“Pastor of anti-gay Alabama church gets 10-year prison sentence for molesting young boys.”
There are a lot of religious fanatics who are obsessed with gays and trans folk and genitals I expect to see appearing under a headline like that.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Is there some kind of law at work here: “Every pastor who rails against something is doing that something themselves”? OK every politician too.
To a first approximation, adding the word Republican to that law would make it half again more accurate.
Ed Seedhouse, #1,
I have to object to the framing there. This guy was convicted for molesting boys. That, most emphatically, is not the same thing as being gay. One might just as well say that molesting girls is the same thing as being straight.
No, what we have here is not hypocrisy but projection.
@3:
Well, we have to look at the trend, not so much individual cases. The MP from my riding is a married gay man. He isn’t out there crusading against “the gays”. I worked on his election team (in a very minor role). Good guy, very good MP.
On the other hand men who pretend they are straight and try to deflect attention from this by attacking other gay people are, in my experience, very likely to be not merely gay, but criminal actors as well. And they often hided themselves as “holy” men so no one will suspect them, or so it seems. Also good occupations for deflecting suspicion seem to be politician and medical doctor.
If someone is gay but feels the need to closet, then I am sad for them and very angry at the society that makes this feel necessary.
It never was just the catholics and I have a feeling sexual abuse is much more rampant in the evangelical and fundie churches.
Ed Seedhouse, #4
I wasn’t commenting on the notion that a lot of homophobic public figures might be closeted themselves. Whether that is true or not, the issue I was raising was that this man is a paedophile abuser, not a gay man, and so should not be treated under that trope at all.
He isn’t expressing homophobia to hide homosexuality. He’s a paedophile, not a gay man. The two are not connected, and it is a dangerous right-wing piece of defamation to suggest they are.
People who are comfortable with their own sexuality aren’t threatened by alternatives.
As a wg once said, “They think about gay sex more than gays do.”
I’m sensing a pattern here.
“Gay” closeted religious folk denounce homosexuality. Then get caught doing the thing they renounce.
The GOP accuses the left of election fraud and then (as MTG said this week) endorses voter fraud.
Their strategy seems to be, If we accuse them first, then we can do it to them.
Is no one else reading what cartomancer has written here, twice? We need to be careful with our thinking and our comments.
Howard Brazee @7
People who are comfortable with their own sexuality aren’t threatened by alternatives.
Of course they are. (Not all of them, obviously, but some of them.) Just as some people who are very comfortable with being white are threatened by other ethnicities.
I’ve expressed this already in another thread, but I’m very disturbed by the common litany that every homophobe must be a closeted homosexual. (Nobody in this thread has quite come out and said that, but some posts have come close… and with all due respect to PZ the original post struck me as nodding in that direction as well.) Just because some high-profile homophobes turn out to be closeted gays doesn’t mean they all are, and if you say that all homophobes secretly have gay tendencies, that amounts to saying that completely straight people are never homophobic, and that homophobia is therefore entirely gay people’s fault. I realize that I’m probably engaged in a hopeless cause here, but this is a narrative I’d really like to see go away.
And yes, cartomancer’s noting of the implicit conflation of homosexuality with pedophilia in some of the posts here is pertinent as well.
From the linked article:
““We believe that God has commanded that no intimate sexual activity be engaged in outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. We believe that any form of homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality, bestiality, incest, fornication, adultery, and pornography are sinful perversions of God’s gift of sex,” the church’s website states.”
Niiiice. So they think that homosexuality is on the same level as bestiality. Notice what’s conspicuously missing? Any mention of pedophila. Apparently that gets a pass.
How to tell who or what organization will appear under a headline like that? All the organizations that explicitly or implicitly disenfranchise women.
Not because there aren’t female sex offenders or pedophiles, but because statistically, the bulk of the pedophiles and sex offenders are male.
When you take away women’s rights and women’s power, you enable pedophiles (who are predominantly male) to operate unchecked. Look no further than the Catholic church, the Mormon church, innumerable fundamentalist & evangelical Christian groups, Islamic (esp. fundamentalist) groups and conservative political groups for examples.
