Next They’ll Be Blaming Darwin…
Via Alvin McEwen, I see this post over at Equality Matters…
NOM President Claims Marriage Equality Will “Normalize Pedophilia”
On August 18, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) posted a “NOM Marriage News” update, written by NOM president Brian Brown, to its blog.
You read that update and you really start believing that NOM desperately wants to be on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate groups list. Because now they’re just about saying flat out that legalizing Teh Gay means your children are going to get raped. Carlos Maza quotes a passage from Brown’s dirty little rant on the Equality Matters blog. I’m going to quote a tad more of it here, because you need to notice something about the organization Robert George Super Genius co-founded…
NORMALIZING PEDOPHILIA
When you knock over a core pillar of society like marriage, and then try to redefine Biblical views of marriage as bigotry, there will be consequences. Will one of the consequences be a serious push to normalize pedophilia?
The Daily Caller raised the question by pointing us all to a high-level academic conference in Baltimore this week, “Pedophilia: Minor-Attracted Persons and the DSM: Issues and Controversies.”
The DSM is the diagnostic manual that defines mental illness. You probably recall that a key moment in the gay rights campaign was the 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association, the organization that produces the DSM, to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses.
Here’s how the brochure describes the goal:
“This day-long symposium will facilitate the exchange of ideas among researchers, scholars, mental health practitioners, and minor-attracted persons who have an interest in critical issues surrounding the entry for pedophilia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. The symposium will address critical issues in the following areas:
- Scientific and philosophical issues related to the DSM entry on pedophilia and/or hebephilia
- Effects of the DSM entry on stigma, availability of mental health services, and research
- Ways in which minor-attracted persons can be involved in the DSM 5 revision process”
When professors from Harvard and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine get together to discuss ways in which “minor attracted persons” can be involved in the DSM revision process—watch out.
Enquiring people want to know: Will pedophiles become “minor-attracted persons” in our culture? Will courts which endorse orientation as a protected class decide down the road that therefore laws which discriminate against “minor-attracted persons” must be narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest?
Here’s the fundamental truth: Ideas have consequences and so do words—because they contain ideas, because they are the vehicle through which and by which human beings describe reality.
NOM is pushing two old lies here. First, that gays and pedophilia go hand in hand. Anyone who has watched them since Proposition 8 knows that this is a regular song of theirs…The Gays Are After Your Children! Anyone who has studied the gay rights struggle since Anita Bryant knows that this is how the anti-gay industrial complex win elections. They go straight for the GAY=PEDOPHILE attack and the only question is do they do it overtly or do they dog whistle it. But the anti-gay campaigns where that scarecrow isn’t being waved in voters faces is the rare exception to the rule.
The other lie is that homosexuality was removed from the professional psychiatric association diagnostic manual of mental illnesses after a gay rights campaign. It was no such thing. The emerging science on sexual orientation brought about the change, much to the everlasting regret of the bigots in that profession, then and now. The science simply does not support the conclusion that there is anything clinically wrong with gay people. Evelyn Hooker in her her 1957 paper The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual, showed that sexually active male homosexuals were clinically indistinguishable from sexually active male heterosexuals. All the science done since then has confirmed that over and over again. There is nothing innately wrong with gay people. We are simply attracted to our own sex in the same way heterosexuals are attracted to the opposite sex.
The science drove the change in the DSM. The politics on the streets were the inevitable result of both the science, and the fact that gay people were beginning then to come out of a period of intense cultural isolation and persecution and were seeing for themselves that what the popular culture and traditional medicine were saying about them was simply wrong. When the popular culture keeps telling you that you are a monster, and you look around at the others of your community and you don’t see monsters, but fellow human beings, after a while you get angry about being told constantly that you are a monster. Sometimes you even get politically active about it. This is only surprising to people who still believe, who still need to believe, that homosexuals are either dangerous psychotics or contemptible faggots. They’re not human beings defending themselves they’re homosexuals desperately wanting social approval… But that gay anger did not drive the change to the DSM. It was the science.
Anyone who has studied the struggle for gay equality since the change to the DSM knows exactly what happened next, what the ones who could not let science override their cheapshit bar stool prejudices about homosexuals did. They started their own cottage industry of junk science to have something to support their prejudices against what the actual scientists were saying. Paul Cameron being probably the main example of that. But he is hardly alone.
NOM is with them, if not in generating their own junk science, then at least in cheerfully passing it along. But there is more to it. Take another look at Brian Brown’s alarm at this academic conference in Baltimore…
Here’s how the brochure describes the goal:
“This day-long symposium will facilitate the exchange of ideas among researchers, scholars, mental health practitioners, and minor-attracted persons who have an interest in critical issues surrounding the entry for pedophilia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. The symposium will address critical issues in the following areas:
- Scientific and philosophical issues related to the DSM entry on pedophilia and/or hebephilia
- Effects of the DSM entry on stigma, availability of mental health services, and research
- Ways in which minor-attracted persons can be involved in the DSM 5 revision process”
When professors from Harvard and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine get together to discuss ways in which “minor attracted persons” can be involved in the DSM revision process—watch out.
Yes. Watch out. Because science might happen. Note that there is nothing in that brochure or the bullet points he cites even remotely suggesting that this conference has any interest in normalizing pedophilia. But notice also that Brown doesn’t even bother trying to make that case. What Brown is saying there, clearly, sickeningly, is science can’t be trusted.
Science turned our world upside down when they said nothing was wrong with the homos after all. That is proof that science can’t be trusted. Next thing you know they’ll be saying rape doesn’t harm children. How do you know they won’t? Science always turns things upside down. Science can’t be trusted. Next thing you know they’ll be saying humans and apes have a common ancestor. Next thing you know they’ll be saying the earth isn’t at the center of the universe. This is, seriously, how the folks in the organization co-founded by Robert George Super Genius think.
It’s a mindset thing. It’s a worldview thing. Understand this: the attack on science by groups like NOM isn’t motivated by a simple matter of applying the best political tactics to the job at hand. That’s the mindset of a Karl Rove, but not the folks at NOM. NOM is to homosexuality and marriage, what creationists are to biology and evolution. They’re throwbacks to an age before reason and science, that still needs its demons, witches and scapegoats. Behind that mask of dispassionate logic and rationality George assumes, and the others like Maggie and Brown try to, is, demons, witches, and scapegoats.
Demons. Witches. Scapegoats. Homosexuals. That’s their world. When professors from Harvard and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine get together…watch out… If you ever wondered why none of them can bring themselves to simply look at their gay neighbors in this life and see fellow human beings, some good, some bad, some just trying their best, there’s your answer.
