I just realized that I didn’t link to the article that I referred to in my post above, leading some to think that perhaps they really didn’t say all that about pounding pegs and pitching and catching and seeing Daddy’s penis in the shower.
If only I could make this stuff up.
Remember: teach your kid that a square peg belongs in a square hole, so he’ll understand that his round peg doesn’t belong in a round hole. Or something.
Somebody needs to point out to Mark that of course he’s got a little sodomy in him. He’s only thirteen. As he grows older and more sexually mature, he will have larger sodomy in him, until he discovers precisely the right sized sodomy (not that he won’t make mistakes and sometimes allow more sodomy than he should) and at that point will achieve happiness.
Oh, and he needs to get over the ridiculous notion that one’s sexuality is something to be ashamed of.
Waste
Ya know…the whole “homophobes are all latent homosexuals” is something of a cliche and not always true. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes an idiot is just an idiot. But the more I read of him…his drooling admiration for all things “masculine”, and mirrored distain for the feminine, and general treatment of woman as an afterthought…even those who might fly in the face of all decency and be gay…I think there might be something to that theory in his case.
Sigh If only some Daddy would take Mr. Dobson into the shower and show him his bigger penis, the world might be a better place.
I feel for his son. I think his son wrote a book, unless it was another Dobson.
I take back what I said earlier.
I think Falwell is ever-so-slightly nuttier than Dobson, but I agree with you all that Dobson is more dangerous.
However, I stand firmly by the thing about the beetles.
He has a son named Ryan who wrote a book called “Be Intolerant (because some things are just stupid)”. My mom bought me a copy a few years ago. I haven’t read it, but I might just to see how bad it is. I don’t think that’s what you were thinking of though.
Perhaps Good Egg was thinking of Randall Terry’s son, who is gay.
This list is conveniently packaged permission for hate and bigotry. Many of these points are stereotypes turned into pseudo-science.
I could agree to a few of these points on the list, because I was a sickly child. And because I had an absent father. Did I “walk, talk, dress and even ‘think’ effeminately”? I don’t know. I was a kid. I was me. I was dressed by my mother until I was a teenager. How does one define effeminate “thinking”? This is a point where there’s no element of hard science, but merely projection on the part of a parent or adult.
And I never wanted to be a girl. Because I’m not transgendered. Nor am I a drag queen. Or a transvestite – which is a heterosexual thing.
What good could possibly come from this list? More actions like the following:
Man accused of killing his ‘gay’ baby son
“Ronnie Paris Jr., 21, of Tampa, Florida is accused of abusing his 3-year-old son in an effort to prevent him from being gay, until the boy slipped into a coma and died.”
Yes! Thats it. I am sure Ryan is not gay. Lucky for him. :rolleyes:
Or of Richard Socarides, a writer and the gay son of Charles Socarides (probably the most vocal of the “homosexuality is a choice” psychiatrists).
Other anti-gay politicians with gay children include Phyllis Schlafly (whose little queerbait Sonderkommando John not only lives with his homophobe mother but supports her politically), Pete Knight (California legislator who spearheaded the state’s gay marriage ban), Alan Keyes (African American radio show host, academic and senatorial candidate whose lesbian daughter’s blog shocked a lot of people [including him]), and of course Dick Cheney.
The list focuses on boys as they are probably deemed more important in the conservative universe than females. I wonder what qualities girls posses that would lead to lesbianism? It can imagine if one of their daughters displayed “masculine” traits like athleticism, assertiveness, an interest in math or science they would brow beat them into traditional female roles. Sad.
Are you sure you mean sonderkommando and not kapo? For those not familiar with the terms, sonderkommando were Jewish concentration camp inmates who were placed in charge of handling and disposal of corpses. After everybody was dead and the Zyklon B was vented, the sonderkommando went in and removed gold fillings and any other remaining valuables. They were the ones actually loading corpses into ovens, or just arranging them in pits in a manner that assured the hottest possible flame. Generally, there isn’t hatred or disgust of sonderkommando in the Jewish community. They were trying to survive in a horrible time and place, and their work didn’t increase the suffering of other inmates.
Kapos were the Jews given positions of authority over other Jews. Kapos are seen as sadistic and/or selfish bastards who actively made things worse.
Note what most of the attributes in the link are really about:
> 1. A strong feeling that they are “different” from other boys.
> 2. A tendency to cry easily, be less athletic, and dislike the roughhousing that
> other boys enjoy.
> 3. A persistent preference to play female roles in make-believe play.
> 4. A strong preference to spend time in the company of girls and participate in
> their games and other pastimes.
> 5. A susceptibility to be bullied by other boys, who may tease them unmercifully
> and call them “queer,” “fag” and “gay.”
> 6. A tendency to walk, talk, dress and even “think” effeminately.
> 7. A repeatedly stated desire to be — or insistence that he is — a girl.
None of them are explicitly about wanting to have sex with men. Number 7 is perhaps explicitly about wanting to have a sex change, but then it doesn’t really belong on the list at all. Is there any tendency for homosexuals to want to be women?
