The philosopher of biology and of language Ruth Garrett Millikan tries to naturalize teleology in biology by proposing that a selective advantage is a sufficient condition for the existence of “being for” relationship. If a trait or behavior x gives an organism a selective advantage (it has x now because x helped its ancestors survive and reproduce) by virtue of doing y, then the functional purpose or telos of x for the organism is doing y. The organism’s trait or behavior x is for doing y. For example, the darker color of the English Peppered Moth gives that creature a selective advantage by using camouflage to escape the notice of its predators. The camouflage is what the darker coloration is for.
Same-Sex-Sexual Attraction (SSSA) has a selective advantage for human beings; otherwise it would have died out a long time ago. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02955/full The story as I currently understand it starts with the fact that the default configuration of the human fetus is female. As the fetus develops in the womb, it is susceptible, to varying degrees, to various masculinizing influences if it is of the xy persuasion. The degree of susceptibility is determined genetically. Not any single gene, but a number of different genes will be responsible for this trait. If the fetus resists masculinization sufficiently, it will end up more likely to display behaviors and dispositions typically seen as feminine, including sexual attraction to other males. As I have just suggested, inheriting just one of the gay genes will not necessarily make you gay, nor will inheriting all of them will guarantee you will be gay.
Clearly, there is at least one, and possibly several selective advantages to the incomplete masculinization of the male fetus in the womb. This may seem a bit counter-intuitive, but perhaps we should not be speaking in terms of “complete” versus “incomplete” masculinization. Not all coffee beans should be roasted to the French Roast level, the darkest. (If I understand correctly, the French started roasting the bejesus out of their beans in an attempt to blast out the flavor defects in the green beans imported from their tropical colonies). Lighter roasts, such as the medium Dunkin Donuts Roast, also have a place in the world.1 A lighter degree of “masculinization roasting” helps guarantee that at least some persons of the xy persuasion will remove the dishes before peeing in the sink.
A number of possible selective advantages have been proposed for this persistence of SSSA in the human population. Following are two.
First possible selective advantage: ’ People of the XX persuasion often find slightly feminine men to be more suitable as mates’. I explore this theme a bit humorously here https://cliffengelwirt.wordpress.com/2016/01/31/evolution-and-being-gay/ An explanation like this is also broached in the book *MOSTLY STRAIGHT*.
Kinship selection is the second possible selective advantage, which I will be discussing in a bit more detail here. Kinship selection, as it turns out, is not just for bees, and it has gotten empirical support from studies of gay people in Samoa.
Gay people in Samoa, it turns out, have a way of ending up taking care of the children of their relatives. My personal experience has been that in large families in the West, the more effeminate males also often end up taking up a certain amount of the child-rearing burden of their relatives. This way, you indirectly increase the prevalence of your own genes in the general population. The more strongly SSSA you are, the less likely you are to have biological children of your own. Having children of your own is notorious for monopolizing your care, energies, and attention. So your own children would be a massive distraction from caring for your relatives’ children. Voila! A clearly-defined selective advantage of SSSA.
So by Millikan’s principle of teleofunctionality, SSSA has at least one functional purpose, and that is to PREVENT your making your own babies. This prevention is accomplished so that you can devote more time, resources, and caring to the children of your relatives. Here it is not so much particular human beings that are getting reproduced, but certain of your genes by way of your relatives.
Evolution is so clever that it has found a way to prevent those of us who, because of one degree or another of effeminacy, are most likely to be of service to our relatives’ children from getting distracted from our teleofunctionally nepotismal duties by having children of our own to take care of. I have to say that I probably would not have arrived at a solution as diabolically clever as this one even were I suddenly elevated to the status of a Designer God by the Demiourgos-in-chief.
On this scenario, it would remain true that the “reproductive power” has as its end reproduction. It is just a question of what is to be “reproduced” — entities sharing one half of your genes, or the genes of your relatives, many of which will also happen to be your genes. Christianist and Islamic fundamentalist ideologues typically do not show much interest in becoming aware of the ambiguity in the term “reproduction”, mindlessly assuming that “reproduction” will always mean the production of an entity that shares one half of your genes.
Skalko notes that across species what is the same function when described most generally might have, species by species, different proximate ends when the description zeroes in on a particular species.
When an organ has a general purpose shared across all species it can still have other purposes peculiar to certain species.
DISORDERED ACTIONS: A Moral Analysis Of Lying And Homosexual Activity (Neunkirchen-Seelscheid, editiones scholasticae, 2019), p. 236
Across most or perhaps all species with teeth, for example, the teeth function as instruments for those grinding, chopping and distending, and piercing motions needed to reduce food to a mush suitable for swallowing. Certain species will have teeth whose shapes are conducive to piercing, others to grinding. Others to biting in self defense or predation. Some other, different species will have a range of these energy-and-nutrient-gaining purposes, but also shaped to produce certain sounds, including sounds needed for speech and for singing. The teloi of teeth are disjunctive across species.
Something similar seems to be happening here, except not across different different species, but across different groups of human beings. What might be described most generally as the ‘reproductive function’ when talking about human beings generally might take the form of making babies among the Kinsey 0’s among us and the form, among the Kinsey 6’s, of ‘increasing the prevalence in the population of some of my genes and my relatives’ genes’.
In other words, it looks like the “reproductive power” is disjunctive. The “end” of that power may be EITHER making babies that share one half of your genes OR getting more of your genes and your relatives’ genes out there into the general population, even when your direct line is not present in that population. The end of the “reproductive or “generative power” would be very different in the two groups, the Kinsey 0s and the Kinsey 6’s, so much so as to be “disjunctive”. There would be no single telos to this power, as if humanity were a dough cut by a single cookie-cutter with a non-varying shape.2
Thomas brought a certain amount of fresh air into the discourses of his time by bringing in all that new-fangled Aristotlean science. I would suggest that present-day Thomists would do well to bring into their discussions of Natural Law a more serious discussion of current-day biology, especially evolutionary theory. And no, Skalko’s rather bizarre discussion of penis-fencing flat worms is not going to suffice (p. 223).
In the face of all of this simply saying, as Skalko does, that this power has just a single telos, “reproduction”, because that is, after all, why we call it the reproductive power” is not going to cut it. And this is not the only severe lapse to he found in the quality of Skalko’s argumentation and scholarship.3
1 Please note that I am not saying that drinking Dunkin Donuts coffee will make you gay.
2 cf Gunther Laird, *THE UNNECESSARY SCIENCE: A Critical Analysis Of Natural Law Theory* (Onus Books, 2020), where he invites us, should we want to remain within Aristotlean/medieval hylomorphism, to regard “straight people” and gay people as having two different natures.
Also consider how polymorphism as used in Object-Oriented Programming Languages such as Java provides an analogy to this difference in teloi. Through polymorphism, the Java programmer is able to issue a single method call — say “eat” — to various objects that interpret that call each in its own way. An object of the wolf class might interpret that call to mean “go out hunting with your pack and bring down, then eat a deer.” An object of the cow class might interpret that command as ‘find a pasture to graze in.” An object of the human being class may interpret that command as “rob a bank to get money, then use that money to buy food”. Each to its own Form and Nature.
3 I argue here that these lapses are to be explained by the clear malice Skalko directs against LGBTQ+ people and their allies.
As long as I am bashing right-wing Christianists (Gil Sanders’ hateful homophobic propaganda, John Schneider’s greasing the skids towards violence against Asian people), I may as well point out that Mr. Paul Manata, who has made quite a splash as a Christianist apologist, used to target special-ed students in High School.
I can remember making fun of the kids in special Ed. Oh; I would get a laugh from all the popular kids. They thought I was so cool and funny! I would make one autistic kid so mad that he would scream and hit himself in the middle of the halls. He wanted to be liked so I would use him. I would act nice and tell him to ask our P.E. coach what a sphincter was. All of us would laugh when we would hide and listen to him ask Coach C. “what’s a sphincter?” Then we would bust a gut when Coach rolled his eyes and said in his gruff voice, “It’s a muscle, Chris.”
But I didn’t only pick on the special Ed kids. I would punch anyone for a buck. My friends knew it and so if they didn’t like someone they would give me a dollar and I’d just walk up and hit them.
This is in contrast to my Jeff, who employed his formidable pugilistic skills in Junior High and High School to protect an autistic kid from bullying. The contrast here is striking. There is a core that doesn’t always change over the years, though it can find a different target. Jeff’s core found compassion for very different types of people; Mr. Manata’s core, DingoDave thinks, just found different targets as he turned into a Christianist ideologue.
Mr. Manata also beat up Pinoy people in High School, and crossed the border into Mexico in order to “jump” (as he put it) Mexican people in side streets and beat them up.
