Billingham

You know someone named Arsenio Billingham? No.

Looking at naked women on the internet.

 Why?  Well, we’re going to have to back up and see what Michael Schwartz, Chief of Staff to Senator (US Senator) Tom Coburn thinks about life and values.  And no, this isn’t shit on Oklahoma week (Coburn represents the Sooner State).

 First:  But it is my observation that boys at that age have less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people. They speak badly about homosexuality. And that’s because they don’t want to be that way. They don’t want to fall into it. And that’s a good instinct.

He’s talking about preteens.  12-year-old boys are now are new standard for moral and honest behavior, apparently.  Coburn has sponsored a resolution to make October 19th National Armpit Farts Day.

It’s remarkable how much people are willing to rely on their kids’ actions as being based on ‘instinct,’ rather than carefully learned behavior.  If you hate on gay folks for 12 years, and send a kid to a school with a bunch more homophobes, and he comes out homophobic, that BS ain’t instinct.  Eating when he’s hungry is instinct.  Reactions to social behavior are socially learned.  He continues:

[A]ll pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards. Now think about that. And if you, if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s going to want to go out and get a copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants.” You know, that’s a, that’s a good comment. It’s a good point and it’s a good thing to teach young people.

Hoboy.  So now, apparently, ‘turning your sexual drive inwards’ makes you gay.  I don’t really know how that works or really what it means.  Then, he’s trying to use boys’ homophobia to drive them away from porn - this is sort of a small scale example of how bigotry gets promoted even when the goal isn’t promoting bigotry directly:  you rely on homophobia to fight porn.  You rely on racism to fight health care reform.  You rely on sexism to fight environmentalism.  These things arise because of all these uses to another aim, not because there’s a secret conspiracy of racists.

And that’s putting the cart before the horse in this particular case:  porn makes boys gay?  I mean, I could see that in the context of pornography, boys will find themselves looking at a lot of penises, and may be a click away from actual gay porn, which could at least make them aware of latent homosexual desires.  But that’s not even at play here:  Playboy doesn’t have hardcore anything, just naked ladies.

So he wants us to believe that looking at sexualized depictions of members of the opposite sex will make boys who would otherwise be hetero decide that they only want cock from now on.

Yowza.