[lbo-talk] Christian right leader takes vacation with rent boy

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed May 5 07:18:51 PDT 2010


On May 4, 2010, at 10:15 PM, Joseph Catron wrote:


> Doug, if you want to argue that something you dislike constitutes a
> psychological disorder in the clinical sense, the onus is on you to
> prove
> your case, not on me to preemptively disprove it.

"Dislike" is one thing. But the guy in question was a leading spokesperson for the "ex-gay" movement:

http://gawker.com/5531106/comment-of-the-day-oh-happy-gay

Someone who makes a career out of this is a different case from someone who finds same-sex sex kind of icky.


> But I'll go ahead and suggest that the material needs of previous
> societies,
> codified into surviving cultural and religious traditions, might have
> something to do with it.

Actually, same-sex behavior is fairly frequent in a lot of "traditional" societies.


> (Why many leftists are so eager to blame religion
> for everything - except those things for which it's obviously
> responsible,
> at least in part - I'll never know.)

Who blamed religion for anything?


> You're playing another semantic game here, conflating every form of
> anti-homosexuality sentiment with "visceral dislike." Plenty of people
> dislike homosexuality on cultural, religious, or other grounds
> without being
> particularly visceral about it.

For a materialist, you're giving cultural and religious grounds a free pass. Where do these come from? And what is there relevance to life in the USA in 2010?


> I quote Slavoj Žižek on the equally ludicrous pathologization of
> anti-Semitism:
>
> "In the same way that the overriding belief underlying the Serbsky
> Institute's measures was that a person had to be *insane* to be
> against
> Communism, so Foxman's offer implies that a person has to be insane
> to be
> anti-Semitic. This easy way out enables us to avoid the key issue:
> that,
> precisely, anti-Semitism in our Western societies was - and is - not
> an
> ideology displayed by the deranged, but an ingredient of spontaneous
> ideological attitudes of perfectly *sane* people, of our ideological
> *sanity
> * itself."

I'm not sure what your point is. Most of us would find anti-Semitism repulsive, though we might disagree on the exact definition of anti- Semitism. So you must be conceding that homophobia is also at least somewhat repulsive. And, by the way, "phobia" doesn't just mean fear, like triskaidekaphobia. It also means an irrational fear or hatred, on the model of "xenophobia."

Anti-Semisism wasn't and isn't a form of "insanity," but it is a cultural pathology. Zizek himself subscribes to the theory that it comes from a distorted anti-capitalism - that the anti-Semite's mythical "Jew" embodies all the bad things about capitalism that adherents are incapable of blaming on capitalism, so they blame it on the greedy, disloyal, shifty, rootlessly cosmopolitan Jew. That may not be a personal pathology, but it sure is a social pathology.

Doug



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