Having power meant that I could destroy anyone. So I fought on a regular basis. My popularity grew because of my victories. I remember me and three of my friends fighting about 25 Filipino gang members who came to our school to recruited new members. We beat them in the parking lot. You can imagine the news spreading. Four guys take on a whole bunch of gang members and beat them. Well, I had death threats and was told by school officials not to go to any school functions etc. But I went just to show that I had power. Nothing ever came of the threats. I would fight any chance I had. If I was driving and you honked your horn at me, well then I’d follow you to where ever you were going, get out of the car, and beat you in public. I used to have a broom stick handle and would just wait outside of restaurants in the bushes for any random person to come out. I would jump out and beat them with the stick. I remember once going into an Italian restaurant, pulling out the cooks from the back, and beating them. They had jumped a friend the night before so we went down with baseball bats and I had brass knuckles. We beat them so bad that a couple were in the hospital fighting for their life (or so said a kid whose mom was a nurse on duty at the local hospital).
America wasn’t enough. I would go down to Mexico, get hammered, and then jump Mexicans in side streets.
This was cool but not big enough. So a friend and I vowed to beat up at least one person from every state in the U.S. We would drive around, find an out of state plate, and then follow them and jump them when they got to their destination.
I remember going to a party and walking up to guys and making them bow to me in front of everyone, what an ass I was(!), actually I thought I was cool. I still fought on a regular basis. I was asked to bounce some pretty cool parties. One party, after I had drank 750 ml. of Jeggermeister and about 8 beers off the keg; I was told by the owner that some guys were getting loud. I went over, grabbed the first guy, threw him down and kicked him in the face. Now, I could leg press over 1,000 pounds and squatted almost 600 lbs, so it was a powerful kick. I deviated his septum and he ended up getting reconstructive surgery.
Mr. Manata’s self-serving comments do nothing to hide the sheer ugliness of this.
He then shows an amazing lack of self-awareness when, some years later, he makes statements that lead people to accuse him of racism. One could only make such inferences, he seemed to be claiming, only if one were cynically seeking to further the agenda of a particular leftist (!) political party. As if his getting hammered (on alcohol? On meth?) and crossing the border in order to “jump” Mexican people in side streets were irrelevant to the interpretation of his statements. Certainly Mr. Manata is not the best person to point to if one wants to refute the White Christian racism uncovered in the book WHITE TOO LONG.
Oh, and I’ve been meaning to ask you, Mr. Paul Manata — did you also beat up LGBTQ+ people? You would not, after all, have to bother crossing the border into Mexico to do that. And if you did, do you think that just MIGHT inform your attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people today?
George Tooker, egg tempera on panel. I am not sure what the official title is, but the topic is certainly the Torment of Christ. Mr. Paul Manata and his targets, past and present. There is a core to a person that doesn’t always change over the years, though it can find different targets
Update (04/08/2022)
…never did [beat up LGBTQ+ people], though that’s not due to some virtue in me at the time. In the early 90s, finding people who were out of the closet as “LGBTQ+” (indeed, the acronym didn’t even exist) wasn’t super common.
Paul Manata, commenting at a Facebook page in answer to my question
But Mr. Manata rather strongly implies that he would have targeted and beaten up LGBTQ+ people, had he only been able to identify us queers. I suppose it is fortunate that his gaydar was not quite up to par at that time.
I think the post you [a certain person on Facebook] accidentally deleted was the one I was planning to respond to, which I cannot presently find. Here is the response, in case it is apropos:
In his The FORMATION OF A PERSECUTING SOCIETY, Robert Moore details how, starting in the 10th century, Christians started persecuting Jewish people, gay people, “heretics” (though often the heresies were more in the imagination of the persecutors than anything actual), and lepers. The holocaust was the most extreme instance of this persecution.
Rene Gerard (whom I have just started reading, starting with THE IDEAS OF RENE GIRARD: AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF VIOLENCE AND RELIGION ) has, I think, the best explanation for the motivation of these persecutions (though not for why they started around 950 AD): scapegoating. An insider group “transfers” all its sins onto an outsider group — Jewish people, gay people, African Americans, Asians, lepers or handicapped people, so that members of the insider group can feel superior and virtuous in relation to the outsider group. This need to feel superior and virtuous often provokes extremely violent emotions when there is even the slightest hint of a demand for equality, which threatens the insider group’s “superior” status. As a White Southerner plaintively asked after he was convicted of murdering an African American person, “If I am not better than an [N-Word], who am I better than?”
It is all too easy to find instances of scapegoating LGBQT+ people, for example, on Facebook. Although so far as I can tell at the time of this writing, Girard does not directly say much about the scapegoating of LGBTQ+ people, this link above discusses the implications of his work for this scapegoating. http://www.theologyattheedge.co.uk/chistian-lesbian-gay/7-ecclesial-homophobia-in-the-light-of-renee-girard-s-theory-of-memises? People who identify as heterosexual feel uncomfortable about the practices they engage in (their own same-sex attraction, anal sex, oral sex, BDSM), so they transfer onto gay people everything they feel uncomfortable about. “We are not the perverts — those gay people are the evil perverts”. In doing so, they persecute innocent people by, for example, posting on Facebook vile memes that could have been developed by taking as a template German propaganda from the 30’s directed against Jewish people. Girard notes that the perpetrators of the scapegoating have to be unaware that this is what they were doing even though this is blatantly obvious to 3rd parties; and the author of the anti-gay meme was comically unaware that he was taking his own discomfort with certain practices (now why would he feel uncomfortable with those?) and projecting them onto gay people. Not to name names, of course. (Well, I guess I will name Gil Sanders, who came up with the meme, and AJ Stringfellow, Paul Manata, and others, who at the very least rendered themselves complicit by failing to push back against it.) But I was appalled by the lack of push-back against this vile, sickening propaganda disseminated by this Christianist’s meme.
The meme was vile, as is the illustration below. It’s perpetrator and the people who are complicit in it deserve as little respect as any other dumb, vicious bigot — a racist, an anti-semite — persecuting innocent people.
This particular Christianist was big on neo-Thomistic Natural Law, as were most of his FB friends. John Holbo notes here https://crookedtimber.org/2019/05/07/the-steelwool-scrub-a-fallacy/?fbclid=IwAR2fq_jpriacMAkdMGNRewxvmkBYKySMwlysAn1GxBfh82pmry7Q7B83Szk how all the quaint neo-Thomistic talk about angels and essences and “Natural Law” is just a cover hiding the real motivations of people who produce anti-gay propaganda like the meme just discussed. The quaint neo-Thomism isn’t what motivates snaitsirhC to beat up gay people or try to try to remove gay people from the recent anti-lynching bill. What motivates them is the question “If I am not better than a queer, who am I better than?” What motivates them is scapegoating. And scapegoating, of course, is an integral component of bigotry.
Those who want to create an anti-gay meme can use this as a template — just make all the necessary changes:
I try here to define what it is to be a bigot, a major part of which consists in being a member of an in-group that scapegoats members of a defined out-group.
A recent Facebook post written by a certain Gil Sanders affords us a peek at what is at work in the scapegoating of LGBTQ+ people by bigots by letting us watch this scapegoating in action. I will analyze this scapegoating with the help of concepts developed by Rene Girard as discussed here . Although so far as I can tell at the time of this writing, Girard does not directly say much about the scapegoating of LGBTQ+ people, the link above discusses the implications of his work for this scapegoating. In this post, I will be discussing the particular mechanics of scapegoating, how this scapegoating works, and how, the more it slips unnoticed into the background, the more effective it is.
If we define a Facebook neighborhood by the people who are attracted to one’s page and place comments on it, by one’s FB friends, and by the friends of those friends then Mr. Sanders resides in a rather skeezy FB neighborhood. Some of the people who comment on his page post items that suggest they are trying — perhaps in a deniable fashion — to advance White Supremacy. (I am looking at you, Mr. Jeff Mecham.) Some of their friends (for example, a certain Ken Zerkowski) in turn, make no effort to hide their depravity, posting pictures of Pepe the Frog and depictions of LGBTQ+ people that would make Dr. Goebbels proud. This is the sort of run-down, disreputable neighborhood in which one might expect to encounter meth dealers (oh — hello Mr. Paul Manata*) and meth addicts and purveyors of anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda. One does not expect good things to come from a neighborhood like this.
Mr. Paul Manata and Mr. AJ Stringfellow (mansplainer par excellence)do not seem to regard this neighborhood as beneath their standards — perhaps, like me, they were just slumming, though the history of Mr. Manata would suggest a certain natural affinity for it. And at least so far, they have not posted pictures that would garner the enthusiasm of Dr. Goebbels. I will give them credit for that much. Nonetheless, I do think certain silences are telling, as I will show shortly.
