Friday, June 6, 2014

Born Gay And Proud... of Being Gay

“I can’t change, even if I try, even if I wanted to…” ~ Homosexual rap by Macklemore, who isn’t actually homosexual but pretends to be in songs because he knows it’s foolproof awards bait

“The fact is, I’m gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud.” ~ Anderson Cooper

“Incompossible, adj.  Unable to exist if something else exists.  Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both – as Walt Whitman’s poetry and God’s mercy to man.” ~ Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary


Applying for college scholarships can be a mind-wracking process, particularly if you happen to be a white, male, Republican-leaning, 10th-generation European immigrant.  In fact, if I was a respected movie star and could make any abjectly idiotic, shockingly offensive characterization I wanted with impunity on account of a doting paparazzi, I might go so far as to say that applying for college scholarships feels a lot like going to war.  So grueling is the mental toil it exacts from young people who just want to spend all their days out-hashtagging each other on Twitter or playing Candy Crush on their iPad Bses (if you count the median age of Candy Crush players as something like 60-years-young).  In any case, it gets even worse if you happen to be white, male, conservative, and right-handed.  It appears that leaders of the left-handed community have finally organized to demand fair and equitable treatment from the educational centers formerly dominated by the religious right-handed.  Chief among their measures besides discrediting and vilifying the opposition as bigoted meanies is a scholarship prize offered exclusively to left-handed persons who demonstrate exemplary commitment to left-handed causes.  According to left-handed activists, a person’s joint orientation is innately fixed in their blood from birth, a scientific fact which alone ought to preclude them from personal shame or social stigma.  Rather, members of the left-handed community ought to take pride in this uncontrollable biological condition which they had no responsibility for whatsoever, and the rest of us should sing their praises for doing so.

Ha!  What a ludicrous supposition.  The reason, of course, why Left-hand Pride movements haven’t yet penetrated the mainstream is because the very idea of congratulating yourself for a physical characteristic you theoretically have no power over is just as asinine and prejudiced as the idea of condemning some person or group of people for such a characteristic.  These dueling positions, 1) that left-handers are born with that distinction and 2) that they therefore ought to pride themselves on this uncommon aspect of their nature, are what American author Ambrose Bierce would term an incompossible union.  If it’s true that left-handers are born with this defining trait and fully lack the wherewithal to alter it, then what manner of personal achievement may they rightly claim through it to merit this sense of “pride”, which, under the circumstances, really signifies nothing more than satisfaction with the way one’s body works?  Likewise, if a man is to take pride in his left-handedness, would not that preference have to be a voluntary choice, undertaken by his own initiative and will rather than foisted upon him by external forces?

This brings us to the dilemma of so-called (Gay) Pride Parades, those celebrations of deviance and debauchery which ironically have either nothing to do with pride or nothing to do with real homosexuality. Incidentally enough, “Grand Marshal” Demi Lovatory of the L.A. Pride event kicking off this Friday isn’t even a lesbian but nonetheless says, “I have been an active advocate of the LGBT community [TLGB, according to the most innocent and unassuming promotional website of “LA PRIDE”] and am wholly committed to supporting individuality and being comfortable in one’s own skin.  I am thrilled to be a part of… a wonderful celebration of independence and self-confidence.”

Let it be noted that Gay Pride, as sponsored by its noble humanist dignitaries, shall hereby be construed as synonymous with “confidence and comfort in one’s own skin”; how else can the sponsors of this movement make it to coexist with the Gay Rights movement they support in equal measure?  Under any traditional definition of Pride, it would appear that Gay Rights and Gay Pride are based upon fundamentally estranged doctrines.  The former movement holds as holy scripture that people’s sexuality/gender/orientation/whatever is irreversible from birth and beyond the scope of human ability to change, usually demonstrating its earliest effects from the ripe young age of 2-5 years old, where children first start to experiment with their sexual identity by deciding which clothes they like to wear (that their parents buy for them), which toys they favor playing with (that their parents buy for them), and which social activities they most enjoy doing (that their parents sign them up to do).  Resistance to sanctioning homosexual unions, they argue, is steeped in the same irrational hatred that once outlawed interracial marriage and punished loving couples for merely physical attributes endowed on them by nature and fate alone.  After all the progress we’ve made (because human civilization, far from degenerating or becoming complacent towards liberty, always advances with time, contradicting everything we know from history and anthropology), who are we to tell two consenting adults they can’t love each for whotheyare, where one’s “love” is completely contingent upon procuring a paper certificate arbitrarily bestowed by a bureaucratic stranger and sealing such love in print?  These activists commission a multitude of pithy catch phrases and cardboard banners to defend their core convictions against overwhelming scientific, mathematical, and simply logical proof to the contrary, beating such slogans to death as Born This Way and God Made Me Gay, which would seem to credit divine providence for saving the hypothetical homo-gene from its natural, inevitably self-extinguishing course.

