In case you missed it:
“And one of the things that he said to me, that I think is an astonishingly insightful remark. He said, ‘all pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards…. And if you, if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s going to want to go out and get a copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants.” You know, that’s a, that’s a good comment. It’s a good point and it’s a good thing to teach young people.”
We should teach boys that pornography—even pictures of naked ladies—and masturbation—which 99.999999% of them engage in—will turn them gay. Because masturbation turns them “inward.” Because, hey, every time you touch your own cock, every time you give yourself an orgasm, you’ve just… um, what? Desensitizing yourself to sucking off strangers in toilets?
These comments—which are everywhere today—were offered up at a panel on masculinity at this weekend’s Value Voters Summit in Washington D.C. And not by some lunatic in the audience who got ahold of a mic and was quickly laughed out of the room, but by Michael Schwartz, chief of staff for Sen. Tom Coburn. What is there to say besides… these people are, well, first and foremost: these people are nuts. And they’re absolutely terrified of human sexuality. They’re afraid of women having control of their own reproductive systems, they’re afraid of pornography, they’re afraid of masturbation, of birth control, of homosexuality. And since they refuse to accept that homosexuality isn’t a choice—for reasons political as well as religious—they have to look for environmental causes, for accidents and incidents, for trapdoors that normal, red-blooded ‘merican men can fall through and into the homosexuality lifestyle.
Or they have to pretend that that’s what they’re doing. I don’t believe that Schwartz actually believes what he said and I don’t think that his audience really believes it either. The real key to Schwartz’s real meaning came in a comment he made a bit earlier, in an observation about 11-year-old boys:
“They speak badly about homosexuality. And that’s because they don’t want to be that way. They don’t want to fall into it.”
So lie to them about it—tell them pornography, which we don’t like, and masturbation, which we don’t like, will lead to homosexuality, which we detest. Doesn’t matter if it’s not true. Exploit their fears of homosexuality to keep them away from porn and keep them from masturbating—away from pleasure—and further stigmatize homosexuals in the eyes of straight boys and further terrify and isolate gay boys. Hey, we already lie to them about the harms of premarital sex, the effectiveness of birth control, the protections that condoms provide, the emotional consequences of abortion, and the existential threat that gay marriage supposedly poses to “opposite-marriage.” What’s one more lie?
What’s most amazing about this particular lie is how easily disproved it is. If pornography and masturbation makes you gay… how come all men aren’t gay?
I found the Huffington article this morning, and I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or look for a pike upon which to hoist Schwartz’ head somewhere along Pennsylvania Avenue.
Of COURSE they’re terrified. Sex IS dangerous — to them! Like Evan Rachel Wood says after that soul-opening kiss in “Whatever Works,” it’s like entropy—once the toothpaste is out of that tube, you can’t get it back in. And then people start thinking for themselves, and questioning what they’re told, and the shit really hits the fan.
I’m apparently really, really gay. This is going to be tough to break to the girlfriend.
They have no doubt learned of our secret gay liberal media plot: plant subliminal gay images in straight porn to turn kids gay.
Politicians lie… what else is new?
Guess I am a giant flaming cocksucker.
The reason 11-year old boys speak badly about homosexuality is because stupid assholes like Schwartz and Coburn won’t shut the fuck up.
And Larry Flynt is our leader.
It’s all fun and games until pornography somehow turns my porn-loving wife into a gay man. I won’t be laughing then, no sir.
If it’s so damn easy to “go gay” then there are a lot of rather hot guys I need to give that slight shove into man on man butt action.
Later!
That must be the explanation for the severe population decline since the invention of pornography.
“…how come all men aren’t gay?”
– but they are! And so all the men at the Value Voters Summit were forced to sign up for homo-deprogramming at cash-strapped Exodus International.
At 11 years old I loved Playboy. Boobies, dirty jokes… What could be better.
At 9 I would have only liked the jokes.
I’m prepared to consider that they believe what they say on the basis that most raging homophobes are gay. If, therefore, whatshisface is a closet case, I could see him blaming his own sexuality on that Victoria’s Secret catalogue he furtively masturbated to when he was 14.
Pornography is a convenient target because even the people who view it in private are rarely willing to defend it in public.
11-year old boys are terrified of their sexuality. So of course this wingnut, also terrified of his sexuality, would laud 11-year old boys for their “good instinct” in that regard. The same impulse that drives immature kids to say “eww, yucky buttsecks” and call each other faggots is the same impulse that’s at work in these Values Voter types.