(The Paul Manata I am referring to is the same Paul Manata whose arguments attempting to defend the racist name and logo of the former Cleveland Indians [who have very recently become the Cleveland Guardians] were demolished so effectively here by Randal Rauser on his blog under the category of ‘racism’. Randal Rauser thinks that Mr. Manata’s arguments are “…bad in the way the Trabant is a bad automobile or Chernobyl is a bad vacation destination.” I would have added “train-wreck bad”, though when I am in a more indulgent mood, I would merely say that, like so many White Christianist Nationalists of the ‘more-rational-than thou’ persuasion ala John D. Federer, his reasoning, replete with a succession of ever-so-cute but wondrously superficial “gotchas”, and relying so heavily on tu quoque, with its anti-anti-racist contrarianism, so often has all the depth of a mud puddle. His depressing readiness to claim that his opponents on the left who are, in his view, excessively anti-racist have bad, partisan, cynical motives does not exactly remove from him that certain right-wing, racist stench. Come to think of it, neither does his previously having beaten up Mexican people and tormented mentally-disabled people. It is perhaps true that, like John Schneider, he is not necessarily incapable of doing good work as long as he can refrain from inhaling the toxic fumes of White Grievance emanating from the right-wing fever swamps. But the dodgy things he wrote and the far-worse than merely dodgy things he has done remain.
Yes, that Paul Manata. The Paul Manata about whom the best that can be said is that he is no longer (presumably) a meth dealer and user. The one who once said “I [Paul Manata] would go down to Mexico, get hammered [on alcohol? On meth? Or both? Both are associated with irrational violence], and then jump Mexicans in side streets.” At least the Mexican people had, it is likely, the ability to defend themselves; but Mr. Manata would also target mentally-disabled people. (Mr. Manata didn’t saythat he beat them up.) One wonders how likely he was also to jump LGBTQ+ people on American side streets. That was a while back, and I am sure, of course, that Mr. Manata is a fine upstanding citizen now without the slightest trace of racism (now that he no longer seems to be commenting on Randal Rauser blog), old-school fag-bashing, bigotry, or predatory bullying of any sort. Or meth dealing or meth using. Nonetheless, if one wants to refute Robert P. Jones characterization of Christianists in his White Too Long or Kristin Kobes Du Mez in her Jesus and John Wayne, Mr. Manata might not be the best witness to point to.
But I digress. In this post, I am talking about one White Christian Nationalist, Mr. Gil Sanders and how his propaganda efforts — one of the bad things his neighborhood produces — bring to the light of day the mechanisms of scapegoating. I am not talking about every single dodgy or worse White Christianist character of the Jesus-and-John-Wayne sort scurrying about in Mr. Sanders’ neighborhood.)
But back to Mr. Sanders. The mere fact that one does not seem to mind that much residing in a neighborhood like this does not necessarily mean that one is a racist or homophobic bigot. Nonetheless, speaking for myself, I would surely hope that I could be connected to blatantly Dr. Goebbels types like the aforementioned Mr. Ken Zerkowski in my Facebook neighborhood only after just a few more degrees of separation. What is more, Mr. Sanders himself certainly contributes to the skeezy character of his neighborhood by engaging in a scapegoating program whose sheer vileness he is oblivious to — this obliviousness is, as we will see, belongs to the nature of scapegoating — but obvious to any third party with eyes to see. And Mr. Sanders does not improve the moral tone of his neighborhood by being an enthusiastic follower of the former president, the Syphilitic Apricot, and by being a comically inept defender of the Apricot’s Big Lie. But that is a topic unto itself.
Mr. Gil Sanders, an acolyte of the infamous Edward Feser, is associated with the Southern Evangelical Seminary, an institution that certainly tries hard (with how much success I am not sure) to defend itself against the charge of racism. As one might expect from someone with a background like this, Mr. Sanders was not terribly pleased by the powers that be making June the month to celebrate Pride and rainbows. Sanders reacted to the June, 2021 celebration by posting the image shown towards the end of this screed. This image juxtaposes two pictures in a composite. On the left side of the composite, a black and white photograph of a wholesome girl from the 50’s suburbs playing with her dog. This picture is plainly meant to evoke a sense of nostalgia, though I am not sure how much of that nostalgia would be preserved if one scratched the surface. Might the dog be wanting to hump her, for example?
On the right side is a color picture depicting a white girl approaching with a mixture of curiosity and bafflement some some rather colorful LGBTQ+ people engaged in what seems like a particular form of BDSM in which two men seem to be playing the part of dogs. (I would like to note parenthetically that even though she is of the wrong sex, the presence of the young girl of course readily brings to mind the blood libel ‘pedophile’ so often brought against LGBTQ+ people, worsening the pernicious character of this particular piece of anti-gay propaganda. This by itself suffices to condemn Gil Sanders as a vile propagandist.) Of course, had the two men been American | Mexican Indians in the Sonoran Desert playing the part of and being allegedly possessed by the spirits of coyotes during a religious ceremony, Mr. Sanders may have been okay with that. As Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa makes plain, the intersection of sexuality and religion can get a bit weird sometimes.
But whatever. I continue.
Now of course BDSM is clearly disturbing to most people. One could look at the phenomenon with humor; nonetheless, most people will be made uncomfortable — as uncomfortable, perhaps, as looking at a picture of a back flayed bloody red by a whip, if I may be allowed to introduce an SM-like religious ceremony. This observance is of the Catholic persuasion, though, if I am not mistaken, one not condoned by the official church (notwithstanding St. John Paul II’s own practice.) Below is the observance of Lent in the Pampanga province of the Philippines. (If I am not mistaken, this practice is limited to the area around Angeles. My Kapampangan-speaking friends from that province who participate in this practice sometimes resent the way the people in Manila make fun of their accent when speaking Tagalog, and I suspect the people in Manila find both the accent and the practice strange. But whatever. I continue.)
Relying heavily on the BDSM element (along with the pedophile blood libel), Mr. Sanders’ picture functions to emotionally sear into the mind of the view the meaning ‘LGBTQ+ people: bad, perverted’. Not too far off from the specific BDSM will be associations such as ‘anal sex’ and ‘oral sex’. Pictures like this work emotionally, and this is what strong emotions do: sear things into the mind. The nostalgic picture on the left works to make this searing even more effective. Black and white nostalgia set against the disturbing present shown in full color and rubbed in our faces. Think LGBTQ+ people, think/feel perversion (i.e, disturbing sexual practice). And just in case the two pictures in the composite did not speak adequately for themselves, Mr. Sanders added a blurb to the effect of ‘Pride? Pride is the last thing these people have a claim to.’
(I no longer have access to the Mr. Sanders’ page, so I am stating this blurb from memory as accurately as I can. Sheesh. Some people have no sense of humor. All I did was openly wonder if Mr. Sanders, given his apparent fascination with the phenomenon, secretly wants to be led around in chains by a dom, male or female. And gee — wouldn’t he make an excellent sub? I confess that I am unable to scrub that picture from my mind. In my defense, all I can say is that the Devil made me do it — I couldn’t help myself :-). )
But of course heterosexual cis people engage in every practice LGBTQ+ people do. They engage in anal and oral sex; they engage in BDSM. Male submissive straights get led around in chains by female doms. But of course since no one produces anti-heterosexual propaganda meant to sear into the mind the pictorial meaning ‘straight people: evil perverts’, because there is not a long history of persecuting straight people, one does not think/feel ‘straight people, perversion’. Hetereosexual practices recede into the background. One almost never thinks about them. Those practices are none of anyone’s business. But with the aid of the sort of propaganda generated by Mr. Sanders and his ilk, about every practice that makes one uncomfortable or feel disturbed becomes figure against ground when associated with LGBTQ+ people. Searing the image ‘LGBTQ+ person: pervert’ into the mind practically guarantees that no image ‘straight person: pervert’ gets seared into the mind. In one’s mind-space there is room for only one such emotional image. In this way, the “sins” and “perversions” of heterosexual people get projected onto LGBTQ+ people. ‘Oh no, we aren’t the evil perverts — those people are the evil perverts.’ In this way, LGBTQ+ serve as scapegoats, allowing straight people to settle into an unearned sense of virtue and superiority.
Maintaining this superiority creates the constant potential of violence. When Mr. Manata went down to Mexico and “jumped” Mexican people in side streets, maintaining their inferior status with respect to him was surely a consideration in his mind. “If I ain’t better than a [N word] who am I better than” a white southerner once plaintively asked after he was convicted of murdering an African American. “If I ain’t better than a fucking fag, who am I better than?” is the question in the back of the mind of every dumb bigot engaging in violence or spreading propaganda against LGBTQ+ people. These people don’t murder hetereosexuals who practice oral or anal sex, deny them jobs, beat them up, and in general persecute them. They persecute only people who love people of the same sex. Ordinary bigotry — the need to feel superior to and virtuous with respect to a scapegoated group — is the inference to the best explanation here. Status anxiety is like milk that is about to boil over in the sauce pan — One’s status is constantly threatened and is prone to turn into violence quite suddenly and quite unexpectedly. Clearly, what is key for the Christianists is not violations of Natural Law, since these “violations” do not motivate persecution of heterosexual people. What is key for them is the fact that loving someone of the same sex is useful as a mark of outsider status, allowing the insiders to feel superior and virtuous. The actual motives of the Christianists are as dark and hateful as they are crude.
