"Gays aren't perfect", bigots argue against no one in particular

Why are “traditional-values groups” interested in the just-released report on the Sandusky sex abuse scandal? They saw an opportunity to use it as a weapon against gays:

And there are aspects of the entire case that both Gramley and Barber say cannot be ignored.

“Through all this we cannot ignore the fact that Jerry Sandusky’s victims were all young boys. We can’t ignore the homosexual aspect of this,” Gramley offers. “And through Graham Spanier’s tenure as president, he has brought more and more homosexual-oriented programming and events to the campus than ever before.”

Adds Barber: “There also is an element of political correctness run amok here,” he explains. “Anytime homosexuality is involved — even though in this case it’s a homosexual predator preying on children — people seem to have this innate fear that they are going to be crushed by the sexual anarchist lobby if they speak out against it.” Yet Barber says it is a fact that percentage-wise more sexual crimes are committed against children by homosexuals than by heterosexuals.

Yeah, because “homosexual-oriented programming” includes, um… child rape.

First of all, let’s not fall for the misconception that the gender of a child molester’s victims necessarily tells us anything about their sexual orientation. Contrary to what some may expect, men who molest children are, almost universally, not primarily attracted to adult men – yes, even the men who molest boys. Many consistently engage in relationships with adult women, not men. As pre-pubescent boys lack male secondary sex characteristics, heterosexual men who are attracted to them are apparently responding to their feminine qualities.

Devout homophobe Peter LaBarbera dismisses these findings and says, “Who cares if a guy is married? If he’s into molesting boys, that’s homosexual behavior. It’s academic nonsense to talk about these people as heterosexuals.” Ironically, this takes an academic dispute about the definition of homosexuality and prioritizes it over recognizing the reality of the situation. It means ignoring the facts about what sort of people actually molest children, in favor of perpetuating baseless hate against gays. And it means mistakenly eyeing the two gay guys down the block with suspicion, while believing that the heterosexuals around you could pose no risk to kids. Apparently it’s more important to attack gays than to understand what’s really going on here.

But even if we did agree that Sandusky is gay, and even if he did have a history of relationships with adult men (which there appears to be no evidence of), so what? You know what we call it when a straight person gets caught sexually abusing children? Tuesday. Anti-gay groups seem to want to assign supporters of equality a strawman position that gay people must be saintly, transcendent angels who are incapable of any wrongdoing. I suspect this is the flip side of their inability to see us as fully human – they deeply and comprehensively fail to grasp that LGBT people actually are just like everyone else, warts and all. Yes, sometimes gay people are going to molest children. And that’s unspeakably horrifying. But this doesn’t constitute an argument against homosexuality, any more than straight people who abuse children are an argument against heterosexuality.

As for the claim that anyone would be afraid to report child sexual abuse because the abuser was (supposedly) gay and some all-powerful gay lobby will destroy anyone who tries to stop gay people from raping children: Where does this come from? What basis could this possibly have in reality, however remote and tenuous? Has this ever happened? Even for the anti-gay movement, this is an extraordinary allegation. What is their evidence of a “sexual anarchist lobby” that seeks to intimidate people from taking action against ongoing child abuse? How can they possibly justify suggesting that gay people support the unhindered raping of children? And what makes them so certain that scary, scary gays were the reason that Sandusky was able to continue preying on children for so long?

What?

If you’re looking for a real “sexual anarchist lobby”, how about the thousands of Penn State students who were so irrationally devoted to a fucking college football program that they literally rioted when Joe Paterno was fired? They weren’t rioting in protest of his failure to take appropriate action on reports that Sandusky had raped a child. They were rioting in support of him.

These aren’t the gays you’re looking for. You utter twits.

"Gays aren't perfect", bigots argue against no one in particular
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Maggie Gallagher: “Sustaining civilization itself”

Maggie Gallagher on “Debating Same-Sex Marriage”:

I wish I had better news for you. It’s not everyone of course, but it’s many people trying to establish a new public norm that make the traditional, Biblical understanding of human reality the moral equivalent of racism.

Combining truth and love is not easy. But it is our job, no matter how difficult.

I hope you will read Debating Same-Sex Marriage and tell me what you think. (It’s a trade paperback, so just $11 on Amazon).

Share with me what you have learned—and what you need to know—about how to combine faithfulness to the truth with love, compassion and respect for human suffering.

We need each other for many reasons, but not least of all to prevent us from withering into the caricature that too many gay marriage advocates see. This is a great work, the work of sustaining civilization itself.

Maggie Gallagher: “Sustaining civilization itself”

Maggie Gallagher: "Sustaining civilization itself"

Maggie Gallagher on “Debating Same-Sex Marriage”:

I wish I had better news for you. It’s not everyone of course, but it’s many people trying to establish a new public norm that make the traditional, Biblical understanding of human reality the moral equivalent of racism.

Combining truth and love is not easy. But it is our job, no matter how difficult.

I hope you will read Debating Same-Sex Marriage and tell me what you think. (It’s a trade paperback, so just $11 on Amazon).

Share with me what you have learned—and what you need to know—about how to combine faithfulness to the truth with love, compassion and respect for human suffering.

We need each other for many reasons, but not least of all to prevent us from withering into the caricature that too many gay marriage advocates see. This is a great work, the work of sustaining civilization itself.