What he meant to say was “looking at naked pictures of women makes you realize you’re a closeted gay ‘conservative’ who actually is not turned on by women”.
So, in a way, it makes you gay – if you’re already gay but just trying not to admit you are.
For us straight guys it doesn’t change anything. Although it does distort your view (sociological) of the available pool of women you find attractive, which is not good.
So long as they’re looking for environmental causes of homosexuality, we can at least turn that to our advantage by saying that climate change, deforestation, and water pollution cause homosexuality. Republicans would suddenly become staunch environmentalists. By the time they figure out that we’re just shitting them and “j/k homosexuality has been innate this whole time,” it’ll be too late: we’ll already have clean air and water and limits on CO2 emmissions.
Putting aside the place these comments came from, there’s some truth to them.
It’s been often said by the experts that men who engage in the viewing of pornography eventually leap on to other sexual acts and their inhibitions diminish more and more with each new sexual act they engage in, that can easily lead to homosexual acts. It sort of works in the same way as a drug addiction does, the drive just increments and new experiences are sought.
History gives us the best (more accurately worst) example of this behavior in the roman emperor Nero, incestuous, bisexual, and finally homosexual. Corrupted by all lust natural (heterosexual) and unnatural (homosexual). Once men engage in these sort of addictions like pornography sooner or later they will descend into all sorts of degradations and will loose all self respect and worth.
Oh, and while we’re at it, we’ll say that proper preventative medical care can nip the growth of “homo-cells” in the bud. Nationalized health care will pass in an instant! Pre-existing conditions will be a thing of the past!
20: So you’re having to “repress” your lust and avoid all temptations of porn in order to avoid eating pussy? Explains a lot.
@20 Loveschild, are you saying that pornography is the gateway literature to Giovanni’s Room in the same way marijuana is the gateway drug to heroin?
Also, Loveschild I note with some amusement your ordering of Nero’s worsening depravation: incest, leading to bisexuality, with the ultimate finally worst: homosexuality.
20, You make up this crap because you know you can’t argue your case based on the truth. Lying is against your religion, is it not? (More proof that you don’t actually follow the Bible, you just find scriptures to attack others.)
@20 No amount of porn could lead me to touch a kassloppuss. None.
I don’t think you could put more unsubstantiated crap in one post, but I’m sure you will manage to outdo yourself.
If the anti-sex people had even the smallest validity to their constant railing against masturbation, to give just one example, pretty much every male and most females would be hairy-palmed and blind.
And I wouldn’t be able to see to type this.
@20: You know, the irony is that the homosexuality — if Nero was the dominant partner — was probably the least objectionable of those indulgences in Roman eyes. Marrying his sister was pretty fucking gross, and so was stealing another man’s lawful wife.
I kind of like that though. Nero — the man who had the blood of his own sister/wife, his mother, and his second, pregnant wife on his hands — did it because of *pornography.* Sounds like someone has a stirring paper to present to the next classicist symposium.
Thing is, these idiotic nutjobs have always been around. What’s changed is that the Internet, great equalizer that it is, has taken them out of rural isolation and given them a means of organizing and disseminating their lunacy to the world.
Damn these Internets! Damn them all!
24 I just listed Nero’s depraved acts in the order in which he committed them.
History doesn’t lie, go and look for yourself.
Loveschild: As ALWAYS, please to actually present us with proof of your “experts” and their research? What? They don’t actually exist? Liar, liar pants on fire. God hates you for your lies, Loveschild. You’re going to burn.
30, Lovechild, Nero didn’t do the things he did because of pornography. Why do you you have to resort to lying?
First off:
Been playin with it since before I became self-aware,
Been jerkin on it since it first could grow hair.
….Nope, still hetero.
Second, Loveschild, do you know how many great leaders were “disgusting” by your “Christian” moral standards? Did you know that a homosexual broke the Nazi codes (helping the allies DEFEAT THE THIRD FUCKING REICH) and (arguably) invented the computer? Did you know the guy who got sucked off by an intern in the Whitehouse did better than his vanilla successor?
Also, of course most sick bastards have looked at porn. Most people in the industrialized world have looked at porn. That’s like saying most murderers in the US are Christian.
@28,
You’re confusing Caligula and Nero.
