I’m sensing a new meme developing among the anti-gay right. Lately I’ve seen several of them claim that being gay is “disordered,” though I have no idea what they actually mean by that. Illinois State. Rep. Jeanne Ives is the latest to do it in response to the legalization of same-sex marriage there:
“They’re trying to redefine marriage. It’s a completely disordered relationship and when you have a disordered relationship, you don’t ever get order out of that. So I’m more than happy to take a ‘no’ vote on the issue of homosexual marriage.”
And of course, she’s very brave for saying this.
“I’m more than happy to stand up and take a courageous vote here on this issue because it’s the right thing to do. Essentially what they’re trying to do is not just redefine marriage, they’re trying to redefine society. They’re trying to weasel their way into acceptability so that they can then start to push their agenda down into the schools, because this gives them some sort of legitimacy. And we can’t allow that to happen. The rights to marriage… it’s really a natural right…
“It’s the natural right of the child to be with both parents, either in an adoptive nature or in a biological nature. To not have a mother and a father is really a disordered state for a child to grow up in and it really makes that child an object of desire rather than the result of a matrimony.”
Yes, pandering to ignorant bigots and scapegoating gay people, that’s incredibly “courageous.” That is some serious word salad.
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mvemjsun
March 18, 2013 at 9:10 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The bad guys are not defining their new approach likely so that the good guys have to guess. Then they can accuse us of using a strawman. Assuming they have enough brains for that.
democommie
March 18, 2013 at 9:11 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Just a guess. Calling being gay, “being disordered”, puts it in the category of an illness. Being an illness makes it a little harder to demonize those who “suffer” from being teh GAY; otoh it will ensure that Marcus Bachmann and quacks like him will be able to continue “curing” teh GAY.
Gretchen
March 18, 2013 at 9:11 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Disordered = not conforming the model of relationships mandated by
natureGod, I would guess.It’s sort of like the intelligent design argument– they realize that actually coming out and saying “God says so” isn’t going to do it, so they’re trying to find ways to make the universe say so.
jba55
March 18, 2013 at 9:17 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Isn’t “disordered” when someone messes up your carefully arranged whatever? As in “it was all nice and neat until Jim disordered it.” Course I have OCD so that might affect my thinking on the subject.
I wish there was a way to return “courage” to meaning doing something that actually involves some kind of risk. “Hero” too. Putting on a uniform makes one a hero these days, you don’t need to do something heroic.
Gretchen
March 18, 2013 at 9:24 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Yes. Marriage is God’s carefully arranged whatever, and now the gays have come along and disordered it. God had all of the socks neatly matched and lined up in the drawer, and those darn homosexuals have thrown them all over the place, matched up the blacks with the browns, and generally made a mess of things.
Randomfactor
March 18, 2013 at 9:31 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“Disordered” means “I can’t tell which one’s supposed to be the master and which one’s the slave.”
Ben P
March 18, 2013 at 9:35 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
What huh?
This is the part that just completely throws me.
I understand the sentiment in the first sentence, although “natural right” is using a word that’s just wrong. You can say it’s desireable for a child to have both parents but there’s certainly no “right,” and suggesting that child should have “a right” to both parents is a little disconcerting because I’m inclined to ask what precisely else you would order? We already have an awful lot of state machinery dedicated solely to (a) ensuring that children have parents that provide at least a safe environment to the child, and (b) ensuring that non-custodial parents compensate the others for the cost of raising the child.
But then you go to not having two parents makes the child an “object of desire.” I can’t even tell what she means by this? Is she suggesting the child is merely the “result of desire.” Or is she suggesting a child without two married parents is somehow going to be molested?
arakasi
March 18, 2013 at 9:35 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And yet another anti-SSM advocate puts forth a (rather poor) argument against divorce and pretends it’s an argument against same-sex marriage.
oranje
March 18, 2013 at 9:37 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
When they jump right to the Mrs. Lovejoy “think of the children” argument, you know they’ve got nothing. The appeals to a natural order are hilarious, and the notion that this is going to disrupt breeders breeding makes my head hurt.
That was a word salad with chunky bigot dressing. Eww.
John Pieret
March 18, 2013 at 9:44 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m more than happy to stand up and take a courageous vote here on this issue because it’s the
rightwingnut bigot thing to do.Fixed.
