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Opinion: Self ... um ... love will make you gay?

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Boy do I wish I’d been at last weekend’s Values Voters Summit. I crossed it off my calendar because I was sure it would be a snore, but now I see I shouldn’t have prejudged the event. It was full of interesting sociology theories by right-wing nutjobs thinkers.

For example, Michael Schwartz, chief of staff to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla), talked about pornography at a session called ‘The New Masculinity.’ The Washington Independent has a story and a video. It’s a blight, a disaster, a disease infecting society, he said. Well, so far so good. He gets no argument from me. That’s what I think too.

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But just when I expected to read his thoughts about the new masculinity’s role in degrading and objectifying women and the contortion of heterosexual relationships, Schwartz proved he was an original thinker. No, pornography’s chief sin is that it will make boys gay. (I speak in terms of male-female relationships because I am certain that not in Schwarz’s dizziest daydream does he realize there is such a thing as actual gay pornography.)

According to Schwartz, a friend once told him that ‘All pornography is homosexual pornography, because all pornography turns your sexual drive inward.’

So if we just tell little boys that pornography will make them gay, he reasoned, then they’re bound to stay away from it. Because no one is as homophobic as a 10- or 11-year-old boy.

Well, I don’t know.

Didn’t we used to tell boys that indulging in, say, an inward sexual drive would make them go blind? Now it’s gay?

I’m so confused.

-- Lisa Richardson

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