I submit that the best explanation for the vile propaganda Mr. Sanders produces is not some subtle principle of Natural Law Theory, but the same need to feel superior and virtuous with regard to a scapegoated group he can easily identify as outsiders. He is not, after all, putting much effort into rooting out and shining a spotlight into the bedrooms of straight people who engage in the activities he disapproves of. Nor does he try to take pictures of straight people fucking in the streets during Mardi Gras with the aim of eliciting the reaction ‘Heterosexual people: disgusting pigs!’ “Natural” or “unnatural”, what heterosexuals do does not matter that much to him because they are not his target. They do not serve the function of being outcasts who can safely be treated with contempt.
So Mr. Sanders’ posting his anti-gay propaganda on his Facebook page is a perfect example of bigotry. “To be a bigot”, I said above, is to assert oneself as part of an in-group by casting another group (defined by some characteristic such as religion, race, gender, or sexual orientation) as an out group whose status of whose members is inferior to one’s own status and deserving of contempt.” ‘Pride is the last thing these people can legitimately claim to feel’, Mr. Sanders implied or even said outright in his disgusting little blurb above his propaganda piece. (As I said, I am reproducing this from memory, Mr. Sanders having not taking too kindly to my suggestion that he would, in my opinion, make an excellent sub.)
And, of course, that the bigot is casting their own sins and perversions on members of the out-group is, as Rene Girard notes, completely unnoticed by the bigot. The low status of the out-group is completely taken for granted, such that it comes to a shock to, for example the White Southerner, that no, he is not allowed to murder even an African American with impunity. Were Mr. Sanders to realize that he is taking the “perversions” of his own in-group and projecting them onto an out-group, he could no longer consistently claim moral superiority for the in-group. For the “sins” he was placing on one end of the scale, the end representing the despised out-group, he now has to place on his end of the scale. Becoming aware of the scapegoating would balance the scale. Despising the out group, holding them in contempt, heaping their alleged “sins” and “perversions” on their end of the scale to force it lower, would no longer be possible.
Naturally, then, Mr. Sanders is as completely oblivious to his bigotry as a fish is oblivious to the water it swims in. I am sure as well he is oblivious to the skeezy character of the FB neighborhood he inhabits. Likewise, I am confident he will never recognize the vileness of his propaganda piece. Recognizing this would threaten his smug sense of moral superiority with respect to LGBTQ+ people. Not his actual motivation for producing sewage like this — sewage as bad as the Nazi poster shown below, just targeting a different group — his Thomism serves two purposes.
First, it hides his actual hateful motivations under a veneer of calm reasonableness. In his silly Thomistic analysis of Same Sex Marriage, for example, he tells us in an oh-so-reasonable tone:
I know it’s considered unpopular, bigoted, and homophobic to be against SSM these days, but before you shut your ears, please hear me out and at least think about these questions.
He then proceeds to point out that a Lesbian professor married to her same-sex partner even gave him a high mark on his paper! Oh youth!
But the vileness of his propaganda picture speaks for itself, as pictures tend to do. Speaking to the limbic system in the way described above, it betrays him and show his words to be empty, phony. The air of reasonableness, the medieval quaintness of his rather weak Thomistic Feserian arguments of the sort so ably and so thoroughly demolished by Gunther Laird, cannot hide the viciousness of his pictorial expression, nor cover up its stench. (And yes, please do investigate the phenomenon of synaesthesia, particularly as explored by Merleau-Ponty, before you complain about mixed metaphors.) Gil Sanders is engaging in old-school fag-bashing, pure and simple.
Rightwingers will of course regard the Nazi reference I just made as an automatic get-out-of-jail-free card. But given that all one has to do to generate from the Nazi poster what is for all intents and purposes the same picture is to substitute the wholesome suburban girl for the wholesome German boys and substitute the LGBTQ+ people for the depictions of Jewish people on the blackboard, no reasonable person can deny that the same propaganda technique is getting employed. That this is so will come as no surprise to those familiar with the Christian persecution of Jewish people, gay people, “heretics” and lepers that began around 950 AD, and that found its worst expression (so far) in the Holocaust. Robert I. Moore discusses this persecution in detail in his classic The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250. I do suggest, then, that rightwingers regard Mr. Sander’s use of a Nazi propaganda technique as an occasion for metanoia, not as a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Second, his Thomism helps him serve as what John Holbo calls a “Steelwool scrub” making it seem that no one is really a bigot:
The Steelwool Scrub is quite bad. (That’s what I’m calling it.) Take same-sex marriage (more recently, trans issues): you can always rustle up some Ryan T. Anderson-type to spin up some Thomistic-ish natural law (Christian anthropology etc.) argument. Even if this is weak ‘steel’ (I would judge), belated scholasticism, wandering the modern world, looks ornamental – harmless, innocent, unassuming. At worst, a curious mooncalf; at best, considerably more academically polished than old-school fag-bashing.
Within the ecosystem of Christian cultural politics and belief, the role of someone like Ryan T. Anderson [and Gil Sanders] is not to scourge conservative Christians for having something in the neighborhood of right attitudes, but only as a culturally bigoted, hence surely spiritually poisonous inheritance of animus. Rather, his role is to apologize for bad attitudes as defensible and righteous – to ensure no one can call bigotry ‘bigotry’, by inserting himself in the line of fire as a model, steel-reinforced unbigot.
John Holbo, op. cit.
When one attacks the various not-very-strong Thomistic arguments indicting LGBTQ+ people for whatever violations of Natural Law and insulting the Form/Essence of Marriage, one forgets that what produces the real animus against gay people is not eccentrics such as Edward Feser and his young acolyte, the somewhat bizarre Gil Sanders (aka The Thomistic Typhoid Mary), but the dark, hateful bigotry and scapegoating of the sort analyzed above. This bigotry thrives like the things that suddenly scatter out when one lifts the stone they had been hiding under — perhaps a piece of Thomistic limestone with sections of the SUMMA THEOLOGICA inscribed on its surface. Mr. Sanders, Mr. Feser, and Mr Anderson just serve as decoys.
And in serving as decoys, they make it seem that what is motivating the bigots is not the dark, volatile hatred inspired by status anxiety of the sort exemplified by the White Southerner mentioned above, but some pale reflection of Natural Law theory. But as the dark hatred of the bigots makes plain, that is not what is going on:
You [Christianists] shouldn’t disapprove of LGBTQ folks just because it’s the way your tribe marks itself off as superior and virtuous. But that’s obviously what’s actually going on. (Not some Thomistic secret sauce.)
John Holbo, op. cit.
Christianists will invariably accuse one of name-calling when one refers to them as bigots. Nonetheless, the term is objectively accurate when they engage in the sort of scapegoating Gil Sanders indulges in. Scapegoating people that way just is what bigotry consists in. Calling person an imbecile might be regarded as name-calling, but if the IQ of that person actually is between 26 and 50, the term is simply accurate, no matter how unpleasant its connotations may be. The truth may be unpleasant, but Mr. Sanders cannot escape the label ‘homophobic bigot’ no matter how much of a Thomistic overlay he may try to cover himself with. No matter how much hyper-rational philosophical vocabulary and turns of phrase he may employ, the propaganda piece he produced damns him completely.
Those who, like Paul Manata, participate in Mr. Sanders FB page but stay silent when he generates his vile anti-gay propaganda, are complicit and are to be held equally accountable, the more so the more influence they have. Their silence — especially Mr. Manata’s — is especially damning given their history of serving as apologists for racism and bigotry and their participation in the past in racist and xenophobic physical violence. Their not explicitly engaging in (so far as I know) old school fag-bashing does not wash away their complicity in and responsibility for the oppression of LGBTQ+ people. They make themselves willing tools of the persecution society that started forming around AD 950 and that — yes — found its most extreme expression in the Holocaust. The sheer ugliness of the persecution does not render these people any less complicit in it.
