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subordinance -> RE: Repressing bisexuality? (5/16/2015 11:57:34 AM)
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I first want to apologize for responding to your post with a book. I keep trying to shorten this, but I just had so much to try to explain. I probably should clarify that my aim is to defend the oppressed, but my experience has been that the media figures out who was oppressed about 10 years too late, and typically the circumstances have shifted a bit by then. For instance, if I walked into a high school and asked kids who the most gay kid was and who the most religious kid was, and then asked them which of the two kids was more popular, I'm wondering if I might discover that today’s gay kids are more popular than the Christian kids. I'm going to liken the tensions between gays and Christians to the tensions between feminists and housewives. Because feminists tend to spend more of their lives in the career world, they are more concerned with how office politics treats women (whether women are treated unfairly compared to men). Because housewives spend little, if any, time in the career world, but rely entirely on their husband’s salary for their family, their financial interests are so opposite of feminists that some housewives adopt very anti-feminist attitudes, since they actually have financially opposing interests. If their husband is treated better, even if the treatment is unfair, and he is promoted above a more qualified woman at the office, this still benefits the housewife, so she may abandon what benefits her in theory, as a woman, to support only what benefits her in fact. Gays can be like this with Christianity, failing to see the religion’s good qualities.
I agree that kids who are gay need to discuss it but, absent this, I still think gays should respect the wishes of parents who don't want their child exposed to the lifestyle. Many people aim to treat kids in a manner that would have worked best for them, personally, and I suspect most people on this board would have only benefitted from early education. However, the average IQ in this country is 100, which means that half the population is even dumber than that, and criminals tend to have IQs in the 85 to 90 range. Any extra reasons you can give such people to avoid crime, including the possible existence of an all-knowing and powerful God, is a good idea. A Christian mother who teaches her child that gays are decent people has just set an expiration date on his belief in the Bible, with his belief expiring when he discovers that the Bible forbids homosexuality. Once he discovers this, she has to hope he can handle atheism and still behave ethically.
A while back a lesbian wrote an article admitting that she hoped her daughter would turn out gay, and she responded to the backlash by saying that she had lived so long in a gay friendly area that she had seen little risk in admitting this. I might suffer from the same problem, since I deliberately choose to live in gay friendly areas, so I know that the gay kids are more popular in my area than Christians are. However, I’ve also read how the Millennials are much more gay friendly, much less religious, etc. than previous generations. I was a teen when gays truly were unpopular. We had no Ellen Degeneres, Lady Gaga, Adam Lambert, Rachel Maddow, etc. Atheists were villains in movies with about as much frequency as Christians are portrayed as villains or idiots in movies today. In a sense, I had the luck to be Christian when it was cool and then to be gay when it’s cool. I had early fantasies about women, but I didn’t worry about those because I didn’t know that God had anything against homosexuality, because I had no clue what homosexuality was. Homosexuality was never discussed in church. That’s how much it didn’t exist back then. Instead, it was all about helping the poor, which we wanted to do, because we believed we would be rewarded by God. Even today, surveys show that religious people give substantially more to charity than secular folks do. Anyway, back then I just knew I had some odd fantasies, though not just odd in that way. I worried that when I got to Heaven, God would punish me for fantasizing about sex during those boring sermons, by showing everyone what I had thought about. I figured they would be most horrified that I was thinking about sex during the sermon, second most horrified that the fantasy was so rough, but I wasn’t even aware that they would be horrified that women showed up in my fantasies. I probably was fortunate in that, since I was bisexual, I also fantasized about men, so that was normal enough that I could just shrug the female fantasies off.
The problem is, the Bible forbids homosexuality, yet that’s the one sexual kink people seem concerned that today’s kids are secretly harboring. Naturally, kids are secretly harboring all sorts of sexual fetishes, not just the Biblically forbidden ones. If they can wait to learn about the others, I think they can wait on homosexuality as well. I would have doubted the Bible earlier had I known what homosexuality was, and that it was forbidden by the Bible. I would have had more fun at an earlier age, but that would have been the only consequence, and I suspect that is true for most people on this board, but unfortunately it’s not true for all people (such as criminals). Kids can be a rather brainless group, so we don't want to ensure that they are also godless. At the same time that some teens begin to wonder if they are gay, other teens conclude that gangstas and serial killers are cool, so I’m just saying that gays should respect the wishes of parents who don’t want their kids exposed to homosexuality, in the same manner that other people with sexual kinks do. It could be that we are on the same page, though, and this lengthy response wasn't necessary. I do agree with you that any kid who is gay should be able to discuss it freely. I actually think that would be easier for kids if we could go back to the days when churches weren't obsessed with it, but that would also require the media not being obsessed with it. I guess I can sort of see your point, though. Older teens should probably get some brief discussion about homosexuality in a health class or something, so they know what it is, and they should be assured at that point that it is normal.
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