More Problems with Claudine Gay

 

Will she bring Harvard down with her?

Hockey Night on the CBC

 

According to this piece from the CBC, NHL players are “ostracizing” gay and transgender people by not wearing rainbow “gay pride” jerseys. We should perhaps be happy they do not go so far as to call it genocide. Brian Burke, of the Pittsburgh Penguins, insists that resistance on religious grounds makes no sense. He was, he says, born and raised a Catholic, and “I don’t see any conflict” between Catholicism and affirming—not just tolerating, but affirming, or, to use his exact word, “honouring”—gay sex.

Anyone who knows the catechism of the Catholic Church knows he is simply lying, or apostate. 

Paragraph 2357: “Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.”

Paragraph 296: “Among the sins gravely contrary to chastity are masturbation, fornication, pornography, and homosexual practices.”

The CBC interviewer, supposedly neutral, asks two gay advocates the leading question, “do you think religion is being used to disguise bigotry?” No advocate for religion, or for the dissenting players, is invited to give their point of view.

But one of the gay spokesmen gives the game away. Cyd Ziegler emotes, “I grew up Christian. I grew up hating myself, because I was gay. Because I felt that I would go to hell for eternity.” Bayne Pettinger agrees with him an endorses what he just said.

Obviously, then they know perfectly well that they are in opposition to Christianity and Christian beliefs. They know that Christianity teaches that gay sex, or endorsing gay sex, leads to hell. They are not prepared to live and let live; they want to ostracize Christianity from the NHL, or crush the conscience of individual Christians.

Cyd Ziegler insists otherwise: “The players have the right not to wear the jersey, if their teams allow it. But guess what? I have the right to criticize them.” 

This is a false parallel. The players are not criticizing gay sex. His demand is that they affirm it, or face criticism. There is a difference between objecting to speech, and objecting to silence. He wants compelled speech.

For a proper comparison, think of requiring the players to wear a scarlet A to affirm their support of adultery, or requiring them to endorse on camera theft or the telling of lies. Or, conversely, imagine him as a gay man required to come on the CBC to condemn gay sex; or risk losing his job and his livelihood.

The important and most interesting question here is why homosexuals and transvestites cannot be satisfied with tolerance, and insist on universal public affirmation. Why do they need to compel assent? Why, for that matter, do they need “gay pride parades”? Why do they even need to “come out of the closet”? Straight people, after all, have no parades on the topic of sex, and are content to and expected to remain in the closet their entire lives, keeping their sexual interests behind closed doors.

It is presumably because they have a guilty conscience. Gays and transgenders must constantly be reassured that they are not doing anything wrong, precisely because they at least suspect they are doing something wrong. And because the problem is their own conscience, they can never be satisfied by any speech or action taken by any other. Their demands will just keep escalating. And they will grow more hysterical, beginning to speak of “revenge” and “genocide.” Ultimately, quite possibly, leading to egregiously violent action, like shooting small children in a Christian school. For the Erinyes pursue them, and they are relentless.

Orestes pursued by the Erinyes

The Pride Parade

 

June is “Pride Month.” It used to be “Gay Pride Month,” but now it’s for pride in general.

Why does every town and city, even smallish ones like Kingston Ontario, hold an annual pride parade? 

It is not, after all, that there’re are so many gays.

But that’s just it. 

Imagine the problem for gays. You are physically attracted to people who, at least ninety-nine times out of a hundred, are not going to be attracted to you. More often the reverse; they will be repulsed at the thought of sex with you.

Not great for the old morale. How on earth are you going to hook up?

For this, the Pride Parade is most useful. There you are, out in public, advertising your availability. Or, if you lack the nerve, in the crowd, seeing who might accept an approach.

This is why we are disproportionately inundated with gay culture. If you’re gay, you gotta advertise. 

In the modern age of Tinder and such dating apps, the need to parade in public semi-nude ought to abate. And perhaps we can all get back to our dignified inhibitions.

Not-Gay Milo

 

Milo Yiannopoulos has come out as straight.

Of course this is heresy. We are supposed to believe that homosexuality is a permanent part of a person. Gender may be fluid, but for some reason, not sexual preference.

