The "Logic" behind Anti-Gay Views

Along with many others who hold conservative views, anti-gay people often are hard-pressed to support their views with good, logical arguments.

Someone else--a frequent poster and commenter on HuffPost (formerly Huffington Post) who has, to my mind, intelligent and progressive views—pointed out that if you ask anti–gay marriage people how or why a same-sex couple getting married will affect them, they typically will simply change the subject. Because they can't show any way in which it would affect them, let alone hurt them.

Similarly and again on HuffPost, I challenged a woman (I think the person in question is female but it's often hard to tell their gender from people's online handles) to answer this question: If being gay is a choice, as she maintained, explain to me why anyone would choose to be gay—when being gay means discrimination in many spheres, being told you're a sinner from the pulpit, and even being physically attacked.

Her reply was that people "choose" to be gay to shirk responsibility or avoid pregnancy.

I assume that the responsibility she refers to means the responsibilities, etc., of being a parent. Well, many gay couples these days—mainly lesbian couples but definitely gay male couples as well—do want to be parents and do so through adoption or other means.

Second, many gay men are in fact married and may have fathered children in those marriages. Particularly among my generation, many gay men got married when they were young. (These marriages sometimes are successful but frequently end in divorce, so I'd say that generally it's not a good idea. Still, in these cases you can't say they have shirked the responsibilities of marriage and/or parenthood.)

As to her other argument, about avoiding pregnancy. That's simply silly. People can (and of course do) avoid pregnancy and conception, both within and outside marriage—and that has absolutely nothing to do with being gay.

So, my point is, press these people to back up their opinions and you get replies that are lame at best, totally nonsensical at worst. I have a feeling that, even as they are saying these things, they know they're not making very good sense. But is that going to make them open their minds? You know my answer to that question. Post a comment if you believe I'm wrong.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Ladies, Is Your Husband Gay?

Remember the movie Brokeback Mountain? In it, there were two guys who were married but who ended up having both a sexual and romantic relationship with one another. In one case, the wife caught on, but only after she happened to catch a glimpse of her hubby embracing the other guy.

I thought that, after that movie, a lot of women were going to begin to have anxieties about their own husbands and suspecting that they might be gay. If anyone ever thought that, because a man is married and maybe has children to boot, that he can't be gay—well, that idea has gone the way of the idea of a flat earth.

I once heard a saying, "Married at 20, gay at 30." An awful lot of gay men my age (late 60s and thereabouts) have been married, many formerly and undoubtedly some currently. I've heard it said that, "back then"—that is, when we were younger—they were pressured by family to get married, or they felt it was "the thing to do," or they themselves had not realized their homosexual leanings.

So it was not uncommon for gay men in, say, the 1960s to enter into heterosexual marriages, and certainly that hasn't stopped. A man may not yet recognize his attraction to men; or he may want to "pass" and/or he gets married for the sake of the myriad advantages of, shall we say, doing the majority thing--like even having a political career!

This blog even received a comment from a woman who said she suspected her husband was gay but needed to come out, and she wasn't sure what she could do to help him.

The online magazine Huffington Post has reprinted an article from Christwire.com titled "Nine Signs Your Husband Is Gay." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/18/signs-your-husband-is-gay_n_687160.html#s128442&title=He_Has_A Evidently Christwire is a satirical site, and thus, if taken literally, their "nine signs" would be ridiculous.

But, as with a lot of satire and stereotyping, there may be a germ of truth in those "nine signs." At any rate I think it's very interesting, and doubtless a sign of our post–Brokeback Mountain times, that many modern married women might at least be considering the possibility that they could be married to a man with gay leanings.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein