Of Scouts and Sex

The husband of my wife’s first lover was an Eagle Scout. At some point, once the trust level reached a certain point, he told us that while a scout in the mid-70’s to the mid-80’s it was just understood that in the pup-tents at  night you would be sucking and fucking with your tent mate. This went on for years and made up most of his adolescent sexual experience.  Now, that does not make him gay, even though the political gay community would desperately want every 15 year-old who sucks off his buddy to join their community.  Most researchers in to adult sexual behavior discount any sexual activity prior to age 18 because sexual experimentation is part of growing up.

Now to be fair, this guy when I knew him could fuck longer and cum more than I thought was even humanly possible. I filmed him having sex and he had 5 orgasms in about 90 minutes. And although at the time I was only aware that he was having sex with his wife and my wife, I have no doubt he would (and does) stick his dick any warm hole that would stay still long enough for him to ejaculate. For he, like nearly all people can get sexual enjoyment with either sex.

But all that brings us to today’s issue of the Boy Scouts allowing openly homosexual people in the scouts.  Now, I listened to a story on NPR about his this morning and in the story they had a clip of Gov. Perry of Texas saying that “Scouting is about teaching substantial life lessons and sexuality is not one of them, it never has been and doesn’t’ need to be.”  Wow!  That is so wrong for so many reasons. I might write an essay on just that. They also heard from  one leader of a conservative organization that predicted that lifting the ban on open homosexuals would destroy Scouting since it is built upon being “morally straight”.

Now in this debate we must remember that under 4% of the population identify as being LBGT, while over 50% are religious, and the majority of Scout troops are house by and sponsored by religious organizations.  So this is clearly a classic case of minority rights as well as sexual rights…..and religious rights.  How to balance the needs of all three? One person interviewed, a mom who was removed from being her son’s Cub Scout den mother last year because she was openly homosexual used exactly the right word “this policy is archaic”. And archaic it is; an artifact from a world that is gone with the wind. But, if the gay activist have their way and the Scouts forbids the discrimination of gay scout leaders the scout likely would fold up as they would lose nearly all their chapters when churches who can’t accept mandate pulled their sponsorships. Of course the gay activist don’t care if that happens.

So how to balance the rights of religious organizations to freely practice with the rights of sexual freedom?  The neo-Marxian leftist don’t believe such a balance is necessary, to them the public good (or their good) certainly outweighs the rights of those they see as religious bigots. Ah, the ugly head of utilitarianism rears its head: the ends justifies the means.

In fact, freedom to practice religion is a fundamental human right, just is the right to practice one’s sexuality. The measure of a liberal democracy is not in how it allows diversity of philosophical thoughts that are popular, but in its ability to allow unpopular thoughts. Ask yourself, if the numbers were reversed, and if the political LBGT community represented the majority of the population and only 4% were traditional Catholics; would they allow the Catholic Church to keep preaching that homosexuality will send a person to hell?  Given what I hear in the rhetoric, the answer is absolutely not. I have no doubt, If they had their way traditional Christian religion would be aggressively suppressed.

So, we must continually ask ourselves what is best for a free democracy and what will best preserve everyone’s rights.  In this case, I think the Boy Scouts answer had planned to to announce two weeks ago was a good one, they  had planned to allow each sponsoring organization make its own choice on this issue.  This would have both preserved the human rights of homosexuals and the rights of the religious sponsors (with whom I happen to disagree).  So if a mom can’t be a den leader at her son’s pack sponsored by 1^st Baptist Church, her son can join (or she can start) a Cub Scout Pack at some other location, and she can lead there.  Sadly the leadership seemed to have collapsed under pressure from religious conservatives.   Conservatives that have been energized by the attempts to portray them as hate groups. Nothing mobilizes people like tipping your hand that you wish to eradicate their belief system.

You might not care not care one wit about exercising your religious freedoms as you seek to exercise sexual freedom; however, the 80 year old Catholic woman might not care one wit about exercising her sexual freedoms as she devotes herself to her exercising her religious freedoms.  Both are fundamental rights. It shouldn’t matter if you are fingering your rosary or your hot lover’s ass, the right to do either (or both) is what matters.

A free society must be free for everyone. We must resist those seek to enhance one set of rights at the expense of liberal democracy itself.  