I know at least one former gay personally who has gone straight. Kathy Shaidle claimed that every homosexual she knew back in high school later went straight. Perhaps your experience is similar. But, as in so many things these days, we must remain silent and deny our doubts. Public people keep telling us that, after living most of their lives as “straight,” they have decided they are really gay. It is absurd to think the transformation can only work one way.

No previous generation supposed there was such a thing as a “homosexual.” There were only urges for homosexual sex, perhaps indulgence, and perhaps addiction to it. Some prefer redheads. 

Were our ancestors, who did not suppose homosexuality was an inborn thing, all fools and idiots? What is the statistical probability of that? 

How does innate homosexuality survive the mechanism of Darwinian evolution? Wouldn’t a genetic condition that prevents reproduction be promptly bred out?

The ancient Greeks assumed that men would practice homosexual sex, at least until marriage. So were all Greeks “born that way”?

Yiannopoulis speaks of it now as an addiction: like alcohol. I think this is exactly right. 

I had always presumed it comes from some early sexual experience with an older homosexual. Yiannopoulis has suggested this was true for him in the past. But in a recent interview with LifeSite News, he gives a possible second factor:

“When I used to kid that I only became gay to torment my mother, I wasn’t entirely joking.”

Perhaps some young men are attracted to homosexual sex because they are repulsed by heterosexual sex. And they may be repulsed because they have suffered sexual abuse.

Allen Ginsberg rather hints as much in his case, remembering his mother in his poem “Kaddish”:

Serving me meanwhile, a plate of cold fish—chopped raw cabbage dript with tapwater—smelly tomatoes—week-old health food—grated beets & carrots with leaky juice, warm—more and more disconsolate food—I can’t eat it for nausea sometimes—the Charity of her hands stinking with Manhattan, madness, desire to please me, cold undercooked fish—pale red near the bones. Her smells—and oft naked in the room, so that I stare ahead, or turn a book ignoring her.

       One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to herself at sink—lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—What, even, smell of asshole? I was cold—later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps—that way. Would she care? She needs a lover.

I have another acquaintance who became a lesbian seemingly because she was sexually abused by her father.

Yiannopoulis now plans to advocate for “conversion therapy”—officially now illegal in Canada.

It works, he maintains, so long as it has a religious basis.

“Secular attempts at recovery from sin are either temporary or completely ineffective. Salvation can only be achieved through devotion to Christ and the works of the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.”

He surely goes too far in saying this is possible only through Catholicism; but Alcoholics Anonymous too maintains that overcoming addiction is only possible through appealing to a “higher power.”

This is why psychiatry and psychology cannot cure mental illness. All they can do is drug down the symptoms. In former days, mental illnesses were regularly cured. They still are in less developed countries, where they still resort to religious methods.

This is not to say that mental illness is caused by personal sin, or by anything justly referred to as addiction—in most cases. But, like addictions, it involves settled habits of thought.

George Michael in Hell

A bit of anti-Christian propaganda came down the Facebook feed of late. Twice, from two different sources. So I guess it’s getting good distribution.

Maybe there really have been comments somewhere that Michael is damned because he was gay. None are cited. But they certainly would not be in accord with Christian doctrine.

To be fair, I can only speak definitively for Catholicism here. Protestantism, with thousands of denominations, has no clear voice on anything. It is probably possible to find a self-declared “Protestant” who believes almost anything you choose, and accepts no higher authority to gainsay it.

But then, you need to be specific, and not call “Christian” a doctrine most Christians would consider heretical. Otherwise, all possible human views become “Christian.”

First off, for Catholics, nobody is certainly damned. Repentance is always possible. Accordingly, nobody is damned for, at any point, “being gay.” Damnation requires not just sin, but a final and definitive turning away from God. That’s what purgatory is about.

Second, “being gay” is not a sin. Homosexual sex is--as is any sex outside marriage, and any sex not open to having children. This includes extramarital sex, using artificial birth control within marriage, or masturbation. Or, for that matter, coveting your neighbour’s wife. Or looking at a woman with lust in your heart. Homosexuals are not singled out as sinners here. One might just as well say that being heterosexual is a sin.

