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Date Posted: 13:14:47 04/29/07 Sun
Author: Chuck in ND
Subject: This is in response

to a front page article in our local paper. Last week they had a full page spread plus several follow-up articles on a male gay couple going to prom at one of the local high schools. This is dh's column responding to that:

http://www.in-forum.com/articles/index.cfm?id=164158§ion=columnists&columnist=Ross%20Nelson

Gay story pandered to elitists,/B.
Ross Nelson, The Forum
Published Sunday, April 29, 2007
Ross Nelson sorts mail at the post office. To delay total brain atrophy he writes an occasional column for the Forum. He also reads on his breaks when he's not arguing politics or epistemological first principles with his co-workers.

Épater le bourgeois, I think the French would say, seeing The Forum’s above-the-fold, front-page picture of the prom-bound gay couple (April 20). Tweak the staid old burghers’ noses, rattle their insular world a bit. Then call it a journalistic coup.

No doubt some see this decision as a bold step, but little could be further from the truth. Great courage isn’t required to run a story that The Forum’s editors know the chattering classes and the elite will support, and that alleged progressives will praise as necessary and good. Meanwhile the man in the street will briefly and futilely protest, be condemned as a backwater bubba who needs to catch up with the world, and then fade into the background as yet another piece of absurd social reasoning becomes the norm.

There are things you simply cannot say out loud in America (save for the Internet), this land of free speech, and we all have a pretty good idea of what the unwritten protocols are. Truth is no defense whatsoever for even those statements that have empirical backing. Don’t even mention making fun of our sacred cows. TV programs use increasingly worse potty-language at the very same time they strictly hew to politically correct standards of speech. Archie Bunker nowadays would never get away with his hilarious definition of “homo sapiens” rendered 35 years ago, even though the joke was on him.

Two gay young men parading together at the prom are a perfect example of how homosexuality is not just to be tolerated – a goal reached long ago – but accepted by the mainstream. I’m sure homosexuals are still mocked at times in schools and other places; maybe even as much as fat or acne-ridden people are. But the prevalent attitude I see is live-and-let-live. Most people get their hackles up only when homosexuals take an “in your face” approach.

Serious discrimination against gays, of the type that black Americans faced, is practically non-existent. Although there are the usual sociological disputes about the exact numbers, it’s clear that gays in America are at least as well-paid, at least as well-educated, and at least as well-placed in artistic and scientific jobs as the straight community.

Do you get the feeling that the emphasis on the gay couple at the prom was meant to be a prophylactic against bigotry? I recall Bonanzaville’s former executive director, Tim Hoheisel, who so briefly deigned to grace us with his presence before re-ascending to Kansas, petitioning for a grant to enlighten us bigots and racists of Fargo-Moorhead. But if our betters can’t make the charges stick, perhaps they shouldn’t bring them up at all.

Clearly, homosexuality is aberrant behavior, the details of which I’ve already handled in The Forum’s pages and won’t go into again except to note: if, as some evolutionary scientists say, an organism is just the egg’s way of making another egg, then homosexuality for humans is a natural dead-end. We might even have a genetic predisposition against the practice just for that reason. That’s one reason why comparisons of mixed-race marriages and homosexuality are invalid. What’s more, even if homosexuality were innate, it would be no more worthy of support than any other genetic flaw we’re born with.

A last point: Justifying the lavish coverage of the gay couple’s prom bash as a novelty and grist for community discussion is shaky reasoning. If we sacrifice all standards of behavior and decorum, not to mention common sense, to the shifting breezes of the moment, there will be no barrier to the next even greater grotesquerie. And there will be a next time.

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