Homophobic bigotry is exactly as objectionable as anti-Semitic or racist bigotry or Mr. Manata’s (former?) anti-Latinx bigotry. Those indulging in it should not be be treated with kid gloves, but subjected to the same unmitigated rudeness, derision and lack of respect as one treats the outright racists, anti-Semites, and misogynists. When a bigot places scenes suggesting BDSM in anti-gay propaganda, one should openly wonder — as I did with Mr. Sanders — why they are so fascinated by BDSM. Is it because the propagandist secretly wants to be led around in chains by a dom, male or female? Does the person who is horrified by the idea of gay people having anal sex secretly want to engage in anal sex? Given the very common experience of a homophobe turning out to having been gay all along, a certain large proportion of these people will actually be into these things. The various scientific “Peter Meter” studies come to the same ‘the lady doth protest too much, methinks’ conclusion. Point that out. Rub their noses in it. Given the damage that it does, their bigotry must come to them with a cost.
Christian Nationalist Propaganda Scapegoating LGBTQ+ people
Nazi Propaganda Scapegoating Jewish People
I, for one, intend to make that cost as high as possible.
J’Accuse.
*I am not claiming, of course, that Mr. Manata is currently a meth dealer.
Recently some FB friends and I critiqued the Thomistic Natural Law theory by asking these questions: 1) How can we know what is the “end” or telos of a faculty? 2) Does a faculty have just one telos? 3) How does the NL lawyer go from an act’s seeming to be contra to the “intention” or “design” of a faculty (for example, a movie star wearing sunglasses indoors) to that act’s being immoral?
Even after repeated prodding, the Natural Lawyers in our lives (none of whom exactly seem excessively enamoured of me) still seem to have no answer to any of these questions. Maybe John Skalko does in his book, but my perusal so far of one of his papers does not give me a whole lot of confidence. (And no, if I may address young AJ Stringfellow for a moment, just dropping Skalko’s name is not going to do it. You need to show in one or two sentences that you actually have command of his argument.) And of course, the fact of evolution means that the entire edifice of Natural Law is set on crumbling foundations. It is beginning to look like no amount of Crazy Glue will ever suffice to repair the ever-widening cracks in the walls.
Now “Strawman Arguments” are of course always to be avoided. Generally, it is better to go in the opposite direction and try to build up a “Steelman Argument” in favor of the position of one’s opponent. That is to say, one should try to make this argument as strong as possible (or find one that is), instead of substituting in an argument that is easily knocked down. Building a Steelman Argument raises the tone of the discussion, and all that good stuff. Everyone becomes polite and collegial. No one starts applying the label “bigot” to their opponent — even when that label is in fact justified. So let’s just ignore the obvious bigots — for example, Mr. Ken Zerkowski, who, at the time of this writing, does not bother trying to hide his depravity on his Facebook Page. Let’s concentrate instead on those who, in a calm and deliberate manner, go about building as strong a case as they can for the positions we oppose. Even in discussions of the legitimacy of same-sex relations (including same-sex marriage), what could go wrong?
Well, as John Holbo says in connection with the issue of how to debate LGBTQ+ issues, a lot.
Sometimes our opponents — I have in mind Mr. Gil Sanders on his Facebook Page — use this Befindlichkeit of scholarly calm to hide (knowingly or not) something else entirely. Professing to love LGBTQ+ people (he just wants to save them from burning in hell for all eternity) and pretending to be a scholar building on objective Thomistic foundations arguments against the legitimacy of same-sex relations, Mr. Sanders nonetheless uses abhorrent propaganda techniques first devised (so far as I know) in 1930’s Germany …
An example of Nazi anti-Semitic Propaganda.
… to paint a picture of LGBTQ+ people as a bunch of perverts and degenerates. (Naturally, it never occurs to him that the same techniques could be used to also make the equation ‘hetereosexual = pervert | degenerate. Juxtapose a picture of a loving and quotidian gay couple with a picture of a female Dominatrix leading a straight man around on chains.) When Mr. Sanders deploys these propaganda techniques, his actual animosity seeps through the walls like a leak from the washing machines upstairs. What Mr. Sanders actually does, as opposed to what he professes, reveals him to be an ordinary hateful bigot, his bigotry made all the more hateful by his phony protestations of both love and calm objectivity. As I will show in a moment (okay, two or three moments) his bigotry takes the form of setting up LGBTQ+ people as scapegoats on whom he can load everything about heterosexual sex (indeed, sex in general) that makes him feel ill at ease.
It goes without mention that often the feeling of unease stems from one’s secretly sharing the same desires, as is shown time and time and time again by all the homophobic preachers and politicians who hire rent boys to “carry their luggage”. I think almost everyone has experienced this hypocrisy even in their own lives — the chiropractor, for example, who seems excessively eager to touch one and who presses one to come in for far more appointments than are needed, but then turns out to write vicious anti-LGBTQ+ screeds on Facebook. So one may legitimately wonder why Mr. Sanders seems obsessed by BDSM.
An example of old-school fag-bashing concocted by Mr. Gil Sanders, in which he projects onto LGBTQ+ people things that make him uncomfortable about sexuality — including, possibly, his own — he says — variety, heterosexuality
In spite of its lack of total effectiveness in hiding his bigotry, Mr. Sanders’ Thomism does do a yeoman’s service in that regard. For as one’s mental energy is taken up dealing with the Thomistic arguments and coming up with objections (‘must a faculty have only one telos?’), one forgets — to one or another degree of completeness — the old-school fag-bashing performed by Mr. Zerkowski and his kind. One neglects the actual source motivating that fag-bashing, which, as I am about to show, is not some quaint Thomism with its preoccupation with angels, essences, forms, and natures, but the need to feel superior and virtuous by projecting upon a group of innocent people one’s own sins.
The sewage poured out by the bigot does not provide many grappling points one can use as arguments against, so if one is concerned with argumentation, one tends to ignore or forget the sewage. Indeed, not taking a close look at the bigot’s motivations, one may end up assuming that these motivations are really some pale reflection of Thomistic Natural Law Theory. One is supposed to be charitable towards one’s opponents one is arguing against, and it is natural to lump in the dumb bigots with the Thomists and suchlike who are actually engaging (and monopolizing) one’s polemical energy and attention. Through a kind of transitivity of charity principle, the dumb bigots end up getting the benefit of one’s charity. One assumes there must be some vague rationality to their animus against LGBTQ+ people, so they must be operating with some dimly-understood version of what the right-wing intellectuals are saying. But this charity is completely misplaced.
At least theoretically, a person adopting Thomistic arguments against the legitimacy of same-sex relations might not be sullied, unlike Mr. Sanders, by baser, darker motives as revealed by their actions as opposed to their protestations. Assume for the sake of argument that the Mr. Ryan T. Anderson mentioned by John Holbo (I will get to this in a moment) is not burdened with these motivations. This is at least possible. But then the problem becomes worse. For at least when Mr. Sanders’ hypocrisy gets exposed, we get a lead to start examining the nature of his real motivations, his bigotry. There is a loose thread we can start pulling on and the other stuff comes out — the obvious scapegoating, for example. But if the darker motivations are either absent or not at all obvious, there is no such loose thread to pull on. Preoccupied with actual argument and not looking terribly closely at the actual motivations of the obvious bigot, we never get beyond the assumption that this bigot’s motivations are just a pale reflection of the Thomistic theorist’s — just expressed with a bit more vehemence than the Thomistic theorist would allow themselves. In this way, in attacking the “Steelman Argument” the Thomist is trying to build, one ends up performing what John Holbo calls a “Steelwool Scrub”. One ends up sanitizing the dumb bigots out there who, like Ken Zerkowski, are past bothering to hide their depravity. In this way, even the Thomist who truly is not burdened by darker motives ends up serving as a wingman to the dumb bigots who are.
As I have noted, Thomist Natural Law theory does not seem very strong. Its proponents seem completely oblivious to the problems for it presented by evolution and by related questions regarding the number of “teloi” a faculty can have. Nor do they seem to have any convincing rebuttal of what Toomas Karmo, working in a Humean ‘you cannot derive an ought from an is’ vein, has shown: no evaluative statement can follow from any set of non-evaluative statements. [Karmo’s argument is presented in Michael Huemer, ETHICAL INTUITIONISM, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2005, pp. 79-83.] But its very weakness as a “Steelman Argument” render it even more effective as a “Steelwool Scrub”. For one of its weaknesses is its requiring us to pretend, at least for a moment, and temporarily accept for the sake of argument in order to get inside the “worldview” of its proponents, that evolution is not a fact and entertain instead the picture of a meticulous engineer God designing everything in a perfection free of all kludges (such as the urethra’s passing through the middle of the prostate gland — I am sure that professor PZ Myers can cite many more such kludges). The cute quaintness of this, the seeming innocuousness of all this medieval scholasticism including all the ornamental talk about angels and essences and forms and natures, leads us even further afield from closely examining the bigotry of the Zerkowski’s of the world. As John Holbo notes:
“The Steelwool Scrub is quite bad. (That’s what I’m calling it.) Take same-sex marriage (more recently, trans issues): you can always rustle up some Ryan T. Anderson-type to spin up some Thomistic-ish natural law (Christian anthropology etc.) argument. Even if this is weak ‘steel’ (I would judge), belated scholasticism, wandering the modern world, looks ornamental – harmless, innocent, unassuming. At worst, a curious mooncalf; at best, considerably more academically polished than old-school fag-bashing.”
