The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Words Mean Things

Posted on | April 18, 2018 | 2 Comments

Here are three words:

heterosexual
homosexual
bisexual

Perhaps you noticed something? These words describe sexual behavior. Over the past few decades, however, the gay-rights movement has deliberately created confusion on this subject. In the pursuit of legal “equality,” activists promoted the idea of sexuality as an identity, an innate and immutable condition. The “born that way” ideology of the LGBT movement was always about politics, promoted relentlessly by the Democrat Party and its propaganda operatives in academia, the news media, and in Hollywood. If you didn’t know any better, you might actually believe that being gay was the same as being black, that (a) both race and sexuality are congenital traits, and (b) both homosexuals and African-Americans are subject to prejudice and discrimination.

The hijacking of “civil rights” rhetoric by LGBT activists was deeply offensive to many people, not only because the analogy seems insulting to the memory of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., et al., but perhaps even more because it defies our common-sense observation and experiences. No matter what scientific “experts” might say on the subject, anyone with too eyes and a brain can see that homosexuality is about behavior (something you do) and not an identity (something you are). Even if we cede the point that some percentage of the population has an overwhelming compulsion toward homosexual behavior — an obsessive fixation beyond their rational control — it does not logically follow from this fact that homosexuality is equivalent to race as a legal category.

From this linguistic prestidigitation, much mischief and confusion has emerged. The proliferation of “gender identities” (71 on Facebook) and the emergence of a so-called “sexual minority community” that includes every imaginable kinky freak (polyamory, BDSM, etc.) are among the results of opening Pandora’s Box for the sake of “equality.”

Well, if people are “born that way,” there certainly seem to be a lot people confused about which way they were actually born. A new study by University of North Carolina-Greensboro Professor Arielle T. Kuperberg focused on young people who have gay sex but nonetheless identify as heterosexual. Professor Kuperberg and colleague “analyzed the Online College Social Life Survey dataset of over 24,000 undergraduate students to examine students whose last hookup was with a same-sex partner (N=383 men and 312 women).” Pay close attention here. This total of 695 students reporting that their “last hookup was with a same-sex partner” is less than 3% of 24,000+ students surveyed. Which is to say that, despite being constantly bombarded with pro-LGBT propaganda from the media, 97% of college students aren’t into that scene.

Out of this 3% of students who are engaged in the gay scene, however, Professor Kuperberg’s research found that “a significant minority of these students (12% of men and 25% of women) . . . labelled their sexual orientation “heterosexual.’” Again, let’s be clear that these percentages are only among the subset of 695 students whose most recent “hookup” was with a same-sex partner. Professor Kuperberg concludes:

Differences among those who identified as heterosexual included more conservative attitudes, less prior homosexual and more prior heterosexual sexual experience, features of the hookups, and sentiments about the encounter after the fact. Latent class analysis revealed six distinctive “types” of heterosexually identified students whose last hookup was with a same-sex partner. . . . Roughly, 12% [i.e., about 85 students] could be classified as conforming to a “performative bisexuality” script of women publicly engaging in same-sex hookups at college parties, and the remaining 28% [i.e., 195 students] had strong religious practices and/or beliefs that may preclude a non-heterosexual identity, including 7% [i.e., 49 students] who exhibited “internalized heterosexism.” Results indicate several distinctive motivations for a heterosexual identity among those who hooked up with same-sex partners; previous research focusing on selective “types” excludes many exhibiting this discordance.

You don’t need a Ph.D. in sociology to explain this. Nor do fancy jargon phrases like “internalized heterosexism” and “performative bisexuality” really add much to our understanding of the well-known fact that drunk horny college kids do weird stuff. The contradiction between sexual behavior and self-declared identity, however, is highly relevant to a political confrontation in Washington, D.C., last week:

The question from Sen. Cory Booker was blunt: “Do you believe that gay sex is a perversion? Yes or no?” Sitting in the witness chair at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing was CIA Director Mike Pompeo, nominated by President Trump to be Secretary of State. The former Kansas congressman began to answer, but Booker interrupted: “Yes or no, sir. Do you believe that gay sex is a perversion that is what you said here in one of your speeches? Yes or no, do you believe gay sex is a perversion?”
Watching this televised interrogation last week, I halfway hoped Pompeo would make the obvious joke: If they’re not having perverted sex, what’s the point of being gay?
Words mean things, and “pervert” originated in 14th-century France, as a verb meaning “to turn away” from correct religious belief, or as a noun synonymous with “apostate.” In the 1890s, the English psychologist Havelock Ellis used “perversion” to describe homosexual behavior in his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, thus borrowing the language of medieval Catholicism for the allegedly “scientific” study of sexual behavior. . . .

You can read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.

 

Category: Gays

Comments

2 Responses to “Words Mean Things”

  1. If All You See… » Pirate's Cove
    April 19th, 2018 @ 1:02 pm

    […] different when posted it, so, how about a second one? I’ll link up The Other McCain, with a post on words meaning […]

  2. Words Mean Things, Part 2 : The Other McCain
    April 19th, 2018 @ 4:07 pm

    […] in “Words Mean Things,” I referenced a study of college students’ sexual behavior that found a small percentage of […]