Gregory in Seattle
March 18, 2013 at 9:51 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It is not particularly new: the current (as of 1997) revision of the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, section 2358, says:
The word “disordered” is used in several places in RCC dogma and canon law to refer to homosexuality; the earliest reference I can find was from 1986 in a letter written by — why, Ratzo himself, written while he was head of the
Holy InquisitionSacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a letter called Letter ot the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons.Ibis3, Let's burn some bridges
March 18, 2013 at 9:55 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
This isn’t new. It comes from Persona humana, a document put out by the Catholic Church (more specifically, the office formerly called the Inquisition) in 1975. It’s also front and centre in the catechism. I guess the Protestants are picking it up because it sounds good to them. But don’t feel left out. The same documents also call masturbation intrinsically disordered.
felicis
March 18, 2013 at 10:01 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Generally, bubble sort is a reasonably efficient algorithm for getting order out of any disordered set- it’s incredibly fast when the set has only two elements…
garnetstar
March 18, 2013 at 10:09 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
She’s right on one thing: what bigots object to in marriage equality is not breakdown of the family or destruction of heterosexual marriage. It’s that being gay, the existence of gay people, will become normal, not hidden. That is what they mean when they talk of the destruction of society: a society in which gay people are ordinary citizens and not evil deviants. As she says, “some sort of legitimacy”.
Raging Bee
March 18, 2013 at 10:27 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“Disorderd” = having a lifettyle or worldview more complex than the most simple and orderly worldview in the room.
ajb47
March 18, 2013 at 10:52 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ben P @8:
“object of desire” stuck out to me, too. I think it refers to their unfounded belief that homosexuality leads to pedophilia.
DaveL
March 18, 2013 at 10:54 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Wait, what? Did a state rep just go on the record that she finds children from broken homes sexy?
raven
March 18, 2013 at 11:13 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
1. 40% of US children are born to single mothers.
2. The divorce rate is 50%.
Teenage pregnancy and divorce are also higher among fundie xians than the general population.
The vast majority of children in single parent homes are victims of heterosexual xian “disorder”.
Fundies seemingly have never heard of Google, the search engine. Or facts and reality either.
raven
March 18, 2013 at 11:20 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Divorce rates are one proven way to produce single parent households.
Documentation for the claim above that fundies have a high divorce rate. The divorce rate for atheists is lower than average. Growing up in Oogedy Boogedy fundie religions is bad for children.
slc1
March 18, 2013 at 11:49 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
To the surprise of no one, Hillary Clinton joins her husband and the president in supporting same sex marriage.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/03/18/hillary-clinton-comes-out-in-support-of-gay-marriage/
Trebuchet
March 18, 2013 at 11:54 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think “disordered”, to these clowns, simply means “mentally ill”. But since homosexuality is no longer classed as a mental illness in the DSM, they have to use another word. The target audience understands it perfectly well.
abb3w
March 18, 2013 at 12:12 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Maybe they’ve been reading too much of Modesitt’s “Recluce” fantasy series?
(More seriously, I think it’s a mindset where “disordered” equals “nonconforming” equals “bad” similar to what Gretchen suggested, with the illness connotations democommie noted.)
Phillip IV
March 18, 2013 at 12:24 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“Disordered” is just another in a long list of right-wing words signifying a completely unspecified objection. Other favorites in that category are “unacceptable” and “inappropriate”. It’s basically just taking a personal dislike and couching it in a term implying a violation of some standard, with the added implication that said standard is widely held an possibly indisputable, but without ever actually specifying the standard.
On a positive note, the term is a lot more circumspect than its predecessors of a few years back, when it was still considered perfectly acceptable to refer to gay relationships as “sick” or “disgusting”.
dingojack
March 18, 2013 at 1:50 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
A Wingnut to human translation
Disordered (dis.’ord.er’d): what follows with be a word salad with chunky bigot dressing.
Dingo
——–
Phillip IV – in other words, it goes against ‘common courtesy’ (ie I think it’s icky, embarrassing, annoying, incomprehensible and/or etc. Everyone thinks like me, therefore they will conform to my standard).
kermit.
March 18, 2013 at 3:38 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Gay marriage legitimacy is one of those liberal ideas that threaten order, that is, the neat and unrealistic world which is explicable and to some degree controllable. Now it’s all messy and icky and changing fast and utterly baffling and scary. but that’s only the psychological motivation behind RW distaste for gay rights.
.
My dictionary definition says:
dis·or’·dered
1. plus ungood
2. double plus ungood (obsolete)
See also
Liberal, Scientific, Educated, Elite, Godless, Cooties
D. C. Sessions
March 18, 2013 at 4:02 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It makes more sense if you compare it to the opposite — in German: “Alles in Ordnung.”
Stacy
March 18, 2013 at 7:14 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think she’s making a distinction between children who are had, regardless of method (adoption, sperm donor, surrogacy, or old-fashioned way) because their parents want them, which is liberal and Bad, and children that happen whether their parents want them or not, because marriage = one man + one woman having procreative sex without contraception as Baby Jesus intended, which is Good.
Calling wanted children “objects of desire” just serves to make reproductive choice sound scary. Shorter her: “Every child a wanted child” is liberal propaganda, and separating sex from procreation is Satan’s work.
Trickster Goddess
March 18, 2013 at 9:11 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
To be fair, they are right that my gay relationship is disordered. Neither of us seems to find the time to tidy up our apartment.
skinnercitycyclist
March 19, 2013 at 8:14 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’d rather be “disordered” than “deranged”…