These wingmen — both those with impure motives and those with pure motives (if there are any such) — are really just a few rare (ostensibly harmless) eccentrics, intellectually unrepresentative outliers compared with the Orc Hordes out there. If these twee eccentrics (some of whom are Teddy-Bear-like, I am sure) want to avoid getting mistaken for the Orc Hordes, they should be battling those hordes, not those who exhibit some decency and empathy. But they do not. John Holbo again:
You have a society in which certain forms of bigotry are endemic. You have, by hypothesis, a few rare eccentrics who exhibit outwardly similar attitudes, allegedly on a completely alternate, inwardly entirely bigotry-free basis of rather outré philosophical argument. These eccentrics should fully expect to be mistaken for the bigots. How not?
John Holbo, op. cit.
And:
“Within the ecosystem of Christian cultural politics and belief, the role of someone like Ryan T. Anderson is not to scourge conservative Christians for having something in the neighborhood of right attitudes, but only as a culturally bigoted, hence surely spiritually poisonous inheritance of animus. Rather, his role is to apologize for bad attitudes as defensible and righteous – to ensure no one can call bigotry ‘bigotry’, by inserting himself in the line of fire as a model, steel-reinforced unbigot.
John Holbo, op. cit.
The role of someone like Ryan T. Anderson in this ecosystem is not to scourge the bigots for their spiritually poisonous inheritance of animus (even if that animus could be reconstructed as being in the neighborhood of right attitudes based on the Thomistic secret sauce). Their role is to help ensure no one can call bigotry ‘bigotry’, by inserting themselves in the line of fire as a model, steel-reinforced unbigot, making it seem as if bigots themselves are really like this one unbigot. The badness of the attitudes of the bigots is just appearance; the real moral quality of those denying the legitimacy of same-sex relationships is that of chivalric Steelmen Knights In Shining Armor in the line of fire, valiantly fighting to preserve the good of Christian Civilization.
But of course it is not a thicket of Thomist or para- Aristotelian arguments that motivate the bigots to, for example try to omit LGBTQ+ people from anti-lynching bills:
“Intellectually, it IS unfair to strawman a position by conflating it with its least thoughtful, most irrational, animus-afflicted exponents. Yet descriptively – sociologically – it’s absurd to steelman a socio-cultural order-or-group by conflating its practices and norms with unrepresentative, intellectual outliers. If you think the reason trans people struggle for respect, recognition, rights is that they are surrounded by well-meaning, rationally-convicted neo-Thomists, you’re nuts. Trans people struggle and suffer because they are members of a despised, oppressed minority group. SSM was a fight because gays face irrational animus, not a thicket of para-Aristotelian arguments. Spinning actually-existing bigotry as, ideally, the better angel of some natural law argument, is just a weird way to excuse what’s right there in front of you.
John Holbo, op. cit.
What is obviously motivating the bigots is not some Thomistic secret sauce, but the way their tribe marks itself off as superior and virtuous.
“The barrier to conservative Christians adopting the right, conservative, Christian view of homosexuality is not, say, Mayor Pete, it’s conservative Christians. You shouldn’t disapprove of LGBTQ folks just because it’s the way your tribe marks itself off as superior and virtuous. But that’s obviously what’s actually going on. (Not some Thomistic secret sauce.)
John Holbo, op. cit.
Let me linger a bit (well okay, more than a bit) on this tribalism business and on this “obviously”. To be a bigot is to interpret oneself as a member of an “in group” that is superior in status, power, and virtue compared to a despised out group — African Americans, Navajos, LGBTQ+ people, whoever. Often even the possibility that a member of the out group might demand equality will result in ferocious violence. As one White person plaintively asked a while ago after getting convicted for murdering an African American person, “If I ain’t better than a [N-word], then who am I better than?” And not so long ago, that an ostensibly heterosexual person might suddenly erupt into violence over the slightest triggering factor was factored into the law as the “homosexual panic defense”. The despised outgroup is at the mercy of the in group for basic goods such as jobs, housing, clean lead-free water, and so on. Often the outgroup is characterized as dirty, smelly, and promiscuous. The outgroup gets used as a scapegoat for sexual practices regarded by the in group as sinful and beyond the pale but still practiced by the in-group, such as anal and oral sex and BDSM.
Mr. Gil Sanders propaganda efforts on his FB page provide a conspicuous example of an outgroup getting used as a scapegoat to carry away the (perceived) sins of the in group. These propaganda efforts include the composite picture shown above. On the left side is a nostalgically black-and white picture of a wholesome young girl playing with a dog in the suburbs. On the right side was a color picture of a young girl tentatively and in a somewhat baffled manner approaching two men engaged ina BDSM ritual in which they are apparently playing the role of dogs. Of course, the fact the picture on the right side was in color was meant to present the scene as aktuel, while the black-and-white of the picture on the left was meant to present the scene as nostalgically far-off, a golden age which has since declined into a perverted and degenerate present age.
Readers of Nelson Goodman’s the Languages of Art will know that the expressive content of a picture consists in qualities usually denoted by single worlds when expressed in language at all. A picture is serene, bloody, calm, violent, nostalgic, aktuel, sad, quiet, dramatic, happy, joyful, elegical, perverted, satirical, respectful, degenerate…the list is indefinite. It is not, say, literally sad — only people can be sad literally — but is so by being a metaphorical instantiation of the quality ‘sad’. The picture’s expression does not depend upon the maker’s intention. A painter may intend to produce a happy picture through using lots of yellow, but the result may in fact be melancholy precisely through the use of too much yellow. It is not the artist intention that determine what the picture expresses, but how it affects their audience which in turn is determined by factors such as how the members of that audience is “built” so to speak (say, yellow in various quantities typically affects people in various ways ranging from creating a joyful effect to creating the opposite, a melancholy effect); and how convention primes them to react (chords that are lower in mood to western ears are allegedly higher in mood to Indian ears); historical context; and God-knows-what makes a work of art metaphorically sad, elegical, satirical….and so on. We can still guess at an artist’s intention even if they failed to achieve it (we might, for example, hazard the guess that Van Gogh may have intended a particular still life to be happy in tone when in fact it is lower in mood.) Naturally, the maker’s intention to express such and such may increase the chances that the picture actually will express such and such even if that intention does not by itself determine this expression. Much of what gets expressed is more aptly labelled “betrayal” an artist may “express” (normally without intending to do so) their ineptitude, insensitivity, clumsiness, and stupidity.
By metaphorically being an example of a kind of protected calm, peace, and nostalgia, the picture on the left is likely to elicit our approval of the scene presented (though your mileage may vary). Convention may be playing a role here — perhaps one is supposed to feel this way through whatever operation of das Man. By being a metaphorical example of something perverted and degenerate, the picture on the right is likely to make one feel uncomfortable, and is therefore more likely to elicit our disapproval. (Though again, our mileage may vary, and surely convention and dasMan are going to play a role.) It is easy to see that the picture conveys something like “Wholesome little girl from the fifties: GOOD; degenerate perverts of the LGBTQ+ persuasion now: BAD”.
Whether from ignorance or from dishonesty, Mr Sanders may try to claim (well, actually he and one of his regulars actually did make this claim, a claim that I think is, frankly, idiotic) that he is not a despicable propagandist because his picture is not saying that all LGBTQ+ people are evil perverts; only that some are. The trouble with this, however, is that a picture is not capable of making such a subtle logical point through ordinary pictorial means. As Goodman notes, a picture is comprehended by way of the bones, muscles, and guts. It is not comprehended by a detached intellect of the sort needed to prove the Pythagorean Theorem. “Wholesome little girl from the fifties: GOOD; degenerate perverts of the LGBTQ+ persuasion now: BAD” is prior to any distinction between ‘all’ and ‘some’. In the case of the picture on the right, one may later think in terms of some or all; but for now all that one is feeling is “degenerate perverts of the LGBTQ+ persuasion now”.
