In the West today, it’s not always easy to know which side has the most victim points. If Muslims persecute gays, who do you condemn? If a black Seventh-Day Adventist doctor-preacher condemns homosexuality and popular culture, who do you side with?
The answer is that you will rarely go wrong in America today if you side with the gays as the most oppressed group in human history.
If you get confused, consult Kevin Roderick. He’ll let you know who the good guys are. Kevin writes: “Folks around Pasadena don’t really want their director of public health bashing gays, Catholics, Muslims, evolution and popular culture from the pulpit. But in the state of Georgia? No problem! The Star-News says that Dr. Eric Walsh submitted his resignation to the city on Wednesday. He had been on leave since You Tube videos surfaced of his scapegoating sermons at a Seventh Day Adventist Church in Pasadena, leading Pasadena City College to wish they had not invited him to give the school’s commencement speech.”
Pasadena City College instead had the prestigious screenwriter Dustin Lance Black address them.
Tom Daley recently lost his 40-year-old father, may he rest in peace. Daley is now 19 and, being young and good-looking, the subject of widespread fanfare in the gay press, from Queerty to Thinkprogress. All the homosexual outlets were abuzz when the teenage athlete announced he was dating a man, even though he didn’t want to identify as gay. A British paper broke the news that the mystery lover was actually Dustin Lance Black, over twice his age, who is right around the same age as Daley’s father upon the latter’s death.
Ironically, Dustin Lance Black won a 2008 Academy Award for the screenplay based on Harvey Milk’s life. Harvey Milk, who has been falsely lionized by the gay rights movement, was a criminal pederast.
I spoke with my friend who lives near me in LA, today. He’s straight but we know a lot of gay men in our social world. He told me, pointblank, he is against gay male couples adopting boys at any age. His reasoning? He can’t trust the gay male subculture not to use foster care and adoption as a means of finding fresh boy meat. I was hurt upon hearing these words, because I don’t think that being a gay or bisexual man means that you are automatically going to prey on teenage boys. But what can I say in response to him? We know from the case of Woody Allen that even famous people have been shameless enough to sleep with people they adopt. It just so happens that gay male culture treats the whole affair with such casual indifference, even reveling in the sick, twisted predation in all of it, that I feel, finally, like I have nothing to respond to my friend’s assertion.
I can hear right now the response from the pro-gay press: “But Daley’s nineteen, so he’s legal.” People who say things like that just prove that the gay male community has a lot of growing up to do. Toying with a nineteen-year-old’s sexual identity, when the person is still at a tender age, still not secure enough in himself to piece together what homosexuality means, or even know why he’s embarking on such a risky erotic journey — that’s just wrong. And until I see gay writers in Queerty and Thinkprogress acknowledging that this is a problem with the gay male community, I can’t deny that I feel uncomfortable with this, almost at the same level as my friend. A community led by people like Dustin Lance Black, a community that thinks this is normal and acceptable, is simply not a community that is prepared to have custody over defenseless pubescent boys.
Yes, it’s true that heterosexuals commit terrible sexual crimes — but heterosexuals make up 98% of the country, and for the most part, they have a guilty conscience and express disdain over blatant cradle-robbing like this. When Bill Clinton cheated on his wife with an intern half his age, he got impeached and disbarred–it would be a false canard to say that straights think this is okay, so gay people ought to get a pass. A critical mass of gays think it’s all very sexy. Remember that the case of Tyler Clementi came and went, without the gay press focusing on the culpability of the 30-year-old man–or indeed any of Clementi’s earlier Internet liaisons–who found it thinkable to go into a freshman dormitory and sodomize a boy who looked like he was about fifteen years old, regardless of whether he was technically “legal.” This worries me a great deal, because the statistics we have on gay male couples show that a large number of them have open marriages, where they bring third parties into their relationship for additional sexual release.
In my dealings over the last year with family members of children raised by gay male couples, as well as the children themselves, a recurring theme is that the gay dads leave their pornography around, leave around pornographic pictures of themselves, have threesomes or even larger orgies in the house while the teenage child is locked in their room, or speak in vulgar ways about sex in front of their charges. Often the ex-wives who have to see this are aghast. The children are traumatized by it. Relatives are alarmed. In some cases, the third party brought in for the “threesome” feels queasy when he realizes there’s a kid in the house. But we aren’t supposed to address these things, because we’re told these are all isolated cases, and anyway it’s wrong to stereotype.
The Daley story, like the Tyler Clementi and Caleb Laieski stories, and like the Mark Newton and Frank Lombard stories, however, reminds us that our fears aren’t actually founded on stereotypes. A gay male couple will, in most cases, have ties to the gay male community at large. And we can do a basic cultural analysis to understand the norms and understandings of the gay male community. It is a community that simply doesn’t have enough restraint or self-criticism when it comes to sexual activity that’s bad for children. I’m uneasy about mixing all of this together.
What we need is a good, stern speech from Jimmy Stewart.