Of Being Automatons or Being Autonomous

Recent studies have suggested that the growth of mobility and the e-culture have not served to make us more eclectic in our belief systems but rather more narrow.   Increasingly Americans are insolating themselves against all views outside those in a narrow group and the result of that is a populace that is more dismissive of other viewpoints and more committed to their own, which just happens to be shared by nearly everyone in their little circle.

In the past two nights I’ve had dinner with two different groups of people. On Friday night I was with a group of my fellow Ph.D. students and their significant others.   I know these people well and I hear a commonality in viewpoints that could have been written by a single author writing talking points memo.  With the election coming the refrain is “Obama would be not be attacked so if he were not black”,  i.e. all non-leftist are racist.  No amount of reasoning, like the Republicans impeached Clinton, can sway them from this belief.

At other times I spend time with both fiscal and religious conservatives. Though both support the Republicans their prime values are very different; however, what I hear laced in the conversation are snippets of rhetoric taken word for word from the incredibly influential guru of the right Rush Limbaugh. Like the leftist, the rightist largely live in a world that reinforces their own prior beliefs and leads them to condemn not only other beliefs but to judge evil motives for those “others”.  

What stands out is the growing tendency to judge those who have political beliefs outside their group to be morally deficient… e.g. evil.

As the nearly universally detested moderate, I see value and reason in both positions.  In 1979 I began listening to NPR news whenever I was in my car.  I began listening to “All Things Considered” and later “Morning Edition”.     About a decade later I was one of the early listeners to Rush Limbaugh. Like NPR, Rush was on my car radio when I drove during broadcast times.  Very conveniently, though combined they run 7 hours a day, the three programs never overlap in broadcast times. What is important to know is that those three radio broadcasts are the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd most listened to programs on US radio; and in many ways they represent (and shape) the agendas of the mainstream of the Republican Party (Limbaugh) and the Democrat Party (NPR).  

Radio is a great forum for exhaustive intellectual discussion, far better than the image driven world of Television and more accessible to the masses than print.   Though both radio networks are dismissive and condescending of the other, from long listening I have fond they both have important things to add to the debate.  Yes, NPR is a full-fledged non-profit news organization that covers many topics and Limbaugh is unapologetically commercial and is political entertainment; but both use their chosen medium to relay a specific world view extremely effectively. What is different is that NPR pretends to be politically neutral while they advocate the Democrat agenda, contrasting with Limbaugh who is explicit is his support of Republicans (specifically conservative Republicans).

By listening to both points of view I am able to see the
strengths and weakness of each set of arguments to come to an independent decision. How can one come to a reasoned judgment when one does not hear the best arguments for both sides from the most articulate spokesmen?

Socially I move between a series of different social and political world views and am able to both understand what the different groups are saying and why they are saying it.  I can see nearly all people are trying to find what is best, while at the same time advocating their own interests. I can see the charlatans on the right and the left as well as the deluded “non-thinkers” who parrot their favorite “thinkers” lines. 

Am I conceited enough to think I’m always right?  No.  I am conceited enough to think I can sound right almost all the time, but I’m realistic enough to know that sounding right and being right are two very different things. What I can say is I have preserved my autonomy. I cannot be fed anyone’s BS and swallow it whole. So I guess I value not being wrong more than I value being right. I hedge my own stated beliefs with my own skepticism.

And perhaps that’s the only way to be an independent in this world that prefers being automatons over being autonomous.  

 

originally posted by me on 11/4/2012

Of Polyamory and Political Identity

There was polyamory before the word was coined in 1992. That must be understood first and foremost.  But words are important; words shape both the discussion and label the players. On the other hand words are also used to obscure the truth and to distract from the truth.

Name calling, is the perfect example of how words are used to hide the truth under the power of the word itself. In the McCarthy era the name “Communist” was used to both silence critics and to hide the caller’s true agenda.

So we consider the word polyamory and its expressed and implicit meaning. Its expressed meaning is very inclusive. It is not a hostile word. It does not exclude any but includes all.  It is almost breathtaking in its expansiveness.  Love is not limited. We can love many people at once.  And by the very word “amore” the term means not just familial love but we mean romantic and sexual love.  