Now as everyone, including Mr. Sanders, knows, heterosexuals also engage in anal and oral sex and BDSM. It would be just as easy to substitute for Mr. Sanders’ depiction of gay “perverts” a picture of heterosexual “perverts” — say, of straight couples fucking in the streets during Mardis Gras, or of a dominatrix with a whip leading a straight man on a chain. (If I may be allowed to introduce a bit of humor into this disquisition, I would add that I suspect Mr. Sanders would make an excellent sub. At the very least, he does seem excessively — to the point of being a bit unseemly — fascinated by the phenomenon.) Clearly, the gay men in Mr. Sanders’ propaganda piece are meant to draw attention away from the “sins” rampant in the ingroup, heterosexual people. “We aren’t the perverts — those sick gay people are”, members of Mr. Sanders’ intended audience are doubtlessly thinking. Mr. Sanders is setting up LGBTQ+ people to function as scapegoats. And in doing so, he is behaving as a perfect bigot. (See What It Means To Be A Bigot.) (I have just now cashed out one of the ‘in a moment I will show’ promises I made above)
I have said it once and I will say it again: Mr. Gil Sanders propaganda efforts on his FB page provide a conspicuous example of an outgroup getting used as a scapegoat to carry away the (perceived) sins of the in group.
Clearly, obviously (remember I said I was going to linger on ‘this obviously’) the motivation of this kind of behavior is the need to feel superior and virtuous relative to the scapegoated group. This is Mr. Zerkowski’s motivation and it is Gil Sanders’s as well, no matter how he tries to hide this need under a thick obscuring layer of Thomism plus phony protestations of love. To quote John Holbo again (but this time with feeling): “You shouldn’t disapprove of LGBTQ folks just because it’s the way your tribe marks itself off as superior and virtuous. But that’s obviously what’s actually going on. (Not some Thomistic secret sauce.)”
That conservative Christians do not direct same animosity against heterosexual non-procreative sex as they do against same-sex relations nails it. There are no attempts to murder hetereosexuals who practice oral or anal sex, deny them jobs, beat them up, and in general persecute them. This persecution is directed only again people who love people of the same sex. Ordinary bigotry — the need to feel superior to and virtuous with respect to a scapegoated group — is the inference to the best explanation here. Clearly, what is key for the conservative Christians is not violations of Natural Law. These do not motivate persecution of heterosexual people. The persecution is restricted to LGBTQ+ people: what is key is the fact that loving someone of the same sex is useful as a mark of outsider status.
Contrary to their protestations, the actual motives of the conservative Christians are as dark and hateful as they are crude.
Certainly coming up with ingenious philosophical defenses of the views of conservative Christians places one under no obligation to pretend that the bigots are in fact ingenious philosophers:
“The fact that someone can come up with an ingenious philosophical defense of a view that most people, who hold something like that view, hold for plain old bigoted reasons, is not a good reason to treat those who are, actually, bigoted, as if they are, instead, ingenious philosophers – just of a closet sort.”
John Holbo, op. cit.
Directing one’s arguments against the Thomists only obscures these dark motives. It is as if one were mounting a charge against a line of chivalrous Thomistic Knights In Shining Armor, only to be outlanked by a bunch of bigot Orcs.
Naturally, some bigots are better -looking
There is a usefulness in showing Thomistic Natural Law to be the long-crumbling structure it is. But let’s not also forget that this does nothing to fight against the Orcs. This fight is best accomplished by showing them up to be what they are: bigots driven by hatred and animosity driven by the need for a scapegoat and by status anxiety — a need to feel superior and virtuous with respect to another group.
For the Thomist to try to cover up these dark motivations is simply to exercise bad faith. It is a refusal to admit fault.
So what presents as intellectualizing, aspirational, uplifting ideal moral theology [Thomism] betrays itself, psychologically, as culturally stubborn refusal to admit fault. Refusal to admit fault translates into unwillingness to face, hence redress real wrongs.
John Holbo, op. cit.
But really, what is going on is more than just a refusal to admit fault. The various Bishops and Preachers refuse to admit fault regarding the sexual abuse of the children in their care and of others, yet they are more than just dimly aware of that abuse. But the scapegoating they are engaged in tends to escape from their grasp. What is so amusing about Mr. Gil Sanders’ scapegoating of LGBTQ+ people is that he is completely unaware that this is what he is doing even though it is painfully obvious to anyone whose brains have not completely rotted out that this is exactly what he is doing. The gay men in his propaganda picture are meant to take on everything about sexuality that makes people like Mr. Sanders uncomfortable. As René Girard says someplace:
If you scapegoat someone, it’s a third party that will be aware of it,” he said. “It won’t be you. Because you will believe you are doing the right thing. You will be either punishing someone who is guilty or fighting someone who is trying to kill you, but you are never the one who is scapegoating.
(Compare with this piece about René Girard.) So there is something inherent in the phenomenon itself that makes it unlikely Mr. Sanders will know what he is doing. In the past, however, I have pointed out … ahem! … certain other qualities of Mr. Sanders that make his obliviousness not that surprising. (This is the person who seemed to be completely oblivious to the danger of getting Snopesed when he claimed that an entire voter’s database had been dropped in Maricopa County). These other qualities make it even less likely that Mr. Sanders will have any inkling of what he is in fact doing, even given the tendency of scapegoating to withdraw from attention.
And yes, Mr. Paul Manata, I am perfectly aware that I will be accused of scapegoating the denizens of the Religious Right. These constant rounds of tuquoque do get a bit tedious after a while. Would you have made the same accusation of any Jewish person who had the temerity to call our the scapegoating of Jewish people performed by all these wholesome German citizens in the 30’s, as reflected by the poster above?
Although I think Gunther Laird presents what is closest to the definitive refutation of Thomistic Natural Law theory in his book The Unnecessary Science A Critical ANalysis Of Natural Law Theory, I shall present here my own snippet of a refutation, which, I hope, can form one sliver in THE Definitive Refutation Of Natural Law Theory.
On another FB page the very sharp Eric DeJardin asked a bunch of thieving conniving Natural Lawyers … er … I mean … asked some esteemed defenders of Natural Law Theory how one is supposed to know what are, and how many “ends” the system comprising a “faculty” has?
Let me step back a moment. Thomas Aquinas’ “Natural Law” theory is based on a view of the world as composed of various natural systems moving towards “goals” or teli (is “teli” the plural for “telos”? Probably not. So sue me.) The sunflower “wants” (no, this is not a LITERAL desire, goddamnit — no gold star for your forehead. Now sit down and shut up) to move in the direction of the sun; the heart “wants” to keep pumping blood. All these systems were designed by the creator and head engineer of the Universe, God, to work in harmony with one another. The heart, for example, works in harmony with the rest of the circulatory system.
Alongside all these systems moving towards their various goals are human intentions with their own “ends”. These intentional ends have to align with or at least be compatible with the corresponding natural ends for an act to be moral. For example, the telos of the reproductive system is to produce rug rats … er … I mean … babies. If in the Garden of Eden Steve offers Adam a peach ala Call Me By Your Name (you know full well what I mean — do I need to make this totally explicit? Geez), the light in Adam’s eye signals an intention to employ his reproductive system for an end other than producing babies. Although so far I have seen none of the conniving… er …I mean … esteemed Natural Lawyers come up with a really clear reason why this lack of alignment between the natural end the human intentional should render immoral what is now ensuing in the Edenic bushes. All that we seem to be able to rest on is the idea that Adam and Steve are somehow throwing a monkey wrench into God’s intricate natural design plotted out to the last iota. God only knows what chaos will ensue.
But, as Eric asks, how do we know what the “end” of a system is? Is this necessarily restricted to just a single end? The Natural Lawyer may say “This is just obvious. Look at your parts. Their telos is inscribed there.” (Do look — it is just that you have never noticed it before.)
But what if something analogous to what is going on with some one-celled creatures is going on here? Certain one-celled creatures contain a protein structure that aid in the function of a flagellum that lets the creature move around. Others have evolved from this so that this same apparatus, with whatever jury-rigging, now functions as a stinger that enables the critter to capture food. The protein structure now functions to help get food. Could something analogous be happening in the evolution of human beings? System A — extending from the lower parts of the brain to one’s private parts — have the telos of producing babies. System B — extending from the higher parts of the brain down to one’s private parts — have the telos of intensely bonding with the people one is attracted to. (Obviously, this is a drastic oversimplification of what is going on, made for the sake of clarity.) The same parts go into two different system with two different ends, just as the same protein structure in the one-celled creatures goes into a flagellum system and into a stinger system. If so, then Adam and Steve’s intentions align perfectly with one of the natural systems — intense bonding down in the bushes. The Natural Lawyers may please now stop leering into those bushes with the intention of handing down a Natural Law indictment to Adam and Steve.
So it seems to me that Natural Law fails to prohibit LGBTQ+ relations even when one adheres to the Thomistic worldview which has an engineer designing all these intricate systems. And of course the fact of evolution radically undercuts this entire worldview.
The reader will keep in mind that I am not a Thomas scholar. Just another Oracle DBA.
Now just as it is a virtual statistical certainty (on ‘the lady doth protest too much, methinks’ grounds) that a large number of the Natural Lawyers congregating at Gil Sanders’ infamous FaceBook Page (warning: this page is also a cesspool of spreaders and enablers of Trump’s Big Lie) secretly desire to engage in same-sex activity (including, especially, BDSM), Saint Thomas Aquinas himself, as depicted by the Spanish baroque painter Velazquez, has a thing for other guys. How else explain his swooning into the arms of an attractive male angel?