@33, as are most of their victims. Why isn’t anybody doing anything to stop the spread of Christian-on-Christian crime? Think of the children!
Funny, I remember as a kid, some other kid told me that the definition of “gay” is somebody who likes to look at naked women. I therefore assumed I was totally gay and did not understand why that was an insult. Eventually I looked it up in the dictionary and discovered the correct definition.
28 Maybe he didn’t do the immoral and criminal acts he did due to pornography directly though his empire had plenty of it (by way of the “arts”) and as you rightfully hinted on, encorage it. But he clearly began his descend into complete depravity by the sexual acts he engaged in, followed by another and another. He never was satisfied and needed to be more abominable. In that way Nero’s depravity channeled his sexual drive more and more inwards just as Schwartz remarked (concerning the viewing of all pornography) and thats how he ended up engaging in incest with his mother and sister and homosexual acts and gay marriage not once but three times. The first to a young boy he had castrated, the second to a freedman and the third to a perverted gang member.
So, LC were you just “repressing your lust” when you decided to make three babies out-of-wedlock?
Loveschild, why didn’t your father use a condom on the night you were conceived?
Most of the craziness and depravity of the latter Roman Emperors had a lot to do with lead poisoning, not porn. The Romans were brilliant engineers, but didn’t realize it was a bad idea to use lead in their viaducts. In fact, the word “plumbing” comes from the Latin word for lead.
@37: Guess what, some really vanilla people look at porn, too — and they have vanilla sex with their wedded partners. Some people don’t look at porn and they rape their children. Your anecdotes are baseless and useless. SHOW US SOME PROPERLY RESEARCHED PROOF OF ANY OF THIS!!!
Did you actually get an education? Can you define “education”?
Well, that certainly explains why most men are gay.
@ 37,
And that’s why Catullus and many other Romans went on raping and killing sprees… I mean within their own empire. By the way, those arts (no need for scare-quotes) were not so much erotic as they were comical. Most of the goofy position paintings were for a good laugh at a bawdy joke. Who doesn’t laugh when they see the Pompeian fresco of Priapus weighing his enormous dick against a platter of food?
i posted this, and one of my gay friends responded:
“Thanks for posting this. Now I know what to get all my hot, straight guy friends for X-mas.”
@34: Hmm? You’re right; I forgot to specify that Octavia was his stepsister, and that’s not strict incest. But he did seduce Poppaea Sabina from her husband. And he did kill Octavia, Agrippina, and Poppaea Sabina.
Still, I’m not sure if I *confused* Nero and Caligula. I don’t think Caligula actually ever married any of his sisters. But correct me if I’m wrong.
What really pisses most of us of about the homophobic extremist radical right is that they try to break as many of God’s COMMANDments as they can.
And then expect praise when they LIE about it.
If this is true, then I must be gayer than Larry Craig during fleet-week in San Francisco!
Loveschild, your husband looks at porn. Lots of it.
Also, the only western government in the 20th century to really crack down on immorality and nationalize christianity was nazi germany, by way of a concordat with the Holy See and subsequent morality acts. They also murdered thousands of gay germans under the directive of this new nationalist-religious government headed by a man who touted “pure marriage” and “true marriage” under the banner of a unified christian nation and frequently made sweeping speeches about how unchristian elements were attempting to destroy germany. His goal in this “pure marriage” was the systematic erasure of “un-german” features and the strengthening of the bloodline. He thought that by barring certain unions he would forge a new master race.
This is why folks gloss over the history of nazi germany, because christianist supremacy is complicit in most of what they did as a regime. Forget all the David Barton-esque revisions and stare history in the face like a mirror, Loveschild.
Godwin FTW.
@48 baconcat
I thought Loveschild already admitted that she is a single mother who has never been married.
But yes, its a guarantee that without the assistance of porn, Loveschild would have never gotten any. Who would want to fuck such a bitter arrogant idiot unless they were imagining someone else?
@36
That’s awesome! I had a similar goofy confusion as a kid. On the playground, some kid told me that “privates” were called a “penis” and so I thought I had a penis for a good long time. Until one day my little female friend and I were changing into bathing suits before a swim and I told her to look away so we didn’t see each others’ penises. She totally laughed at me and I was completely perplexed. Very humiliating.
By this token, 100% of the world’s population should be gay. w00h00! Well, except for hetero absolute losers.