So, the conception is polyamory is that love need not be only bi-lateral. It can be tri-lateral or multi-lateral. All this is simple to understand; however, there is an undercurrent that polyamory does or should or is intended to mean something much more expansive.

There is an element who is aggressively attempting to shape the word polyamory to fit within the neo-Marxist framework of Critical Theory.  I have seen it in any number of writings laced with the trite and overused accusations of; hegemony, oppression and normativity. Inevitably the writer is accusing someone of not doing polyamory the “right” way by not embracing their comprehensive doctrine. In the case of these writers, they fault others for not toeing the line of the comprehensive doctrine of Critical Theory.

For those of you who are not up on political philosophy, Critical Theory was devised after WW2 by the Germany Marxists who returned to Germany after the war only to find the proletariat would not ever rise the way Marx envisioned. So their Frankfort School developed a new brand of Marxism combining it with Freudian philosophy with a goal of uncovering latent oppressions of capitalism in the same way Freud used psychotherapy to  uncover latent neurosis.   And just like psychotherapy is really good at getting people to feel something’s wrong with them but doesn’t make people better, critical theory is really good at convincing people they are oppressed but doesn’t help society get better.  Like in psychotherapy, the practitioner is the only one who benefits from the process.

So we come back to polyamory. The notion of freedom to pursue love as it comes to you is a liberal, not Marxian idea.   Liberalism is founded in the primacy of ones right to pursue personal happiness over (and despite) the desires of the church, king or other powerful groups.  Critical theorists, despite their rhetoric of espousing individual liberty, are fundamentally wedded to group identity. In critical theory, you are not an individual, but a member of a group and as such your rights come due to your group  membership, not to you as the individual.  That is why it is imperative to these people to control the discussion, to squelch descent by code words like hereto-normativity or any other new word they can coin to be a pejorative.  An inclusive polyamory conception with few boundaries beyond the belief in the expansiveness of “amore” is of little use to them in the effort to create a new polyamory minority political block for which they can be the leaders and voice.  

I am an unapologetic, un-reformed liberal.  The ideals of the enlightenment are still a worthy goal in which to aspire.

I left the confines of the Christian community because of their need to tell me what love is and how I should express it; and their belief that I must believe in supernatural non-sense. I’ll be damned if I’m going to walk a back into another quazi-religious community who seeks to do the same thing.  The critical theorist want to tell me the very same nonsense about reality not being real and that I must submit to their narrow view of the world and of love or be ostracized.  I won’t do it. Nor will I link my view of polyamory to their world view.

If you are a critical polyamorist or a religious polyamorist,  I’m not hostile but nor will I accept yours is the only way.   In a pluralistic poly community we must embrace the core values of freedom to love and express love to whomever we want, without trying to put others into a religious or political box.  We can all work together to give the larger population the opportunity to shed the shackles of mono-amory but we will never do so if we put a religious/political litmus test to being poly.

Of the Misuse of Data

Sometimes lies are subtle, but other times they are so egregious that that I’m dumbfounded that it was even attempted.

The most common method of lying in research is to assert a causal link is a causal link. For instance baseball begins every spring, and flowers bloom every spring.  So there is a casual link between baseball and flowers. But would anyone say that baseball causes flowers to bloom?  Of course not.

But this fatally flawed reasoning is used all the time. I’ve written pointing out that although teens who have more sex partners are more likely to have drug abuse problems does not mean (as some claim) that teen sex leads to drug abuse.  The correct interpretation is that the same factors that lead teens to have more sexual partners overlap with the reasons teens have drug problems.

In the case of our baseball illustration, it is the end of winter and the warming weather that brings both baseball and flowers.

Today on FoxNews.com I saw this phony logic taken to a new high.

In this chart it is showing that the recession driving rise in unemployment happened at the same time that the minimum wage law automatically made several steps to bring it back into historical buying power.

The article implies the minimum wage caused the recession; a total and complete falsehood. A falsehood that is so stupid and so transparent that I can’t believe they published it.   The article doesn’t’ say that minimum wage rising caused the recession, but the graphic is designed to work on an emotional level. This is reprehensible.

I’ve bashed other news sources for manipulation of news in the past. What sets this apart is the fact it is a prima facia case, no background knowledge is required to know it’s intentionally deceptive. So they are being both dishonest and stupid. Wow!