The Other McCain

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

Words Mean Things, Part 2

Posted on | April 19, 2018 | Comments Off on Words Mean Things, Part 2

 

Wednesday, in “Words Mean Things,” I referenced a study of college students’ sexual behavior that found a small percentage of students who identified as heterosexual but nevertheless reported engaging in same-sex hookups. Of course, the vast majority of students (more than 97%) are heterosexual both in identity and behavior, but the discrepancy of this confused minority was explained by researchers with jargon phrases: “performative bisexuality” (e.g., girls making out with other girls at parties to gain attention) and “internalized heterosexism,” which we might suppose describes gay people with feelings of self-hatred.

We do not need academic experts to explain that drunk horny college kids do weird things, as I said, but this illustrates how “science” has replaced religious morality as the basis of our understanding:

This shift from Bible-based language to scientific terminology as the common basis for describing sexual behavior was advanced in the 20th century by Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic disciples. Those who had formerly been deemed sinners in need of prayer were reclassified as patients in need of therapy, and psychiatric “experts” replaced clergy as the guiding authorities in such matters. What had formerly been a crime called sodomy (a term derived from Genesis 19) subject to legal punishment, became instead the symptom of a disease called homosexuality, subject to psychiatric “treatment.” Instead of being sentenced to jail for an illegal act, or seeking advice from a pastor, priest, or rabbi on how to escape sinful temptation, the person diagnosed with homosexual tendencies was sent to the therapist’s office or, in some cases, committed to a mental institution. Words mean things, and this change of terminology about sexual behavior was significant of a major cultural shift in 20th-century America.

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental diseases in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. For the past 45 years, our society has gradually drifted toward what I’ve called the Compulsory Approval Doctrine, in which the only moral truth is a fanatical certainty in the wrongness of “hate,” so mere disapproval of homosexuality is “hate,” and thus subject to legal sanction.

“Being Gay Is Just as Healthy as Being Straight,” the APA now declares, and thus “science” is allegedly neutral in this matter. All evidence to the contrary is explained away as the result of societal prejudice, and if you are skeptical about these explanations, you’re a hater.

Skepticism toward such confident certainties is necessary, however, because today’s “scientific consensus” is tomorrow’s discredited “myth.” What we may perceive, if we study the available evidence with appropriate skepticism, is that the cultural shifts of recent decades have yielded a lot of sexual confusion and unhappiness among young people. The belief that “sexuality” is some sort of free-floating and amorphous attribute of identity, not necessarily defined by behavior, has produced such odd phenomena as 71 gender choices on Facebook, and the occasional outbursts of “genderqueer” insanity:

Eli Erlick (left); Danielle “Danie Yun” Diamond (right).

In April 2017, Glamour magazine named Pitzer College senior Eli Erlick one of their “College Women of the Year,” the first time a transgender person (born male) was chosen for this honor. A few months later, one of Erlick’s former classmates, a woman who has since undergone “top surgery” (radical mastectomy) to become “transmale” wrote a Tumblr post accusing Erlick of rape — “fisting someone and making them bleed without their consent.” Erlick is co-founder of Trans Student Educational Resources (TSER), “a national youth-led organization dedicated to transforming the educational environment for trans students through advocacy and empowerment,” and a member of the national advisory council for GLSEN, “which works to create LGBTQ-inclusive schools.”

Do we need to transform “the education environment”? Who is in favor of this “empowerment”? Has there been a referendum on the matter? Has our nation’s education system become a vast lunatic asylum?

“God is not the author of confusion” (I Corinthians 14:33) and our society’s abandonment of reiigious standards has brought about this epidemic of madness surrounding “gender” and “sexuality.” Young people today are very much like Brad and Janet in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, wandering accidentally into the mad scientist’s castle.

It’s astounding.
Time is fleeting.
Madness takes its toll.

A federal judge this week granted an injunction preventing Ohio State University from expelling a student accused of sexual assault during a campus showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was alleged that the victim was too drunk to consent to, uh, doing the Time Warp. The accused student in that case is called “Jane Roe” in court filings, but given the way gender identity is currently conceived on campus, we do not know if “she” is actually female. This may actually be a case of a woman assaulting another woman, but it might also be that either “Jane” or her alleged victim is transgender, and maybe both are transgender.

Is it “hate” to be skeptical about this situation? Is it no longer permissible to express disapproval of such behavior? Contrary to the rhetoric of the LGBTQ activist brigades, no one is actually harmed by public disapproval of their “sexuality” or “gender identity.” Why must the 97% of college students who are heterosexual be compelled to remain silent, lest they say something that might offend the 3% LGBTQ minority?

We are expected to pretend that the Compulsory Approval Doctrine has no practical influence on sexual behavior. But would Eli Erlick and Danielle “Danie Yun” Diamond have been behaving in such a manner had it not been for the pro-LGBTQ regime on the Pitzer College campus? Parents pay more than $65,000 a year to send their children to Pitzer, part of the Claremont Colleges network, along with Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College, Pomona College and Scripps College.

 

The Queer Resources Center offers “a guide to transitioning at The Claremont Colleges,” which tells students how to “come out” on campus, directs them to therapists for “gender-confirming benefits,” and informs them that the college’s health-insurance program covers “gender reassignment benefits of up to $100,000 per policy year.”

For $65,000 a year, parents can send their teenage daughter to Claremont, and then attend their son’s graduation four years later.

Or vice-versa.

 

The curriculum at Claremont includes such courses as “Introduction to Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies” (FGSS026), “Antiracist Feminist Queer Praxis” (FGSS192), “Queer Feminist Theories” (GWS180) and “LGBTQ Social Movements in the US” (GWS189B).

If parents are willing to pay $65,000 a year to provide their children with this kind of “education,” is it any wonder kids are so confused?



 

Category: Education, Gays, Sex Trouble

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