In contrast, the latter movement of Gay Pride must necessarily contend the opposite, that one’s sexuality is not immutably decided at birth and has to be chosen at some point in one’s life.  After all, what valid reason can a man possibly claim for priding himself on some physical feature that’s supposedly but a product of his DNA?  If, as the leftist platitude so often goes, his sexual lifestyle is no different than the color of his skin, then what, pray tell, is the basis for this pride other than a simple gratitude for one’s existence?  By this most conventional gay understanding of human sexuality, commending yourself for being gay, lesbian, genderquack, or transwhatsit is just as self-indulgent and petty and fatuous as congratulating yourself for being not-Caucasian, redheaded, left-handed, or any other purely aesthetic minority you can imagine.  Indeed, this is exactly the kind of self-superior smugness from which supremacist groups are made; as Gay Pride and Black (Democrat) Pride are increasingly hallowed as sacraments of American liberalism, Straight and White Pride will be driven ever further out of political acceptance, to the point where even declaring one’s heterosexual identity will be censured as hate speech that’s insensitive to the plight of LGBT ‘victims’.

L.A. Pride tries to weave its way around this patent absurdity with the explanation that it’s honoring the “history, courage, accomplishments, and future” of the LGBT community, but this is obviously a pretense. On the one hand, it’s fairly safe to say that most attendees of these parades have accomplished nothing very important with their lives, shamelessly frequenting what’s essentially a rolling strip club on floats that deliberately caters to every carnal fetish and lust.  On another, it doesn’t take any great courage to “come out” in a crowd at a rowdy festival populated mostly by like-minded and like-oriented people, nor is being openly queer all that much of a social crutch in a day and age where gossip magazines, web browsers, network morning ‘news’ shows, and the commander-in-chief of the United States of America all rush to prostrate themselves before anyone who unexpectedly gets the gay, be it Michael Sam, Jason Collins, Bradley Manning, Ellen Page, etc.  In the case of Ellen Degenerate and Robin Roberts, these groveling opportunists will even prostrate themselves before themselves while waiting for another heroic queer to emerge from the fray.  America’s media may be the most welcoming of homosexuals in the entire world, and celebrities are more than willing to game that standing for professional gain.  Many of Hollywood’s highest-grossing actors are “proudly” homo- or bi-sexual, and the music industry is likewise inundated in them.  As of this week, there is an official Google-sponsored hashtag, inaptly titled proudtoplay so as to insinuate that one’s physical prowess rather than one’s sex is the object, that’s expressly dedicated to that obnoxious subset of athletes who make a spectacle of their gayness as a diversion from or even cover for their actual talent.  Contrary to popular rumor, there is no legislative or statutory barrier to gay people participating in competitive sports and ogling their teammates in the locker room, nor is there is a resounding public countercurrent to homosexuality in the status quo, though critics of homosexuality and proponents of traditional moral views are persistently reviled and shamed as hateful bigots.  Those words which used to be regarded as a reasonable argument in favor of a functioning and virtuous society are now called “disgusting”, while that behavior which used to be regarded as disgusting is now called a virtuous, indispensable, and somehow valiant support of an open-minded, tolerant, nonjudgmentalist democracy.

