Tag Archives: homophobia

What “Being Gay Isn’t Natural” Actually Means

Every time you say “people say being gay isn’t natural, but [insert case of animal homosexuality here], which proves that it’s natural, and anyway we use [insert technology here] which isn’t natural” an angel gets lit on fire.

Okay, probably most of the Christian people who say “being gay isn’t natural” actually mean something along the lines of “being gay doesn’t exist in nature.” That is because most people don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to Catholic theology. (Also, every time they say that? Two angels.) (If they’re Catholic, anyway. Protestants can say any damnfool thing they like. Damn schismatics.)

“Being gay isn’t natural” is not actually a statement about nature, it’s a statement about natural law. Basically, St. Thomas Aquinas ripped off Aristotle’s idea of the telos, which is basically a thing that any given thing is supposed to do (for instance, knives are made for cutting). He argued that God made everything with a telos and that through reason we can discover the telos of things and then use them in accordance with the purpose God made them for. This is called the “natural law” because you can deduce it from nature, as opposed to the law God revealed.

Catholic theology of the body argues that the genitals have a twofold telos: the unitive purpose (i.e. the bonding of lawfully wedded spouses) and the procreative purpose (i.e. making babies). Every time you have sex, you have to fulfill both teloi, or it violates the natural law. It is, in most circumstances, impossible to have children from homosexual sex; therefore, homosexual sex is immoral. (This is also why the Catholic church opposes birth control. Now You Know ™.)

Now, there are lots of arguments you can make against this thought process, started with “the telos doesn’t actually exist” and moving on from there. “Gay animals exist” is not one of them. Now stop using it, because I have a flamethrower and those angels are fucking trembling.

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Why Orson Scott Card Should Keep His Job

You are absolutely free to buy or not buy Orson Scott Card’s Superman comic or tickets to the Ender’s Game movie. It’s your money, you’re allowed to spend it however you like, and “I don’t want to watch anything written by a homophobe” is exactly as valid as “I don’t want to watch anything with a romance subplot” or “I don’t want to watch anything with Bendydick Cummingsnatch in it, I hate his face.”

But I think that it’s wrong to petition DC Comics to fire him or to refuse to stock his books in your store. (I was wrong about this– see comments.) 

Firing Orson Scott Card punishes the wrong thing. Not giving money to Orson Scott Card doesn’t punish being a homophobe; it punishes being public about being a homophobe. Homophobic authors who never wrote about their homophobia are not going to suffer from the boycotts. Personally, I don’t want the homophobes to be quiet about their homophobia, smugly self-satisfied about how oppressed and persecuted they are by the pro-gay mafia. I want them to stop being homophobes. I am unclear how harming Mr. Card’s career will persuade him that homophobia is wrong.

Second, I believe that it is wrong to punish writers with loss of career for expressing controversial ideas.

You know why? Because “homosexuality isn’t a sin” is controversial. Because “black people should learn to read” was, and “atheists should be allowed to testify in court,” and “people other than white male landowners should have the right to vote,” and… look, name anything we consider obviously a good idea, it probably went through a period of being controversial. “A lot of people dislike this idea” is absolutely no evidence about whether it’s a good idea or not.

The only way that anyone has figured out to sort out whether controversial ideas are good or bad is to argue about them until a majority of people are convinced. In order to argue about ideas, you have to have people who are willing to support them. And you’re not going to have that if the smartest and most articulate supporters of any given idea– that is, the writers– are punished for expressing ideas that disagree too much with what the majority holds sacred.

–Of course, it’s possible that you just happen to be the only person on the entire planet who is magically correct about everything, in which case you can infallibly sort out which controversial ideas are good and which controversial ideas are bad and punish anyone who disagrees. How lucky we are that you have this power.

I suppose you could say “well, free and open debate is all very well for some things, but homophobia hurts real people! We should stigmatize beliefs that hurt people!” On the other hand, it was the consensus belief for a long time that accepting atheism would lead people to become atheists and thus suffer an eternity of torture in hell. Homophobia does not cause eternal torture. “Yes, but they were wrong about that.” And how the fuck would they have known that they were wrong about that unless atheists were allowed to say their piece?

If homosexuality, as Mr. Card believes, risks destroying society itself via destroying the institution of marriage, this is information I would like to have. At the moment, I have read the best arguments anti-homosexuality people have to present, and I have found them scientifically and anthropologically laughable, morally bankrupt, and utterly unjustified unless you accept the premises of a certain brand of Christianity. But I am glad that I had access to those arguments, and I oppose anything that is going to significantly punish people for offering them up.

Pro-Equal Marriage Is Not A Fucking Privileged Position

I am so fucking tired of shit like this:


[Cartoon of gay and straight couple doing normal things like cuddling and shit, with caption "Gay Marriage: Why The FUCK Is It Illegal?" Commentary on side: "Let's queer this shit up. If equality = assimilation count me OUT. I am NOT normal. And I am fucking proud. Rad queer pride. Gay marriage: Why the FUCK is it the priority?"]


[Protest sign that says "Sleeping on the streets or walking down the aisle? It's time to start prioritizing LGBT youth."]

Obviously, I’m not saying that LGBT youth homelessness isn’t a serious issue; it is. So are employment discrimination against LGBT people, violence against LGBT people, access to trans health care, and HIV/AIDS. But there is this bizarre tendency among some people to believe that marriage only matters to rich cis gay men who want to have a giant floofy wedding and be just like everybody else. That being pro-equal-marriage is a “privileged” position and people who are really aware of social justice issues don’t care about it.