Note that I am not saying that there is never pedophilia or sex offenders in progressive/left wing groups. I’m just saying that it’s harder for pedophiles and sex offenders to operate in a group that empowers women to call out offending behavior or band together (as women frequently do) to call out offending behavior.
Small wonder that conservative/fundamentalist/religious organizations take away women’s rights first.
@11 Can we maybe not? Is it somehow the big impossible to look at this garbage person as neither gay nor straight but as a pedophile, in exactly the same way that the BTK (bind-torture-kill) serial killer was not exactly what most people would consider straight? The BTK’s victims were predominantly adult women but it’s difficult to argue that he’s straight, in the normal sense of the word. Ditto religious nut/pedophile here. All his victims were male children. Whether straight or LGTBQ, the thing that all members of those groups have in common is that they are sexually attracted to adults. Not children.
Let pedophiles be their own designation and their own hell.
It really kind of bugs me that John Wayne Gacy always gets pegged as gay. Because what he really was was a serial killer and torturer. He was certainly sexually aroused by it but it’s hard to argue that most adults are sexually aroused by torture & homicide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Rader
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Gacy
cartomancer, JSNuttall,
Well said.
@14 silvrhalide
Er… did you intend to address that post to me? (Since @11 was my post.) Because yes, I agree that this pastor was a pedophile, not gay, and that it is inappropriate to call him gay. I said as much at @12.
However, I am also disturbed by the common refrain that all homophobes are secretly gay, which was also implicit in some of the posts here.
Yes, of course I agree that homosexuality and pedophilia are two completely separate things and shouldn’t be conflated. I also think it’s objectionable to assume all homophobes are secretly gay. These are two separate issues, and the fact that my first post in this thread was about one of these issues doesn’t mean I don’t also care about the other (which in fact I addressed in my very next post).
@11
I am not sure how to explain how the comment bothers me or what I disagree with exactly but something about how it is stated seems a little off to me.
feeling threatened and being threatened are not the same.
@16 My bad. It was meant to be @1 not @11 and I must have double tapped. I’m fried from dealing with a bad IT upgrade at work all day. (Literally nothing works now. Jesus H Christ on a bicycle, is there a reason we can’t hire smart IT people?) Sorry.
silvrhalide @18 OK, no offense taken; typos happen. I was a little baffled as to why my comment would have elicited such a harsh reply. Looks like we’re on the same side here.
unclefrogy @17 I’m sorry if my comment bothered you, but I’m not sure exactly what you’re getting at? I certainly agree that feeling threatened and being threatened aren’t the same, but I worded my post that way to mirror the original wording in @7 that “People who are comfortable with their own sexuality aren’t threatened by alternatives”–obviously that post wasn’t referring to literally being threatened, either. My point there was only that you can’t assume that homophobia only comes from people being uncomfortable with their own sexuality, any more than you can assume that racism only comes from people being uncomfortable with their own ethnicity. Sorry if I could have worded it better.
@19
you can assume that racists are uncomfortable outside of their own race however.
If I knew what bothered me exactly I could say
@20
you can assume that racists are uncomfortable outside of their own race however.
Sure, and you can assume that homophobes are uncomfortable outside of their own sexuality. Again, I’m not sure what your point is.
The main point of my post was just that assuming that all homophobes were closet gays is itself homophobic, and that it would be nice if people would stop doing that. If you’re bothered by the comparison between homophobia and racism, okay, I admit it’s not a perfect parallel. If you’re bothered by the way I worded something, okay, there may have been things I could have stated better. But if you disagree with the main point of the post, no, I very much stand by that. And if you’re still not sure what it is you’re bothered by or disagree with, then… I’m not sure what you expect me to do about that, or why you felt it was useful to say that?
@4, @6 etc.
I think the unwritten assumption here is that an anti-gay fundie pastor very likely accused gays of being pedophiles on a regular basis, and that’s where the projection claims come from.