Which is exactly why everyone feigns to care so much about supposed discrimination against homosexuals here. What it is really all about is heterosexuals wanting free license for lust without feeling guilty about it. If they can convince themselves that the church’s teaching on sex is just prudishness, they can salve their conscience.

You want sin? There is one unforgivable sin. That is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

That is, misrepresenting religion in an attempt to mislead.

The Gay Gene

Old cigarette ad rendered confusing by new euphemism.

A correspondent recently wrote, in response to a column by my columnist friend Xerxes, “I find it amazing that in this age people do not understand that our sexuality is not chosen, but part of the genetic package we are born with.“

Here is another of those things that “everybody knows” that are not true. Generally deliberately planted for political purposes.

In the 1980s and 90s a notion reached its peak that human behaviour could be explained genetically. I guess the “gay gene” was the leading factor, but alcoholism, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and all sorts of other things were also posited to be genetic. Among other advantages, this let a lot of people off the moral hook: either for indulging vices, or for driving others mad. So it was an easy sell to the popular culture.

It was always ever a speculation, mostly wishful thinking, but it was seized upon and presented as an established scientific fact. Periodically, The papers even announced that a “gene for schizophrenia” or “gay gene” had been discovered. But none of those studies could ever be reproduced. Unfortunately, the first claimed discovery was news. The later retraction was not. Many people have been left with the impression that the science is settled.

As time marches on, with many researchers searching for these genes, and as our knowledge of the human genome grows exponentially, we still have not discovered any of these genes. It grows increasingly likely that they do not exist.

Gee—people are not robots. Who knew?

The “gay gene” although always the most popular of these hypotheses, was also always the least probable. For a “gay gene” to exist, Darwin would have to have been nuts. No small issue. If natural selection is real, any gay gene would have died out in a single generation. It would prevent reproduction. Bad evolutionary strategy.

The “gay gene” became popular dogma largely because many believed it gave “homosexuals” an inalienable right to homosexual sex. One was born gay like one was born black. So objecting to gay sex was simply prejudice.

Given that only perhaps 3% of the population has any interest in having gay sex, why did this become such a popular issue?

Because it meant that conventional moral codes, notably Catholicism, were guilty of prejudice. So, presumably, they could be ignored, discarded, and everyone could do what they want. Most notably, I suspect, abort unwanted children, allowing unrestricted sex without responsibility.

At the expense of accepting that you were an animal, or a robot. For some, a small price to pay.

So if it is not genetic and inborn, how does one become gay? After all, the great majority of us have no temptation at all in that direction. Quite the reverse.

If one is not “born that way, the obvious alternative is nurture. Opening up a disturbing possibility. What if a desire for gay sex is triggered by a nearly gay experience? That seems entirely plausible. How many of us, after all, spend the rest of our lives until marriage looking for someone who reminds us of our first girlfriend? After all, how are we to explain other sexual fetishes? Can you be born with a sexual attraction to shoes, or to uniforms?

In other words, people may become gay because they were “groomed,” seduced into a homosexual experience at a young age.

This seems to have been the conventional wisdom, until recently, about homosexuality and how it came about until quite recently. In ancient Greece, an older man would recruit a young male lover. In English public schools, an upperclassman would recruit a younger “fag.”

So what if our ancestors were right?

Homosexuality, if there is a choice, is both socially and individually desirable. Most notably because it does not lead to children. Also because it seems to be an efficient way to spread disease. But it also cannot be a pleasant life to be sexually attracted to people 97% of whom are going to reject your advances out of hand.

So what is the obvious solution? The temptation must be very great to seek out a younger person, someone quite inexperienced, barely aware of what sex is about, and in any case smaller, weaker, and socially less powerful than yourself, and lure then into an encounter.

And now one begins to see why homosexuality has traditionally been prohibited in almost all cultures.

The issue is not really sex between two consenting adults. Even where the prohibition still applies, in countries like Saudi Arabia, that seems to be nobody's business. It is the automatic probability of what we now call “hebephilia.”

The modern concept of taking homosexuality out of the closet, and recognizing gay marriage, may be a viable and more humane alternative to banning it: make it easier for gays to find partners, and there will be less incentive to hunt among the young.

But let's see things as they are.

