On homosexuality

As a person with a probably smaller than normal sum of empathy, and as a person who tends to look at the world with an INTJ clinical detachment and often a lack of patience with the emotional hang-ups of others that prevent them from seeing the world clearly the way that I (believe that I) do, John C. Wright's comments here are a very good lesson to me.  

I've been watching the hit/smear job on Milo, as has anyone who reads most of his news at Breitbart and sees more hope in the alt-right than the failed traditional conservative posture.  Stefan Molyneaux, who approaches things from a similar standpoint as I do, released a video on it.  And Mr. Wright's comments about the video were perfect.  I immediately, of course, caught on the the fact that it was obvious that Milo's flippancy about it was a strategy—a strategy for dealing with the fact that he himself was sexually molested at a young age.  Almost everything about his lifestyle is a reaction to that molestation, including his rationalization in his own mind that he wasn't a victim after all.

In fact, although I'm not intimately associated with the data that suggests this, I've talked to people who are and who's judgement I trust on the issue, when they say that there is a very high correlation between homosexuality and childhood sexual molestation.  A very high percentage of gay men were molested, and their behavior since, including their gayness, is a response to the trauma of having been raped as a child.  Not all, of course, but enough that there's something that that needs to really be heavily investigated.  Rather than swept under the rug and ignored, as liberals are wont to do whenever any of their special interest groups have their Narrative challenged.

Anyway, without further ado, Mr. Wright:

If I may, I think Mr.Molyneux is a smart man, but this is one time where his smarts betray him. He scrutinizes Milo's comments with a word by word analysis as if each word had been selected and weighed, and he comes to the conclusion that a man who says he opposes pedophiles is supporting them. 

If you listen carefully, Mr. Molyneux's whole argument turns on one point: that when Milo says 'boy' he means a pre-adolescent of 13 or so and not a 17 year old. But Milo says precisely the opposite, that he was using this word to mean a youth. Molyneux says this is merely his opinion, and he gives no argument to back it up. Milo apologized for being unclear, which he was, and his clarification should be taken at face value. 

Without that, the rest of the argument falls apart. Molyneux interprets as a positive affirmation of pederasty certain bitter and sarcastic jokes about oral sex techniques Milo was 'lucky' enough to learn from the priest who molested him. To me, this looks like a psychological defense mechanism, not support for the practice, and in his apology, Milo says so, indeed, that is the meaning of the sentence Molyneux dismisses by saying ' I don't know what that even means.' 

I submit he does not know what it means because he is parsing the words like a lawyer, not listening to what the man actually said, not hearing the pain in his voice. 

If you wish to condemn someone because he did not go to the police when he witnessed a crime, condemn him for cowardice, but not for supporting the crime nor speaking positively of it.  

Finally, Molyneux's argument fails because he misses the elephant in the room. Molyneux does not say one word about the fact that Milo is gay, which, up until recently, up until 1970 or so, was identified by professional psychiatrists as a psychological condition, a neurosis.  

If, as I do, you regard sodomy as a sign of psychological damage, you would not expect any homosexual to speak with clinical accuracy and detachment about matter touching the psychological wound which still bleeds in him.  

Molyneux is calling Milo to task for not being brutally honest with himself, and I am not sure a psychologically damaged man can be.  

It is like slapping an amputee and telling him to shake it off. 

When you approve of homosexuality, you are not doing the homosexual any favors. It is a category error, for it identifies a neurosis as a free choice. This in turn requires one to judge and condemn a man's words and action as if they were free when in fact you are seeing a neurosis the man cannot control play itself out. 

Molyneux comes very close to this conclusion when he noticed how self destructive Milo's behavior is, but he does not draw the correct conclusion, because he does not look with eyes of charity, and so he sees a choice, but does not see a sin. 

Until he converts, Mr Molyneux is not going to be seeing reality in a realistic light.

Also, "dc.sunsets" gives us the following, not directly related, but a tangential aside from the Milo issue.  Quite interesting.  Although not of our faith, he is (I believe) a Christian, but he's purposefully attempting to provide a non-Christian, purely clinical and secular justification for Christian doctrine and behavior.  In the process, he echoes the language and style of many of the most assertive of the prophets of old.

Vice: An act undertaken with the expectation of happiness, that instead yields unhappiness. Often, vices are directed by the impulsive mind, whose addiction to immediate gratification and the dopamine rush of indulgence crowds out the rational mind whose grasp of consequences leaves it screaming in impotent frustration.

Homosexuality is a vice, no less than is drug, alcohol, gambling, porn, casual sex or even social media addiction, along with chronic indulgence in toxic personal relationships. All are acts that yield short term highs and long term destruction.

A culture that celebrates casual sex and abortion-on-demand is fertile ground for sexual hedonism that doesn't even mimic biologically-dictated behavior.

