Rod Dreher says he is so not obsessed with gays and anyway God says that gaydom is bad so he's right to be obsessed with gays.
I have an idea. Let's see what else the Bible says about sex. Okay, if you capture a woman during war you can have sex with her. So our soldiers who raped Iraqi women were a-okay. If you have sex with a married women, you both die. If you have gay sex, you die. If a man rapes a virgin he must marry her. If a childless woman's husband dies, she must have sex with his brother. If you can't have kids, you can have sex with your slaves or servants to have a child. If a mob wants to rape your house guest, you can offer them your virgin daughters instead. And of course you can have as many wives and slave "wives" as you wish.
All that's right there in the Bible, and yet somehow I haven't been to a Newt Gingrich stoning lately. Maybe we discard what we don't like and keep what we like, and maybe that's the sane and equitable thing to do. Or maybe we can just cherry-pick whatever pleases our egos and demons, and try to force everyone else to go along with our obsessions and fears.
I went to Rod's blog out of curiosity but, you know, the fact that he thinks he's scored a huge rhetorical victory by pointing out that a gay man often talks about being gay and gay issues just says it all.
ReplyDeleteI hate it when people use religion to hide their distaste for male gay sex. The fool has to hide behind a priest's skirt to avoid admitting that he has sexual hang-ups.
ReplyDeleteWhat's weird is it's not actually distaste for gay male sex. Rod was one of the first people I told I was gay, long ago before he went nuts. He's watched gay men having sex. Reposting comment with that story below.
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Of course many people assume that Rod’s homophobia is something he feels deeply, an ingrained revulsion. Not at all. If he feels genuine homophobia now, he has worked very hard to acquire it.
In fact he probably has convinced himself that his position is somehow more noble because he’s had to struggle against his own natural inclinations not to feel this way. Repost below.
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What is even stranger: Rod’s discomfort with homosexuality is feigned. So much so that it almost rises to the level of the demonstrably true.
Rod and I attended a residential high school in Louisiana. He was one of my best friends. In a school like that, where you’re kept on such a tight leash, you really get to know your friends. You’re locked in together at night, you go away on weekends trips together, you are always in each other’s company. I got to know his family and he got to know mine.
When we were 16, Rod was one of the first people I told I was gay. Rod was a self-described screaming liberal and was more than supportive.
As high school guys do, we talked about sex frankly. He never displayed the least bit of discomfort, and we went into the usual, American-Pie level of detail.
We kept in touch after high school. I started to hear rumors some kind of conservative conversion but found it hard to believe.
Then I read a review he had written about a gay-themed movie. Suddenly he’s claiming that the mild, r-rated gay sex scenes made him cringe.
Cringe??
That’s simply dishonest. Rod and I went to mardi gras together. We stayed in my parents apartment in the Quarter and hit all the gay bars all night long.
During Mardi Gras, guys are having sex all around you. Didn’t bother Rod a bit.
(Please, do not read here that I’m suggesting it should have bothered him.)
So I’ve seen him watch a lot of actual gay sex, in very good spirits. We hung out for hours and hours in places where this was going on.
But then, at the beginning of his career as a right-wing journalist, he plays the blushing puritanical boy? As in “gross man, those guys are doing it!”
Of course you could say this is exactly the kind of “decadence” he came to hate. Maybe.
It always seems strange, though; forced. But that’s not really my point.
He cannot claim to be a cringing naif, someone who could be so deeply disturbed by a mainstream movie.
Chimes at midnight.
We haven’t spoken since a mutual friend found out that Rod had actually voted for George Bush. Customarily, quite a few of us would spend the weekend together at this friend’s house. His vote for Bush was enough of a shock to us that it fell apart. Imagine that: being shocked that Rod voted for Bush.
That is something I can't understand. If he doesn't act out of conviction why does he do it--to help his career? People like Coulter and Limbaugh repeat what their parents said, but if Dreher is not doing that, he was either converted by some event like 9/11 or is just faking an entire career.
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