(Note to reader: this is an ally’s opinion)

The Gay Agenda in action

Around the turn of the millennium, gay marriage became a serious national issue in the US. Opposition to it came from the social and political right. Fundamentally, the opposition was based in homophobia, the tendency to feel fear, discomfort and disgust towards homosexuals and homosexuality. It was ostensibly justified, however, through several different lines of argument. (While I’m referencing things that happened in the past, note this opposition and these arguments are still around.)

Religious arguments

Religious arguments were common. The Hebrew laws listed in the Old Testament include explicit prohibition of male homosexual sex, which many Christians generalized to a prohibition of any non-heterosexual orientation. A flaw of this argument that has often been pointed out is that modern Christians don’t follow the vast majority of Old Testament laws, including those listed in the same book as the prohibition on homosexual sex.

It seems to me that this type of argument is a clear post hoc rationalization. In my opinion these Christians (and others) didn’t start from trying to understand what the Bible says or implies about homosexuality; rather, they started with their homophobic feelings, concluded that homosexuality must be wrong, and then looked for how they could justify this using the Bible.

There was another religious argument made, summed up as “It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” This gets at the idea of heterosexuality being how things were “designed” to work, which also applies to the next kind of argument.

Non-religious arguments

Naturalistic arguments are typically made by non-religious people or by religious people trying to appeal to non-religious people. The basic argument is that humans evolved to reproduce sexually, and in order to do so you need male and female gametes (i.e. an egg and a sperm). Homosexual sex, on the other hand, has no obvious biological function. This characterizes homosexuality as a perversion of natural sexuality.

This type of argument is logically unsound. That’s because it relies on the naturalistic fallacy or “appeal to nature”, which says that a thing is good or right because it is natural. The problem is that medicine, technology, etc. are all unnatural, while suffering and death is natural. It is possible to have a strongly anti-technology perspective asserting these things are in fact bad and good respectively, but that’s not the argument being made.

Indeed, homosexual sex is only about as unnatural as any kind of recreational sex. It occurs in nature. Using condoms or birth control during heterosexual sex is equally a perversion of the natural reproductive process. In general, the people making these arguments wanted to maintain the status quo. However, on the religious side there were those who went further and opposed any kind of non-reproductive sex. This has always been a much less popular idea.

I think naturalistic arguments are also post hoc following from homophobia. I actually don’t think there are any “honest” arguments against homosexuality in general.

Incorrect predictions and actual outcomes

The last type of argument I’ll mention is the slippery slope argument. This says that permitting gay marriage sets us on a path to expand the definition of marriage wider and wider, leading potentially to polygamy and bestiality. While there were flaws with this argument all along, the greatest defeater is the fact that marriage equality hasn’t radically changed marriage. It turns out homosexuals and heterosexuals mostly want the same kinds of lifestyles and participate in society in the same way. If there is a slope, it’s certainly not very very slippery.

It used to be that the public at large was very homophobic. This has decreased massively over my lifetime, and I think marriage equality and the associated awareness campaigns were the biggest catalysts. What happened was that we as a society decided to give people with diverse sexual orientations a chance to be normal and live in a way that’s consistent with their orientation.

Once that chance was given, most Americans realized that people with different orientations just have different orientations. They can be liberal or conservative, religious or non-religious, belong to any race or ethnicity, have any kind of job and any kind of interests, and so on. It’s not much of a stretch to say that a lot of gay culture and attitudes of LGBTQ+ people has been in response to marginalization. I would go so far as to say there’s nothing inherently progressive, leftist, atheistic, kinky, etc. about people with diverse sexual identities.

The next frontier of acceptance

Transphobia is similar and related to homophobia, and seems to be even more threatening to people’s safety. It’s been culturally ingrained in many Americans that trans people are bizarre and gross. What it means to be trans isn’t clear to them, and trans people are framed as targets for derision or hatred. Trans people are culturally strongly associated with sex work, which is somewhat based in reality. I don’t know how many people realize that sex work is not necessarily the first choice for a trans person, but rather it is often their only way to survive as a result of being shunned from mainstream society.

I’ve heard many opponents of trans rights describe a view that, essentially, trans people just can’t fit into society. It would cause too many problems for cis people. What do we do about bathrooms? What do we do about sports? And so on.

But trans people only fail to fit in because they are excluded. Like gay and bi people, trans people are just people. What if we gave trans people the same chance to exist and participate in society?

This is already happening in some places, just as acceptance of diverse sexual orientations gradually grew before becoming part of the mainstream. The pushback from the right, however, is even stronger and more violent.

The more that cis people are aware of trans people and hear their voices, the less transphobic they become. We need to be making more cultural depictions of trans people in mundane situations, dealing with the same problems cis people have, and so on. If cis people see that trans people can be a normal part of society, I think they’re much more likely to be allowed to be a normal part of society.

That doesn’t just mean acting like cis people. What I notice for example is that the general acceptance of gay men has extended to “flamboyantly” gay men as well. The core, I think, is an understanding that there are different kinds of gay and bi people just like there are different kinds of straight people.

If we give trans people a chance to be themselves, we will see that they are just humans like everyone else.

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Further reading: An analysis of biological arguments against transgenderism

Photo by Katie Rainbow