Maggie Gallagher: "Sustaining civilization itself"

Religion is insane. Insane.

From USA Today comes this remarkable question: “‘Test tube babies’: God’s work or human error?” Elaborating, they ask: “Do you think a baby conceived in test tube is still a child in the eyes of God?”

As always, it’s interesting to see how neatly nontheism collapses questions like these. They are not “God’s work”, nor are they a “child in the eyes of God”. Nobody is, because there is no god.

That probably wasn’t the kind of answer they were looking for, though. But there can be no useful answer here, because the question itself is wrong. It’s based on an irrelevant attribute – the location of fertilization – which they pretend has some bearing on an entirely fabricated property: whether a person is a “child in the eyes of God”. The very idea is nonsense. How is such a property defined, and how can they tell if anyone possesses this quality in the first place? What makes you so certain that you’re a “child in the eyes of God”? Such a trait has no apparent effects or physical manifestations, yet they treat it like it’s just another potential birth defect to watch out for: “Ten fingers, ten toes, child of God…”

Clearly, whether someone is a “child in the eyes of God” can’t be reliably determined, because it’s not even meaningfully defined. So why does it merit any consideration, and why should it have anything to do with what we consider a person to be? Is there any real difference between someone who was conceived in a test tube, or a Fallopian tube? It seems the only differences are the ones we’ve invented, kind of like saying someone doesn’t have a “soul” if they were conceived in North Dakota instead of South Dakota.

It’s a shame that major publications would play along with this obvious game of make-believe like it was a serious issue. This only serves to lend credibility to religion’s fiction by treating it as if it has any actual relation to reality. If you really think a baby is somehow special or metaphysically different in some ineffable way because it became a zygote while inside a woman’s body, you’re just wiping off the El Camino.

Religion is insane. Insane.

WHAT? TWENTY THOUSAND!?

I’m subscribed to the American Family Association’s mailing list, since I like to keep track of what they’re up to – I suspect many people are subscribed for the same reason. Today, they sent yet another riveting missive: “An unusual request from American Family Association”. My immediate impression was, wait a minute, everything they do is unusual by any rational standard. Like calling Home Depot the “Homo Depot”, which I’m sure is really amusing if you’re 12. Their latest cause, however, actually is pretty unusual:

With your help, YouTube has agreed to feature an AFA-produced patriotic video on their front page!

A few months ago, AFA commissioned Christian songwriter/singer Eric Horner to write a moving patriotic song to honor our national motto, “In God We Trust.”

Without any fanfare, we posted it on YouTube. The response was so overwhelming that YouTube called us to find out what was going on!

The fact is, the video is patriotic and inspiring, and it shares the message of faith. People love it!

YouTube has told us that if we can get 20,000 people to watch the video, they will feature it on their front page. That means that the tens of millions of people who visit YouTube’s website each day will be offered the opportunity to watch the video – a video with a Christian message!

Okay then. First of all, if your video currently has fewer than 20,000 views, YouTube is not going to be calling you about it. Maybe if it was 2 or 20 or 200 million views, but it’s still rather implausible that YouTube would actually call you to “find out what’s going on”. (YouTube, being YouTube, would likely have a better idea of that anyway.) It is possible that they would email you and invite you to enroll your video in the Individual Video Partnership revenue-sharing program so that they can run ads on it. But this is fairly common and part of an automated process – it isn’t that exceptional.

Getting 20,000 views on a video may seem like a lot, but in an absolute sense, it’s still not especially significant. For instance, an above-average video of mine might get 20,000 views. This has happened many times, and it’s not such an “overwhelming response” that anyone was calling me about it. Just for a sense of scale, here are a few select YouTube videos and their respective view counts:

This is what your anvilicious Christian takeover anthem, now sitting at 51,076 views, is up against. Good luck!

Now, as for their video being featured on the front page of YouTube if it gets 20,000 views, this is almost certainly false. That’s not a guarantee that it will appear on the front page, and that specific number likely has nothing to do with it. There are videos with both higher and lower view counts that are listed in the featured section of the front page, and YouTube has stated that featured videos are now selected by an algorithm, not manually chosen. As for including them in the spotlight section of the front page, it seems unlikely that YouTube would choose to place a controversial and partisan message front-and-center on the site. That’s something they tend to shy away from. And even if they were willing to do so, a threshold of only 20,000 would mean having to feature millions of other videos which meet that same requirement.

However, it’s quite possible that their video will be featured in general, which is distinctly different from being highlighted on the front page. According to a YouTube employee I met with, videos that are enrolled in the revenue-sharing program are automatically entered into the pool of videos that can be “featured”. Videos which are marked as featured aren’t necessarily featured on the front page; they can be displayed as featured at the top of the related videos on an individual video page, or alongside search results. Many of my own videos have been featured in this way despite having fewer than 20,000 views, often being placed atop the pages of people criticizing me – which they just love.

In any case, there’s no assurance their their video actually will be shown on the front page, and 20,000 views is a pretty low target to meet. It’s hardly an “overwhelming” response – for me, that’s just a decent day on YouTube. If anything, I’d expect their video to get more views from being mirrored on one of the many channels that ridicules tacky religious nonsense. Aim high, guys!

WHAT? TWENTY THOUSAND!?