What these warnings are really about is the labeling of someone who refuses to try to dominate other people as homosexual. That’s what the popular tendency to use the labels like “fag” are really about. Boys, before they even understand what either homosexuality or hetrosexuality is about, will use terms like “fag” to torment other boys. Calling other men homosexuals among the most ardent anti-homosexual advocates is about achieving dominance, not about sexual orientation itself. That’s why they are so concerned about boys who are unathletic, or who are bullied easily (i.e., refuse to bully other people), or who act effeminately (i.e., act like a woman, who, of course, are subsurvient and can be bullied). In some sense, this is really about power, not about sex.
In the article linked here, much is made of the claim that the author has never met a single gay male with a loving and respectful relationship with his father. He literally says he has met with “hundreds of homosexuals” and never met a single one with a good father. Are there any formal studies or research that proves this wrong? What is the percentage of homosexual males with good relationships with their fathers vs. straight?
I only know a few gay males well enough to know what their relationship with their father was like, but in those cases they would go along with that idea of poor male role model = turn out gay. Of course, I know many straight men with horrible father relationships as well, including my own husband who had about the worst role model ever. According to the article his home environment would have been extremely likely to make him gay, yet somehow he and his brother are both straight.
That’s a lot of pressure on dad. They are basically saying if your son is gay, it is dad’s fault. I also wonder about the lack of commentary on lesbians, apparently we are not as concerned about them. I assume it is also dad’s fault if daughter is gay, or is that mom’s doing?
Wendell Wagner, the ironic thing to me is that, as I read the Gospels, bullying someone is about as un-Christian as you can get. It goes against that whole “love your neighbor as yourself” business. Yet, it seems to me Dr. Dobson is actually encouraging bullying.
I’m sorry. I’ve been fighting bullies for over 3/4 of my life now. Standing up to them when they picked on someone smaller and weaker shaped who I am. I’ve been called a “fag” and a “virgin” and pretty much every foul name in the book, and believe me, “virgin”, when it’s used to mean “creature who is so ugly/useless/worthless/vile not even the most desperate guy will fuck her” can be pretty vile. I’ve been bullied by members of church youth groups and by good, Catholic kids from good, Catholic families. It’s not my place to judge others, but I’d love to know how those who do torment those who are difficult reconcile it with what they’re taught in Sunday School.
CJ
Ex-Sunday School teacher
Truthfully, kids (and mental kids) can rationalize damn near anything. I was also bullied as a child, and you’d be surprised how many of my peers didn’t understand that what they were doing was wrong. It’s not that they were taught to bully, it’s that they just could not relate their religious and moral education to their own behavior.
That being said, though, I knew (and know) too many people intent on memorizing Bible verses without thought to their meaning, as if Sunday school were a contest with a grand prize of salvation. Just my $.02, though.
Robin
As you hinted at, homosexuality and transsexuality are completely different animals. Trans people come in all sexual orientations.
Indeed, if anything, trans women (i.e. male-to-female) seem to be lesbian or bisexual much more often than the general population. (In other words, they are very often what Dobson and his ilk would call “heterosexual men,” not “homosexual men.”)
FWIW, I’m what’s usually called effeminate, and I identify as genderqueer, but I don’t feel at all like a woman. I feel like an effeminate gay man. I know few gay men who would say that either their sexual orientation or their gender presentation are associated with feeling like a woman.
Or they claim that the victim is at fault, because he or she should just “get over it”, and is a whiny baby or a perpetual victim who’s too weak.
So basically, not only is Dobson encouraging bullying, but asserting that kids who are bullied are going to turn out gay?
Looking over this thread the number of prominent religious or right-wing leadership people with gay children is enough to push me more to the ‘nurture’ than ‘nature’ side of the why-are-people-gay-o-meter.
It would make a neat list on Wikipedia.
I will admit that I had a terrible relationship with my father and an overbearing suffocating mother, the “Add designer water and stir” recipe for Fag. However, I have known gay men who did have loving Little League dads, and I’ve known (as you mention) many men who had a worse relationship with their father and a more histrionic mother than I have and wound up straighter than the road to hell. (Elvis, for instance, had a ne’er do well father and an overly affectionate mother and gay is one thing I’ve never heard him accused of.)
Personally I think that there is at least a MAJOR biological component/predisposition to being gay and more studies indicate that than not (most famously probably the hypothalamus studies and the recent pheremone studies). Nothing else really makes sense, and I suppose that it’s some progress that even the whackjob Fundies are beginning to allow that it’s not a conscious choice or easily “changed”.
If there is a connection between parenting and homosexuality I think there may be a reversal of cause-effect: the father, sensing on some level the child is gay [and on an animalistic level that it is not likely to perpetuate his genes] rejects the child and the mother, whose job throughout nature is to nurture and protect, overcompensates.
Roughly 1/3 of births in the U.S. today are illegitimate (from just under a quarter among white women to the majority of black women). While illegitimacy does not necessarily mean that the child will not have a healthy relationship with its father, it would imply that the likelihood is greater. If there is more jockeying for the lead in La Cage Aux Folles than for quarterback at most high schools in a decade or so then we’ll know that nurture might be pretty important after all.