Why Christians Should Not Be Heterosexuals
Explained here.
(By the way, I think the main factual contention of the essay, that "heterosexuality" and "homosexuality" are not natural categories, but inventions of the 19th-century, is pretty well established, and often by "queer theorists," and not just traditionalists.)
(By the way, I think the main factual contention of the essay, that "heterosexuality" and "homosexuality" are not natural categories, but inventions of the 19th-century, is pretty well established, and often by "queer theorists," and not just traditionalists.)
Although I do not exactly agree with the article (I think gay and straight are very accurate categories), it does remind me of the feminist-sexist divide.
ReplyDeleteIf you are not a feminist, you are a sexist. I am reminded of here in Spain, when a man was shouting Ole Ole as a lady danced in the streets, and a feminist acquantaince complained this was very "machista". Innocent things like this have such hard cut categorizations!
If these are "accurate categories," why had no one noticed them until the late 1800s?
DeleteWhy would noticing or not noticing something reflect on whether it is accurate?
DeletePeople had noticed "sodomy", no? And it is not unreasonable to believe that some people would be pridisposed to it.
To be honest, simply identifying someone as gay requires answering two questions:
1) Do they find people of their own sex more attractive than people of hte other sex?
2) Would they have sex with people of their own sex?
Both of these are things are documented before 1800. At best, what changed is there being a word for it.
"Why would noticing or not noticing something reflect on whether it is accurate?"
DeleteYou're not being serious, are you? We're not talking about quarks or deep sea fish. The contention is that there are two quite distinct types of human beings: "heterosexuals" and "homosexuals." And that they are different in a very fundamental and obvious way. But for 100,000 years this escaped everyone's attention?
In fact, your questions show the flimsiness of the construct. Why not instead divide people into masturbators and non-masturbators?
1) Do they masturbate more than have sex with others?
Or how about people who have oral sex and those who don't? Humans are fundamentally divided into oral-sexers and non-oral-sexers!
The VERY POINT is that people often had same-sex sex before 1860. And no one thought they were some different "type" of person, just like we don't think someone who masturbates is a different variety of person than those who don't. And what changed was not that "homosexuals" were suddenly noticed, but that with the break down of Christian civilization, people thought they need a "scientific" classification by which to condemn such acts as abnormal.
As noted in the article linked to, the term "homosexual" was invented as a *diagnosis of a mental illness* to enable sticking people doing those acts in mental institutions. You did read the article, right?
Delete