Thursday, July 09, 2009

Of Bibles, Marriage and Overactive Imaginations

In the wake of Diane Ablonczy's recent faux-pas that has likely terminated any chance of ascending the ladder of Stephen Harper's cabinet, I find this little turd floating in bowl of the internet.

It appears to be an attempt to justify opposition to gay marriage because ... well, apparently men are beasts if they aren't in the company of women:

Homosexual male culture is the way it is because it centers upon encounters between men and men alone. Everything that's most animalistic about men when they are not in the company of women has an excellent opportunity to emerge to the fore.


Ummm...sure. Right. Somehow, this doesn't quite mesh with any of the gay couples that I have known, but then I won't say I'm wildly familiar with their bedroom encounters.

But, beyond the blithe suppositions that the author starts with about gay male behaviour, it's what he posits will happen if the US allows gay marriage.

... But then he goes on to describe the rest of his lifestyle, which is not exactly domestic. I'll spare you, but one detail caught my eye.

I had previously assumed that in his "marriage" he and his boyfriend are monogamous. Not so. Savage writes about how he would like to detail their adventures but his "boyfriend" vetoes the idea.

What was I saying about those tenets of sexual adventurism? Oh yes, that they may please Dan Savage and many other gay men. Sexual sterility goes inevitably with their lifestyle. Even in a "marriage" like Dan's, monogamy isn't expected. And there's no necessary limit on lurid public expressions.

Monique, don't you see? Girls and women were hurt by males with increasing and heartbreaking frequency as the Sexual Adventurist Code of Values was progressively adopted since the 1960s as the norm among heterosexual males. No, we didn't need homosexuals to teach us these things. It was old fashioned heterosexual adventurism. Many women are still paying the price.


Well, let's just think about this for a moment. Sexual promiscuity in men has been met with a nudge and a wink for centuries - going back to the earliest recorded civilization. Among the Romans, the men of the house bedding slaves, the neighbor's wife and whomever else happened to be convenient was tacitly accepted - mostly because it meant that there was less chance of a woman being perpetually pregnant. An early, and crude form of family planning, but planning nonetheless.

Of course, since the 1960s, what has happened is that women have started to assert that they have a say in whether or not they want to have sex, and when they want to bear children. Something that has long offended the holier-than-thou crowd.

But there's a real problem with the writer's implicit assertions. First, he seems to believe that men are incapable of managing their sexual desires. This is blatantly false, and as has been pointed out in numerous sexual assault trials where the defense tried to claim that they "couldn't help themselves" because of how the victim was dressed, an line of reasoning that is simply insulting to both men and women.

But now gay activists want society's seal of approval on their lifestyle, and it is, on average, far more extreme in its adventurism. And you think that will not encourage heterosexual men and boys to keep on hurting women as they do now, or worse? If homosexual males treat each other that way, with their activity officially endorsed by the government, why can we heterosexual males not relate to you, heterosexual women, in a similar fashion?


Wait a second, here. How can you possibly make such a leap with any intellectual honesty? Let's just consider something for a moment. Homosexual couples have been a visible and tacitly accepted part of our society since the 1960s. To the best of my knowledge, the rates of domestic violence have not substantially changed; and if he is referring to subjects like marital breakdown, well, I don't think you blame that on the homosexuals somehow.

Imagine a man and a woman, of impeccably heterosexual tastes, with an open marriage on the Dan Savage model. Every woman with a brain in her head knows that in such a relationship, she's likely to be the one who gets hurt.


Ummm...I hate to point this out, but heterosexual couples have engaged in "swinging" for a lot longer than a few decades. It may have been quietly hushed up, but rest assured that it went on. This is perhaps the great irony of the entire construct of marriage - it creates a set of boundaries and rules for people to live by, and the first thing that half of them seem to want to do is find ways around those rules. (and don't get me started on the delightful church practice of "indulgences" and other ways to sidestep supposed scriptural prohibitions!)

No, sorry, but blaming homosexuals for the infidelities and abuse that happen in heterosexual relationships is simply stupid.

However, the article's author in a subsequent writing goes on to describe women as sluts. Well, I suppose it fits into whatever weird idea of relationships the author has. Sadly, I think he's spent to much time with his nose buried in scripture, and not enough time looking around the world and reveling in the diversity that resides here.

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