An LBGT Breakthrough in the Philippines

Filipino transvestite

Apparently there has been a great breakthrough for the LBGT community in the Philippines. This article appeared recently in the UK's Daily Mail: “Transgender politician is poised to become the first LGBT politician in staunchly Catholic Philippines where same-sex marriage is illegal.”

Where do I begin?

Apparently most Brits, or Canadians, or Americans, have no idea. The truth is, transvestitism is far more acceptable in public in the Philippines than in Britain, Canada, or the US, and always has been. Just turn on the TV. A lot of top performers in the Philippines are transvestites of the most campish sort. Or take a trip downtown in any largeish Filipino city, and not see at least one transvestite.

You will not often see transvestites walking alone in broad daylight in Britian. Canada, or the US, outside “pride” parades. They would, I presume, risk being spat upon, or beaten up. No such fear in the Philippines, even though the overall crime rate is much higher. You want to dress like a woman, it's your own damned business.

Filipino transvestite being awarded "Miss Queen International" title.

This highlights a crucial difference between Calvinism and Catholicism. Being ignorant of religion generally, the secular public of Britain, Canada, and the US do not understand. This leads, in turn, to a lot of prejudice, and a lot of lousy policy.

Homosexual sex is, of course, in Catholicism, sinful. So is refusing to accept one's natural sexual identity. But then, a lot of things are sinful in Catholicism. The ultimate result is, we are all sinners.

For Calvinists, by contrast, to call someone a sinner is to condemn them to hell. You are either saved, or not saved, by divine fiat, and there is nothing you can do about it. If you are saved, you will not sin; you cannot sin; whatever you do is not a sin. God has preordained it. You are born with a white hat, or a black hat. So wear a bra once, as a man, and, if it is acknowledged as a sin, you are doomed to the outer darkness.

There used to be a pop song back in the Seventies, a Christian crossover hit, with the lyrics “Never been a sinner/ I never sinned./ I have a friend in Jesus.” Sounds good to a Calvinist. To a Catholic, sounds more like Lucifer. It is the sin of pride.

To a Catholic, denying that you have committed sin is the biggest sin. Therefore, it is anathema to Catholics to say that transvestitism is not sinful. On the other hand, sin is not that big a deal; we all sin, and the key to everything is forgiveness. Why do you think Jesus died on a cross? You do not condemn, but you do not say it is right.

In practice, a far more comfortable way to live life as a transvestite than in Britain or North America, either forty years ago when crossdressing was sinful, or now, when everyone has to publicly say it is a good thing.

No doubt it is true that no transsexual has ever before been elected to the Philippines congress. This is no evidence of popular resistance to the idea: transvestites are, after all, a miniscule proportion of the population, perhaps 0.03%. It is far more likely no qualified transvestite has ever stood before. If a political party representing the interests of the LGBT community has never elected a member, this too is unsurprising in the real world. When you represent a special interest group that is going to be about 0.03% of the population in any constituency in which you run, why would you ever expect to be elected?

Filipino transvestite

Especially since the Philippines has lots of real problems. One of the big ones appears in the article, but is not even commented on. You will note that Geraldine Roman has not, in fact, been elected. Nevertheless, the writer of the piece can and does take it as a foregone conclusion that she will be. Why? Because she is the scion of the “big family” in the area. She is inheriting her mother's seat.

There is a real problem: behind the mask of democracy, the Philippines is still a thoroughly feudal state, and Filipinos feel they owe their vote to their seigneural master. But this, apparently, is “progressive” so long as that master wears a chemise.

When was the ruling class not effeminate?

The Philippines's official entrant in the Miss Universe 2015 competition. Yes, she is a transvestite.

Before we go, one other thing. The headline assumes that not recognizing same-sex marriage is some sort of discrimination against gays. It has no more to do with discrimination against gays than what the Philippine president ate for breakfast this morning. It is a question of definition: what is marriage? The intolerance is obvious, surely: if you do not conform and think in lock-step with me, you are a bigot. It is a paradox, but a typical position on the left.

Some Common Sense on Homosexuality

A good piece here, making a few important points:

1. homosexuality is a dangerous practice
2. bullying is not about gays in particular
3. homosexuality is often (maybe always) due to sexual molestation when young
4. people really can go from gay to straight. In fact, most "gays" do.