What, then, are Priders so proud of to throw a party in recognition of their Pride, if not their courage, which, having no adversity to overcome, must exist in a vacuum, or their achievements, which, in most cases, simply involve doing the same things that heterosexual people do while vociferously reminding everybody that they’re homosexuals?  It can’t be their orientation – according to the foundational tenets of Gay Rights, one’s orientation is as inextricably ingrained in one’s biology as one’s pigmentation, and what man has no free will to determine he has no logical reason to respect himself for determining.  But what else could it plausibly be?  Gay Pride and Gay Rights are based on incompossible philosophies, the one professing that people should love themselves for their sexual tastes, the other that people can’t be held accountable for any such preferences.  The world of being, alas, has scope enough for only one of these delusions; the other must be judged a lie and a fraud.  If gayness is innate from birth, then it’s impossible to be truly proud of oneself for that coincidence, and the whole principle of these hedonistic vanity fairs implodes along with the faux heroism of those stalwart warriors for diversity in Hollywood and the NFL.  If sexual pride really exists as more than just a fanciful idea, though, it’s impossible to build a legal or logically coherent case for the natural right to “marry” anybody of any sex, especially when homosexuals already retain the same eligibility for marriage licenses typically claimed by traditional, procreative couples. When homosexuality’s own practitioners demonstrate it to be a matter of individual, free choice instead of biological necessity, the homosexual agenda instantly ceases to be a matter of upholding basic human dignity, becoming yet another case study in the corruption of financial profiteering by a small but vocal minority at the expense of their fellow citizens… and that’s disgusting.

7 comments:

  1. This is dumb. While superficially, you are correct. Being proud of being left-handed is dumb and, ostensibly, being proud of any unalterable predisposition is as well. But the gay pride movement is not claiming to be proud of this characteristic intrinsically. They are proud of being public/open about a characteristic that is widely stigmatized.

    The black pride movement in Brazil, or the Autistic Pride events held in America today are the first examples that come to mind.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh, look, it's another snarky anonymous person telling me how insensitive and mistaken and dumb I am for not unquestioningly buying into a current social trend, all the while providing no logical reason why my argument is faulty. I could be talking to Demi Lovato for all I know.

    Gay Pride has nothing to do with being open/public about a characteristic that is widely stigmatized; if so, why should we be proud of that characteristic? Because the majority of society's members have deemed it to be immoral? Gay Pride, in this instance, is entirely relative to whatever civilization and time period one has grown up in – again, a factor that's beyond one's control. "I'm proud that I'm a homosexual who lives in a country where homosexuality isn't universally accepted." At best your interpretation of Gay Pride just attaches another voluntary condition to this ridiculous idea of Pride: in addition to choosing a homosexual lifestyle, one has to choose a homosexual lifestyle against the established moral standards of one's culture. At its worst, your notion of Gay Pride is just a glorified form of contrarianism, praising a certain lifestyle or, supposedly, biological condition for no other reason than that the majority of civil society disparages it, elevating something strictly for the sake of counterbalancing those who lower it.

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  3. Buzzfeed sent me here from their list of the 20 most moronic homophobic rants. They made a pretty good choice. Why don't you go suck on a ____ for a while then try making a coherent argument about gay rights? Then you'll at least be in a qualified position to write about LGBT issues.
    And to think a bunch of ignorant ___heads like you are making decisions about people's ______ civil liberties...

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  4. Let me guess. You're probably like Ron and Rand Paul and think Congress was mistaken to pass the Civil Rights Act because it inadvertently aggravated racial animosity and impinged on private property rights, right? If I'm reading your post correctly, you seem to think that unquestioningly going along with populist movements like Gay Pride and Civil Rights actually achieves the opposite of those causes' supposed intentions and/or entails a wide range of negative consequences people don't foresee when they're trying to uphold basic equality? You people are unbelievable. Happy 4th of July. #justiceforall #yesallmen #equality

    Robert Robbins

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. To answer your guesses, Robert, yes and yes. In fact, I could hardly have said it better myself. For obvious reasons.

      And yeah, you people are pretty unbelievable.

      Delete
  5. i'm gay.

    #demicrew

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    Replies
    1. Pound sign interesting. Would you say you're proud of that?

      Delete

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