That said, my wife and I watched our sons like hawks while they were in their formative years. No one was given the slightest opportunity to manipulate them, and anyone who attempted a forceful assault would have died within minutes. Not hours. Not days. There's nothing about my demeanor that could be misinterpreted. 

Sociopaths hide in plain sight. Victims grow up to be victimizers (although not always, just as most but not all kids whose parents smoked grow up to smoke cigarettes.) Saddest is when parents don't realize their own kid (biological or adopted) is a sociopath and poisoning their family right under their noses.

My word of the day is Devotion. Like Honor, it is now AWOL from our lexicon. Husbands and wives should be devoted to each other. Nuclear families should enjoy that devotion. People should be be devoted to their communities and their people (tribe.) Devotion to God is a whole separate discussion.

In an environment of honor (at the individual level) and devotion (within the social pyramid), children are protected as best is possible and vice is suppressed as best is possible.

Our current world is all but devoid of honor and devotion. As I see it, the task falls to each of us to hew to these traditional ideals, walk the talk, be an example and await what will eventually be the cyclical renewal of a society based on such ideals.

What no one ever seems to notice is that there's a direct link between approval (tacit or open) of teens having sex, young (unmarried) adults having sex and the sexual gratification of adults using people who lack full adult agency. It's one continuum, folks. I don't care that 1/3rd of girls probably initiate sex by 15. If everyone else jumps off a cliff, should we join them?

There are a number of open, plain, obvious and irrefutable reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with religious teaching why people should eschew physical intimacy prior to forming what is reasonably expected to be a permanent pair-bond.

Just because our modern times seem to dictate that pair-bonding not occur until a decade or more after sexual maturation does not change the hardwired effects of breaking the link between physical and emotional intimacy. And don't give me that crap/rationalization from sociobiology about how males are driven to spread their seeds while females are driven to nurture their eggs. I have an MS in biology so I'm not stupid; human social behavior is full of conflicting drives, and the balancing of them is utterly essential to living life on Happiness Path. [editor's note, i.e. me: The natural man is an enemy to God, right?]

All of us are protected from poor choices (or allowing ourselves to be manipulated by others) by having wide buffer zones between what is accepted and what is not. This eliminates entreaties that might be interpreted as ambiguous in a "benefit of the doubt" environment. 

There are two kinds of abuse: Rape (characterized by irresistible physical force) and "social engineering," AKA a manipulative sociopath hacking the mind of another person. The latter always starts small with the goal of getting, in small steps, to a point where the target is too deeply hooked to reverse course. Then the abuser reels them in like a hooked mackerel. 

As an aide, this behavior has many parallels to how men sometimes try to socially-engineer their way into a girl's pants. I've seen guys land a roll in the hay by claiming they were gay, and I've heard stories of guys self-describing as impotent or somehow shortchanged in the genital-size lottery in a clear attempt to get the girl to "save" or "fix" them in the sack.

It's long past time to place the same index of suspicion on anything sex-related in social commerce as we do when we get emails with strange attachments or unsolicited requests for password resets & redirects to weird URL's. 

Instead, now it's perfectly normal for sitcoms to discuss masturbation in mixed company and the commercial interruptions wax eloquent on Viagra and using a pill to get an erection. No wonder our kids are vulnerable.How many people can confront that they were victims of manipulation? Even if said manipulation occurred long before that person was old enough to separate vice from not-vice?  

This is a serious defect in the Human OS. Our minds recoil from confronting the consequences of our past, even when said consequences are obvious, and even when we were too young and dependent to say "NO!" had we wanted to. 

I used to look at teen aged boys who got laid by decent-looking adult women as "lucky bastards." I now see such "relationships" as significantly more toxic, abusive and manipulative than if it's a teen aged girl and an adult man. In the latter it actually might be the girl who is the manipulator; in the former it never is, and a decent-looking adult woman chooses a teen over widely-available adult men for one and only one reason.  

Modernity has amplified this evil astronomically by normalizing homosexuality and sexualizing our culture to the point of parody. Instead of victims of sexual abuse as kids knowing that they were victimized, the perverted rewards of sexual pleasure get mixed with social approval of hedonism and the result is that the victim of manipulation decides to celebrate being victimized. 

What a feedback loop of vicious evil! 

Until the Left Cult's sacrament of hedonism and cognitive dissonance of treating pre-adults as both adults and not-adults is resolved, it will fall entirely on parents to protect their kids while nurturing them in an environment that recognizes both the adventure of life and the Serengeti plain level of dangers surrounding us all. 

As long as the Left Cult holds sway in any institution, all persons with power must be viewed as potential threats because from priests to coaches to Scout leaders, such positions now attract sadistic predators like blood in the water attracts great white sharks. Our society is still in the process of promoting such parasitic predation.  

The swamp is nowhere near being drained, a process that won't be complete until people who abuse children are routinely given cranial lead injections.