Bigots, Teddy Bears, And Objective Evil: Not TOO long ago, I was having my hair cut by the local barber in the town in Southern Utah where my parents’ house (now my brother’s house) is located. The barber was a really sweet, avuncular guy, maybe in his 60s. We had a pleasant conversation.
Several townspeople walked into the barber shop. My barber started talking with them amiably. He continued to be amiable as the townspeople and he started telling among one another vicious, nasty, despicable jokes about the Navajos.
That he should do so is not totally incongruous. He is, after all, a member in good standing of that community. Because his fellow townspeople see themselves as members of the in group (White Christians) defining themselves against an outgroup whom they despise, he is likely to do so as well, his personal qualities notwithstanding. That is the dasMan that he — unconsciously in all probability — participates in. Members of this community want to maintain ascendency over the outgroups — Native Americans, African Americans, LGBTQ+ people — and keep them in their place. They want to continue feeling superior to them. And any demands made by members of the outgroup for equality are likely to be met with violence. My avuncular barber might not engage in this violence outright, but he surely would be complicit in it one way or the other. In other words, he was a bigot in spite of being avuncular in manner and tone.
So it is perfectly possible to be avuncular (towards members of one’s own group) and a bigot (against those in the scapegoated group) at the same time. Likewise, it is perfectly possible to be an absolute teddy bear to one’s friends and girlfriend, but a bigot towards one’s outgroup, demeaning and degrading that group in vicious ways all the while claiming to love them (‘I just want you guys not to burn in hell for eternity’). One does not have to look like and act like Joseph Goebbels in order to be a bigot.
The Nazi comparison comes to mind because of the nature of some of the people who frequent the Facebook page of a certain Gil Sanders. One such person had on his page what could easily be taken for affirmations of White Supremacy. One step lower down this into this sewage pit, some of his friends, in turn, left absolutely no doubt. I challenge anyone not to look at Mr. Ken Zerkowski’s cover picture and profile picture on Facebook and not be sickened. His blatant, vile propaganda there, and pictures of Pepe the Frog elsewhere on his site unambiguously declare him to be a White Supremacist who regards LGBTQ+ people as subhuman creatures. Joseph Goebbels would have felt right at home on that page. These pictures were so bad that Facebook even banned me for a day when I placed them in a post CRITICAL of that bigotry.
One step up that pit, the vile propaganda Mr. Sanders placed on his FB page was, in the last analysis, much the same — just a tiny bit more outwardly respectable. But this trace of outward respectability did not prevent Mr. Sanders from taking his cue from Nazi propaganda pictures showing wholesome blond German youths juxtaposed with pictures of Jews depicted as evil degenerates. In Mr. Sanders’ version, a black and white wholesome girl from the 50’s playing with her dog in the suburbs is juxtaposed to a color picture depicting a white girl approaching with a mixture of curiosity and bafflement some some rather colorful LGBTQ+ people whom the mainstream would quickly apply the label “perverted deviants” to. The presence of the young girl of course readily brings to mind the blood libel ‘pedophile’ so often brought against LGBTQ+ people, even though here she is of the wrong sex. Clearly the pictures carried the message ‘wholesome little girl in the 50’s good; gay degenerates bad. See how Western Civilization has declined!’ Some audiences, including me, would have looked at the colored picture with humor; clearly the audience this propaganda was directed to would not.
Any mention of the word “Nazi”, of course, will trigger among those right-wingers who have not yet embraced their inner Nazi an automatic dismissal. But here, at least, such a dismissal would be nothing more than a wilful refusal to look at the evidence. It simply cannot be denied that both the German anti-semitic propagandists of the 30s and Mr. Sanders, anti-gay propagandist of 2021, employed the technique of juxtaposing wholesome-looking young white people against pictures of “degenerate” Jewish people or LGBTQ+ people. To deny that the propaganda techniques are the same mutatis mutandis is simply to deny that this juxtaposition was done. This cannot honestly be denied.
In a move that prompted from me a face-palm and the ‘oh the stupid — it burns!’ response, some frequenters of Mr. Sanders’ propaganda site tried to defend the anti-gay picture on the grounds that it didn’t say that ALL LGBTQ+ people were degenerates. Among these frequenters was a certain Mr. John Hanby, an advocate of “Side B” Christianity trying to pass himself off, not as a bigot, but as a reasonable moderate.
But Mr. Hanby’s response was clearly disingenuous. Were I to juxtapose a picture of wholesome white middle class people next to a picture of people in the Pampanga province in the Philippines observing Lent in a way that was literally colorful, and showed this to an audience bigoted against Filipinos, the natural response of that audience would naturally be ‘Look at those savage deviant Filipinos!’. The thought that not all Filipinos engage in those practices would not be terribly ready-to-hand within their cramped tiny minds. (By the way, I do not look down on these practices — I see them as just an attempt to imitate Christ; and I view with neutrality the fact that most Pinoy, especially outside Pampanga, do not engage in them.)
And indeed, when I posted some of the Lent pictures on Mr. Sanders’ page in order to make fun of him, one Pinoy woman frequenting his site DID take me to be implying that to be Filipino is to be a savage degenerate. She accepted my assertion that this was not my intention at all; but the point is that what the picture communicates does not depend on that intention. I of course should have known that even by itself, even without getting juxtaposed to the white middle class people, the picture would have been vulnerable to getting seen as carrying the message ‘savage Pinoy doing all these weird things’; and this was my mistake. As Nelson Goodman points out in his LANGUAGES OF ART, a picture communicates emotively, not logically or linguistically; its expression is not readily translated into language except through single words: “serene”, “bloody”, “quiet”, “terrifying”, “sad”, “joyful”, “calm”, “vital”, “violent” … and so on indefinitely. It is not capable of anything as structured as “But keep in mind that not all LGBTQ+ people/Jewish people/Pinoy people are like this; please do bear that in mind.” Contrary to the title of his book, art is not literally a language; pictures communicate at the pre-logical, pre-verbal level. The emotional response ‘LGBTQ+ people/Jewish people/Filipino people bad is prior to an understanding which includes quantified logic with its “all” vs “some”.
So when the Nazi propagandist juxtaposes the wholesome white youths against the Jewish deviants and perverts, there is absolutely no room for doubting that there is nothing to the picture other than the simple, pre-logical ‘Germans good; Jewish people bad’; not ‘well, maybe SOME Jewish people aren’t bad.’ I think Mr. Sanders is being disingenuous in claiming something different is happening with his ‘wholesome white youths from the 50’s good; gay degenerates bad’ picture. — Or perhaps he is not being disingenous. I do not see him as being very bright, even with his superficial and rather clunky command of a Thomistic philosophical vocabulary. The human capacity for self-deception is almost infinite. Just as the Neo-Confederates try to deceive themselves into thinking all those Confederate statues are not emblems of White Supremacy, Gil Sanders may be deceiving himself into thinking his picture is not an emblem of White Christianist Supremacy. To accomplish this self-deception, it helps to be dumber than a rock.
Now when I see that someone is clearly a homophobic bigot, I do not hesitate to say so and to name names. The interesting things is that just as the racists (one variety of bigot) are always very sensitive to getting called out as racists, the homophobic bigots are likewise very sensitive to the charge that they are what in fact they obviously are. At one point, a woman (maybe Mr. Sanders’ girlfriend) started yelling “How can you call him a homophobe and bigot! You don’t know him! He is in fact a total sweet teddy bear! In fact, he loves you and your kind! He is just trying to keep you from burning in hell for all eternity, you ingrate!”
It is of course true that I do not personally know Mr. Gil Sanders. Maybe he has a Teddy Bear side to him, though I have also seen him described as a “prick”. But what I do know is that someone who directs propaganda of the vile sort that he did does not love me or my kind. There is something else at work, namely, an animosity stemming from the need to have a scapegoated group relative to which one is allowed to feel virtuous and superior. It is not love that is getting expressed, but bigotry, evil. Just as it is possible to be an avuncular bigot hiding an animosity against Navajos, it is possible to be a sweet-to-some teddy bear bigot hiding an animosity and status-driven hatred against LGBTQ+ people. In both cases, the evil is as objectively real. One does not have to look or act like Joseph Goebbels to accomplish objective evil.
I view the Observance of Lent depicted below as a legitimate attempt to imitate Christ. It is a valid form of spirituality, akin to that practiced by John Paul II. But regardless of how you view it, do keep in mind that not all Pinoy observe Lent this way. The practice is limited, I believe, to Angeles City in the Pampanga province.
cliffengelwirt 