Homosexuality, Race and Identity
 
Homosexuality, Race and Identity
Written By Laurie Higgins   |   04.25.16
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Homosexual activists have long sought to transform cultural disapproval of homoeroticism into approval, and one way they pursued this goal was to co-opt the fight of blacks for racial equality. Hence, they pursued the inclusion of homosexuality (and now “gender identity”) in anti-discrimination law. To that end, homosexual activists have relentlessly compared these two groups (i.e., blacks and homosexuals) who have been historically mistreated, suggesting without proving that since blacks have been mistreated and homosexuals have been mistreated, the two conditions are ontologically the same and must be thought of and treated in all contexts as identical.

In short, this is what liberals think—or pretend to think—in the service of normalizing sexual deviance:

  • Blacks were mistreated
  • Homosexuals were mistreated.
  • Therefore skin color and homoeroticism are equivalent.

But if mistreatment of people because of cultural disapproval of their volitional acts renders them the ontological equivalent of blacks, then those engaged in bestiality, “minor-attraction,” “Genetic Sexual Attraction,” and promiscuity—all of whom are at times mistreated—are equivalent to blacks.

The fallacious and odious comparison of race to sexual perversion has been an effective stratagem in our increasingly non-thinking culture, but there was yet more rhetorical gimcrackery to come.

Homosexual activists began transforming the concept of “identity.” They sought to recast identity as something intrinsically inviolable, immutable, and good. They sought to refashion identity in such a way as to make it culturally taboo to make judgments about any constituent feature of identity. They re-imagined identity in such a way as to move homoeroticism from the category of phenomena about which humans can legitimately make moral distinctions to one about which society is forbidden to make judgments.

Identity in its former incarnation was merely a way of saying that a thing is itself. Identity when applied to individual persons simply denoted the aggregate of phenomena constituting, associated with, affirmed and experienced by individuals. Identity was “the set of behavioral and personal characteristics by which an individual is recognizable as a member of a group.”

Identity was not conceived as some intrinsically moral thing, because identity could refer to either objective, non-behavioral, morally neutral conditions (e.g., skin color) or to subjective feelings, beliefs, and volitional acts that could be good or bad, right or wrong. Prior to the new and subversive conceptualization of identity, there existed no absolute cultural prohibition of judging the divers elements that constitute identity.

By conflating all the phenomena that can constitute identity, “progressives” demanded that society should no more make judgments about feelings and volitional acts than they should about skin color.

In short this is what liberals think about identity (except when it comes to those whose identity is found in Christ):

  • All phenomena that make up identity are off-limits to moral judgment.
  • Homosexuality is part of identity.
  • Therefore, homosexuality is immune from moral judgment.

But if all conditions constituted by powerful, persistent, unchosen desires and the behaviors impelled by such feelings are part of this new and culturally destructive understanding of identity and, therefore, immune from moral judgment, then bestiality, “minor-attraction,” Genetic Sexual Attraction, and promiscuity are immune from moral judgment.

The Left demands that society affirm all subjective feelings not only as good but also as signifiers of objective reality, and this demand results in sometimes hilarious conundrums (or is it conundra?) for those who know that reality exists and that the Emperor is buck naked.

For your chuckle ‘o’ the day, watch this short video to see the ideological Gordian knot from which post- Dolezalians can’t seem to extricate themselves:

YouTube video

Subjective homoerotic attraction and volitional homoerotic activity do not constitute a condition analogous to race or a condition that deserves special legal protections. Neither does the desire to be the opposite sex constitute the ontological equivalent of race. And if they do, then so do all other conditions constituted by subjective desires and volitional activities.

Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor illuminates the paltry nature of the new definition of identity and its similarly deformed corollary “authenticity”:

Only if I exist in a world in which history, or the demands of nature, or the needs of my fellow human beings, or the duties of citizenship, or the call of God, or something else of this order matters crucially, can I define an identity for myself that is not trivial. Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands.

People of all faiths and no faith have the right to make moral judgments about subjective feelings and volitional activity—even if others choose to place those phenomena at the center of their “identities.” In fact, moral creatures have an obligation to make such judgments.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:



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Laurie Higgins
Laurie Higgins was the Illinois Family Institute’s Cultural Affairs Writer in the fall of 2008 through early 2023. Prior to working for the IFI, Laurie worked full-time for eight years in Deerfield High School’s writing center in Deerfield, Illinois. Her cultural commentaries have been carried on a number of pro-family websites nationally and internationally, and Laurie has appeared on numerous radio programs across the country. In addition, Laurie has spoken at the Council for National Policy and educational conferences sponsored by the Constitutional Coalition. She has been married to her husband for forty-four years, and they have four grown children...
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