Noooooope. Let us review some of the advantages (for Americans; non-Americans will have different advantages) of marriage!

  • If your same-gender spouse dies, you can’t get Social Security survivor benefits; if you are not the biological or adoptive parent of your child and the biological parent dies, you don’t get Social Security survivor benefits to take care of the kids. This disproportionately affects poor people, since rich people are less likely to need Social Security benefits to make ends meet. 
  • The government gives tax breaks to couples who are raising children. If your child isn’t your biological kid or adopted by you (and adoption by an LGBT person can be hell in a lot of states), you don’t get those tax breaks, which means you have less money to take care of your kid. Again, affects the working poor a lot more than it affects the rich.
  • Employers are not required to offer family leave to people so they can take care of a sick, injured, or disabled domestic partner or family member of a domestic partner. This disproportionately affects disabled people, since– hey– turns out we need more caretaking than abled people do!
  • Spouses of people in the US can immigrate to the US. Your same-gender lover? Doesn’t count as a spouse! Like a lot of immigration issues, this disproportionately affects the poor (who can’t afford lawyers to work through the immigration bureaucracy) and people of color.
  • Employers who offer health care for domestic partners get taxed more than those who just offer it for spouses, which makes them less likely to offer health care to domestic partners. They’re also not required to offer former employees continued coverage for domestic partners the way they are for spouses. While you’re pretty privileged if you have employer health care, this still hurts the middle class more than rich people. Not to mention how necessary health care access is for disabled people!
  • Turns out you can get a lot of the same rights as a married couple if you hire a lawyer to draw up the contracts. Guess who can’t afford a lawyer? Poor people!

I realize that social justicey people don’t like talking about disability and poverty, because poverty and disability aren’t cool and sexy issues that you get all kinds of cool points for talking about. But they matter. It matters when you run the risk of never seeing your life partner again because neither of you can immigrate and you can’t afford a plane ticket. It matters when you can’t get leave to take care of your partner who’s dying of cancer or just out of the mental hospital. It matters when your partner dies and while mourning them you have to find some way to make ends meet without the Social Security checks you’d been relying on.

It also helps that a lot of the people criticizing “assimilationism” are young. A lot of the benefits of marriage are things like Social Security and parenting and family leave, things that young people usually have no lived experience with. It’s easy to think that marriage is just about “being the same as the breeders” when you’ve never experienced any of the ways it isn’t.

Furthermore, if you talk about the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell as a concern of super-privileged queers, and don’t talk about how the military is one of the few options for poor, rural people to make a middle-class income, I will fart the word “intersectionality” in your face.

P. S. First dude! As a polyamorous nonbinary queer sex worker who has a lot of Words to say about the way our culture constructs relationships, very few of them kind, I am probably as “anti-assimilationist” as you. But you know what? I want to get married, I want to help raise children, and even if I didn’t I stand in solidarity with those who do because there is no fucking wrong way to be queer. I refuse to limit other people’s choices so you can feel super-special and revolutionary because of whom you want to bang.

Platonic Affection and Trevin Wax

Lately a lot of atheist bloggers have been making fun of Trevin Wax‘s theory that gay sex is bad because men can’t be bros without being mistaken for gay anymore. And to be fair there are a lot of really laughable aspects to his theory: for instance, he seems to believe it is some kind of Inevitable Law of Nature that when one person gets more free someone else gets less free. (Maybe that explains the whole “we’re propping up dictators to protect our freedom” aspect of US foreign policy. America is just trying to hog all the freedom for itself.)

Despite that… well, I kind of agree with him.

Wax is right that many same-sex friendships avoid displays of affection for being thought of as “gay.” Of course, this is the result of homophobia and the fact that far too many people think of “gay” as an insult, not the natural result of gay people being public about their sexual orientation. But then he’s a homophobe clutching at increasingly desperate straws, what do you expect, rational argument?

There are very few ways of expressing affection in American culture that are not instantly read as romantic. “I love you”? Romantic. Snuggling or holding hands? Romantic. Thoughtful little just-because presents? Romantic. Commitment to maintaining your relationship over the long term or even spend your lives together? Romantic. Agonizing about whether to break up with someone, or crying into your ice cream when you fight? Romantic.

So therefore we tend to assume that all really intense friendships are really sexual or romantic. See the idea that men and women can’t be friends, the people who refuse to allow their romantic partners to be friends with people of the same gender as them and, yes, the homophobic fear that being friends with someone of the same gender makes you gay.

American culture makes a lot of really toxic assumptions about friendship. For one thing, we tend to assume that a romantic relationship– even if new and fragile– is always and everywhere more important than a friendship– even if old and deep. Sometimes the friends themselves believe it and end up ditching their friends for a romantic relationship only to return after the inevitable breakup. For another, many people seem to believe that friendship is something that diminishes in importance as you get older. In middle school, your best friend is the most important person in the world, and in college, bros before hos (fistbump); but soon enough prioritizing friendship means you’re a manchild who refuses to grow up, and you wind up forty years old with no friends but your spouse.

I agree with Dean Spade‘s wise words that we need to move towards treating friends more like we treat lovers and lovers more like we treat friends. To have boundaries with and reasonable expectations of our lovers, and to value, commit to, and deeply cherish and invest in our friendships.