is riddled with false assumptions:

9. In one crucial respect the social acceptance of homosexuality makes matters worse, not better, for the homosexual himself.

If my body needs protein, it will not do to try to fool it with starches. If the male homosexual needs a true male friendship, and affirmation as a man, he will not attain it by adopting the pose of a woman. That stands to reason.

The assumptions he is making in here are astonishing. First, is the utterly ludicrous assumption that gay men (in particular) are somehow effeminate and assuming the "feminine role" in a relationship. I can only imagine that he is deriving this from the ages old stereotype of the gay male being exaggeratedly feminine. In part, this is no doubt because the only kind of intimate relationship Esolen is capable of considering is the classical "male/female romantic pairing" - which is as stereotypical in form as what Esolen assumes a gay male relationship must be. I have only come to know a handful of gay couples in my life, but none of them has been the masculine/feminine stereotype that Esolen's wording implies.

The second key error in Esolen's reasoning derives from his previous post - that is the assumption that homosexuals are either socially isolated as children, or they did not receive 'adequate' male bonding as children. As I pointed out back here that assertion is utter nonsense.

He follows that up with the following piece of pseudo justification for being an obvious bigot:

f people understand that some folks are unfortunately attracted to members of their own sex, and if, while they neither seek to reveal it nor feel compelled to punish it, they make it known as a matter of cultural custom that they do not approve of it, then the homosexual is provided with a sane and merciful curb on his behavior. That explains why homosexuals seem to plunge further and further into the bizarre and self-destructive, precisely in those places where bigotry against them is slight or nonexistent.

... homosexuals themselves admit that they delight in being what they have called “transgressive,” that is, literally, crossing the boundaries of what is decent or even speakable.

First of all, again he is stereotyping gay subculture behaviour, without actually having the faintest clue what he's talking about. He fails to recognize that by far the majority of homosexual couples live amazingly quiet, pedestrian lives. The "show" that is put on for "pride" parades is deliberately exaggerated, intended to dispel the very myth that GLBT people are some kind of uniform stereotype.

The second thing that Esolen is doing is assuming that anything other than his own behavioural norms is somehow destructive. Of course, out of his vaunted, monogamous heterosexual "norms", we get stories like this on a regular basis. We won't go into the myriad of infidelities, child abuse and other activities that go on every day.

Suppression is neither sane, nor merciful, when it is destructive to people's mental well being. When the APA removed the diagnosis of homosexuality from the DSM in the 1970s, it was recognized that the psychological problems most homosexuals face actually arises from the treatment they receive at the hands of the "majority", not from their romantic and sexual identities.

Following from that fallacy, Esolen plunges into his next error:

AIDS is only one disease in a panoply of ailments that the male homosexual suffers, through abuse of his body. Perhaps the reader should pause to consider why hepatitis is so common a killer of homosexual men.

Ah yes, the stereotype of the homosexual as disease-ridden. AIDS is most unequivocally not a "gay disease", in spite of what Esolen claims. If one looks around the world, it rapidly becomes clear that AIDS doesn't care about your sex, sexual orientation, race, or anything else. In Africa, AIDS is endemic, and most monogamous women are infected by their promiscuous husbands who don't see anything wrong with a little recreational sleeping around.

Then, cutting to his final argument:

10. It spells disaster for children.

Our society has been corrupting childhood for a long time now, all under the pretense of good hygiene.

Why have we forgotten that it is crucial to our emotional and intellectual development that sexual feelings be latent while we are children? It frees the time for what is then more important: learning. In the first instance, the boy learns to be a boy and then a man, so that afterwards he can marry; and the girl learns to be a girl and then a woman.

I'm not at all sure where he thinks he's getting this from. First of all, homosexuals are not automatically pedophiles, nor are they running around "recruiting" children - there is exactly no evidence that one can "recruit" or otherwise manufacture someone else's sexual identity.

At worst, normalizing homosexuals as part of our society might result in a child seeing an openly gay couple on occasion. Speaking for myself, I grew up as part of that first generation where homosexuality itself was no longer considered criminal conduct. The idea of someone being openly gay doesn't bother me, nor has it ever done so. I fail to see how gay couples are going to cause any significant problems for children. Among other things, we have to be honest, and recognize that the numbers of GLBT people in our society is a very small fraction of the overall population indeed.

However, let's let Esolen try and clarify things for us, shall we?

This social learning is short-circuited by a forced precocity in matters of sex. Other forms of learning are short-circuited too. The boy who at age fifteen is not interested in girls may well be forging his way through calculus, or learning to take cars apart and rebuild them from scratch. The girl who at age fifteen is not interested in boys may be devouring the novels of Charles Dickens.

Okay - first of all, at the age of fifteen, most teenagers are walking collections of hormones. However, I'm going to dissect this a little further, because Esolen is making yet another egregious assumption that is just plain wrong - namely that of social roles.

Boys play with cars or mathematics, girls with literature. Assumptions like this just irritate me from the start. Some of the best software developers I have known have been women - and trust me, software development is nothing but applied mathematics. One woman I am honored to know very well indeed knows more about printing presses and how to make them run than a lot of pressmen that have worked for her. None of these women lack for being feminine, and yet their interests are way over Esolen's arbitrary gender role lines. Another lady I know from work has a husband who stays at home to look after their young children. He knows the local coffee klatch better than she does - and usually knows more about hairstyles and fashion as well. In his spare time, he does house renovations. The social "rules" we apply to gender roles are artificial at best, and generally speaking incredibly arbitrary.

The argument then proceeds to claim that normalizing homosexual relationships will foist upon children an identity crisis:

Would we of all people not want instead that our children should not even think seriously about the opposite sex until well into their teenage years, at the earliest?

But if homosexual “marriage” is accepted, there can be no such wise deferral. We will be visiting a crisis of identity upon every child in our society. That in fact is the intention of many homosexual activists, whose revenge upon the children who were once cruel or indifferent to them is to afflict other children with doubts, to make them endure the questions that they themselves endured.

My goodness, this man must be amazingly blind to the activities of teenagers then - or he underestimates their ingenuity. While we might not want it to happen, teenagers quite naturally experiment with their sexuality throughout their teenage years. Everybody knows of the guy or girl in their middle or high school years that was bragging about their "conquests" in bed. It happens - don't assume that it has anything to do with their sexual identity.

The gay rights world does not wish to foist upon others the very crisis of identity and the pain that it caused them as adolescents and young adults. By opening society to the reality that already exists, we stand to gain far more by inviting the GLBT members of it to be active and full contributors to our world. When people like Alan Turing are driven to suicide by society's abuse of them, our world is that much poorer for it.