I don’t often think about the sexual lives of gay people. I just don’t. Whatever any two consenting adults do to pleasure themselves in private is none of my business.
Many political and religious conservatives differ from me in this regard. Many conservatives are obsessed with thoughts that adult gay people are having consensual gay sex. Those conservatives pace their hallways at home and at the office fretting that gays are sexually satisfying each other in private. For proof, Google “God homosexual” and you’ll find more than one-half million web sites, almost all of them written by conservatives who argue that homosexuality is “unnatural” and that the Bible prohibits it.
At this site, we’ve sometimes discussed this conservative obsession with gay sex. What does Jesus say about homosexuality? Nothing. [1] With regard to the Old Testament, we’ve warned of the need to beware of the ubiquitous cherry picking of Bible literalists. See here [2] and here [3] and see Mark Tiedemann’s commentary on the conservative spin regarding homosexuality. [4]
Here is some additional evidence to show how amazingly obsessed conservatives are regarding homosexuality. This is truly amazing. Check out Conservapedia, [5] a Wiki geared to conservatives [thanks to The Carpet Bagger Report [6] for this tip] As indicated on the “Statistics” page of Conservapedia, the site contains almost 50,000 content pages covering a wide array of topics (all of them written from a notably conservative perspective). Now take a look at the following list of the top-rated pages in Conservapedia. [7] Most of them, however, concern the “problem” of homosexuality.
1. Homosexuality [2,279,810]
2. Main Page [2,144,701]
3. Teen Homosexuality [367,030]
4. Homosexual Agenda [325,305]
5. Homosexuality and Anal Cancer [296,770]
6. Arguments Against Homosexuality [285,870]
7. Ex-homosexuals [272,478]
8. Wikipedia [270,085]
9. Homosexuality and Choice [268,310]
10. Examples of Bias in Wikipedia [254,327]
I assume that I’ve made my case that conservatives are obsessed with homosexuality (even though many conservatives engage in same-sex sex, whether or not they consider themselves to be “gay.”). [8] I think it’s obvious that these conservative obsessions are making lives miserable for many good-hearted law-abiding tax-paying homosexuals. Many of those who detest homosexuality seem driven to make gays uncomfortable in order to change them or to “cure” them (Google “cure homosexual” and you’ll get another half-million web pages).
We’d all be better off if we got conservatives thinking about things other than gays. We all have better things to do. Getting conservatives to kick this addiction to fretting about gays is not going to be easy, however. “Just say no” campaigns just don’t work. And further, these conservatives are sick and need to be healed (to borrow some of their metaphors!).
My plan? Let’s flood the minds of Conservatives with other things. Let’s distract them. Let’s cause conservatives to think about the aberrant and unnatural behavior of heterosexuals.
Step 1: Let’s define “natural sexual behavior.” How about this: “natural sexual behavior” is having sex with the hope and for purpose of having babies. Fair enough? How often do heterosexuals engage in natural sex? Almost never.
Step 2: Ergo, sexual behavior that is not “natural” is “unnatural,” right?
Step 3: Let’s create a law that requires all people who have ever disparaged gays to wear t-shirts clearly displaying their own unnatural ways of having sex.
Step 4: But how would we ever determine who has disparaged gays? We’ll start with all Conservatives, since they tend disparage gays or to harbor or give comfort to others who disparage gays. Conservatives tend to lie about their bigotry and their sexual practices, though, so we might need to do some waterboarding to get them to fess up (Because many conservatives think waterboarding is OK).
Step 5: My proposed new law would require every American who has displayed bigotry toward gays to clearly display their own “unnatural sexual preferences,” all of their idiosycracies and dysfunctions on a t-shirt every day for a month. [Bear with me now—this is a thought experiment, not a real proposal!] Wearing these shirts every day for a month should be long enough for lots of people to take note of the wearers’ unnatural sexual propensities.
How detailed will these t-shirts be? Really detailed. Every deviation from “natural” sex will be emphasized. Here are some examples:
I am impotent.
I am incapable of becoming emotionally attached to others, so I have lots of meaningless sex.
I have sex through serial marriages (like numerous conservative politicians).
I like to have oral sex.
I am afraid to have oral sex.
I have premature ejaculations.
I am frigid.
The only kind of sex I have is in the missionary position, half-dressed, in the dark.
I am a married person who only tolerates sex once a month.
I need to use sex toys to have satisfactory sex.
I go to church hoping to meet people with whom I can have sex.
I have lied to my friends that I have sex a lot, when I almost never have sex.
I fantasize about having sex with people I’ve never met.
I treat sex like a sport—I don’t really care what the other person thinks.
I like to masturbate (this will be preprinted on every t-shirt).
I have sex by cheating on my partner to whom I profess to be faithful.
I refuse to have sex with the lights on.
I pay other people to have sex with me.
I have sex with almost anyone who is willing and I don’t respect myself.
I refuse to help my wife achieve orgasm.
I experience sublimated sexual satisfaction by working to enact laws to interfere with the sex lives of other consenting adults.
I work really hard to buy expensive things in the hope that I can have more sex with people who admire my things.
I need to have porno videos playing in order to have sex.
I don’t ever have sex with people who treat me with respect.
I only have sex with people who buy me expensive gifts.
I’ve never had satisfying sex.
To have sex, I make my wife pretend she’s my grade school teacher.
I need to use drugs to have sex
I immediately roll over and go to sleep right after sex even though my spouse resents me for it.
If all people who are bigoted toward gays are forced to display their own unnatural sexual behaviors prominently on t-shirts, then they’ll see that most of the sexual acts in which most people engage most of the time are unnatural. And we’ll also see undeniable proof that numerous “unnatural sexual preferences” are not homosexual acts.
Perhaps then we will be able to better see that gays and their aggressors have a lot in common. In fact, all of us are a long way from “natural.” It’s time to get that basic lesson straight.
Then, after we all take careful note of the hundreds of millions of Americans among us who are “unnatural,” maybe we can start to focus on treating each other based on factors other than our private consensual sexual behaviors.
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