Looking at Naked Ladies Makes You Gay

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?