I sometimes wonder if I just need to stop reading the internet. Since I returned to the world of mass media (i.e. this morning) I have been made sequentially angry by 9 things, and was planning a fairly serious In Brief about them until the 10th thing came along and just overwhelmed my capacity to think for a while.
I haven’t seen anything like this in a while. In brief, the SciFi (or possibly SyFy? WTF?) channel got criticised for being behind the curve on presenting homosexuality in an appropriately neutral way. They Did the Right Thing ™ about this, and apparently outraged some idiots by responding appropriately and swiftly to having it pointed out that they’d been acting like bigoted fucks.
I’d never heard of John C. Wright before. Apparently he’s a DC lawyer, which makes him dangerous. From what he says, I suspect he may also be a Fundamentalist puritan; he certainly seems to have slept through the Enlightenment altogether. From an inauspicious beginning:
The head of Sci-Fi channel has contritely promised to include more homosex [sic] in future shows, and to do it nonchalantly, just as if this abomination is normal and natural and worthy of no comment. The shows will not actually come out and say sexual perversion has no bad side effects. They won’t actually lie and tell you homosex won’t destroy your life. But they will imply the lie.
… WTF? He goes on to explicitly equate homosexuality and consensual sado-masochism with…
Love affairs with corpses, small children, and farm animals will also be on display in a natural nonchalant fashion in the new raft of progressive shows
Consensual adult homosexuality is equivalent to incest, paedophilia, necrophilia and bestiality? Really, counselor?
Someone explain to me by what series of events persons with serious sexual-psychological malfunctions would somehow be awarded the status of moral arbiters, something like priests and confessors and sages
So, being gay is a “serious sexual-psychological malfunction”, is it? Er, I’m fairly sure that even your legendarily bigoted and socially conservative nation figured out this wasn’t true some 35 years ago.
Is an irrational lust and longing to mimic the mating act with a sex with which one cannot mate, at its root, any more or less disconnected to reality than an irrational fear and hatred of a Negro? How do we know race-hate is not genetic?
Oh, right, so in fact this is just a fundy rant; homosexuality is not genetive and it is therefore an abomination? Failure of logic, Mr. Wright. We’re already over-populated; sexualities which are not genetive are a survival trait right now. Much more importantly, even the bloody bonobo monkeys have figured out there’s more of the social to sex than there is of the conceptual (see what I did there?).
Others are better able to deconstruct this idiot than me. One of them is Hal Duncan, whose rebuttal is detailed, erudite and written in a fantastic parody of the pseudo-intellectual language employed by John C. Wright.
I regularly look at someone’s opinions and think, “Well, ok, you’ve not been exposed to some basic concepts here, so I can understand your philosophical delusion”. The child raised by evangelical fundamentalist parents, who has never been permitted access to non-Fundie television programming, pop music or books; this person is going to be a bit confused about homosexuality. They’re likely to believe it is something only men do, that gay men are 100% coherent with paedophilic men, and so on. Such a person may, if they employ their mind and gain access to real information rather than propagandist fantasies, be able to acquire an education. Someone may be able to teach them to think, some day.
John C. Wright is a lawyer, and as such a public figure. He works in DC, which last time I looked contained something like 1/10th of the total number of lawyers on the planet [1]. He must, by the nature of US legal training, have been exposed to real information about homosexuality; he must have received an education in ethics. No Washington lawyer can possibly have avoided contact with the basic doctrine of human equality.
Therefore, a man in Wright’s position who holds the view that homosexuality is a psychosis equivalent to paedophilia, parent/child incest and necrophilia, can only hold such opinions via a conscious act of will. This man has declared to the world “I am a practicing idiot: I am as bad as George W. Bush when it comes to ‘evidence-based’ reasoning. I am what is wrong with America, and I’m proud of it”.
[1] Circa 2000 I read that the US of A had perpetrated just over half of the species’ total lawyer problem. Given that about one fifth of the lawyers in America at that time worked in DC I arrived at the idea that Washington contains circa 10% of the world’s lawyers. This could have gone up or down during the Bush years without me noticing.
No comments:
Post a Comment