With the recent activity surrounding the hearing for Army Lieutenant Dan Choi, an Iraq War veteran and Arab linguist who is also openly gay, I had a thought occur to me and I wanted to share it with y’all.
In my (limited) experience with the military, there’s still quite a bit of public resistance to the idea of allowing gays to openly serve. There are many reasons that one may take this stance, ranging from deeply principled to deeply homophobic and covering all points in between. If the objection comes from deeply held religious or moral convictions, I choose to respectfully disagree with you, but I understand and value the fact that you do have your beliefs on this issue.
From my anecdotal experience, though, the people who are usually the loudest about this issue (“I ain’t lettin’ no queer next to me with a gun; I’ll shoot his ass first!” is a representative sample I’ve heard recently) tend to be strongly grounded in the “mindlessly homophobic” rationale. This isn’t just confined to the military, though. I have plenty of memories of the charming functional illiterates at my rural high school indignantly asking me if I was gay, harrassing me for my presumed homosexuality, and making not-so-subtle meant-to-be-overheard comments about my lack of “real manliness”. These were the people who would always get in your face and confront you on your disgusting life choices — as long (of course) as you weren’t big enough or mean enough to be perceived as capable of handling the violence they always threatened to dish out.
Let’s take a representative example of this kind of person — we’ll call him Bubba. (Don’t assume that it’s only guys who do this; I’ve heard plenty of women who do too. ) Down at the bottom of it all, though, these guys and gals have one common flawed assumption, deeply rooted in raging sense of entitlement:
If that person is gay, they want to have sex with me.
I think the appropriate response here is a quote from Megan Fox’s character of Mikaela:
Oh God, I can’t even tell you how much I’m not your “little bunny.”
In other words, Bubba has committed the logical fallacy of assuming that just because a gay man is sexually attracted to some men, they must like all men — including, necessarily, Bubba. In other words, the defining characteristic of a gay man’s sexuality, according to Bubba, is the orientation; once a man is gay, they automatically must like all men even if those men are otherwise unattractive. Bubba, sad to say, thinks that being gay overrides any sense of taste or choice or other form of preference.
Bubba is a dumbshit. Bubba is, however, all too common — I’ve heard plenty of people independently reproduce this exact line of reasoning.
My thought and theory is: that for the Bubbas of the world, the objection to knowingly associating with someone who is gay comes down to projection of their own inner characteristics: Bubba wants to nail pretty much every female, or in the event that he has some self-restraint, is deluded enough to think that every woman wants to have sex with him. Being a paragon of self-control and discernment, Bubba is naturally are unable to conceive of someone who could in theory be attracted to them but isn’t.
What Bubba objects to, I believe, is not the gay person’s lack of taste and self control, but his own. It’s the same as the liar who in turn is convinced that everyone lies to him and is unable to see a truthful response without looking for the “real” answer, or the person who continually cheats others in big and small ways and in turn expects everyone to cheat her.
Do I think that everyone who objects to military service for gays and lesbians falls into this trap? Not at all. I just tend to think that the more vocal someone is about it, the more likely they are to have this motivation simmering at the bottom of it all. People who suffer from this attitude tend to have the crudest, most violent responses to homosexuality; they tend to be the loudest slanderers, the meanest and most illogical protesters. They argue from a well-deserved fear, because if everyone was just like them, all the sick, dark scenarios they fantasize would of course happen.
God knows that my gay and lesbian friends and acquaintances are no saints. Some of them are people I don’t willingly spend time around — but then, there are plenty of straight people I don’t want to spend a lot of time around either. Frankly, I’ve found that brushing off determined advances from a guy who likes me is no better and no worse than those from a gal who likes me — orientation having less to do with it than does their fundamental ability to hear and accept, “Thanks, but I’m not interested.”
Mind you, typically the Bubbas of the world are at heart hypocrites, because almost all of them have absolutely no problems with lesbians. Oh, no. They’re in favor of lesbians. Mainly because, along with all their other stinking thinking, they are under the delusion that those lesbians still secretly want them — so they’ll be able to score with the lesbian and her girlfirend at the same time. Because of this, it’s easy to spot a Bubba and identify his objection for what it really is.
They argue from a well-deserved fear, because if everyone was just like them, all the sick, dark scenarios they fantasize would of course happen.
My brain wishes to pose everyone the following essay question: Compare and constrast ‘gun control’ with this, um, ‘penis control’. Please note similarities for the record. To assist, here’s ten lbs of literature on ‘projection’.
Then do the same thing for, oh, Prohibition.