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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34531 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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In providing a deliberate choice, it forces one to answer the question of which lifestyle is better.

It forces each individual who has the option of taking the pill to make a decision about how they would rather be, but I am not sure I see how it forces some kind of cross-individual evaluation of which way to be is "better."

The most defensible formulation of this position is that sure, gay is worse than straight (i.e. any parent would choose the latter for their kids), but some are born gay and there is nothing that can be done.

I am not sure what "this position" being defended is. What if I do not believe that being gay is worse than being straight?

If we are now discussing whether or not someone should (or be allowed to) become gay by choice, leftists would be forced into saying that yes, a sterile existence is better than starting a family.

I think I am as leftist as anyone and it is not clear to me how my beliefs oblige me to answer the way you say. Could you elaborate?

As a rightist assuming that leftism always wants more members of its protected groups (gay is a protected group), the pill would be seen as important technology and marketed towards children through schools and hospitals the same way transgenderism is.

Do you have any evidence for this? As a leftist myself and someone who knows lots of leftists this does not seem like it would be the case to me.

Then you believe a civilization that would extinct itself in one generation is on equal footing to one that wouldn't.

Sure. I do not think anything that causes a civilization to endure is made morally good by that fact. Moral goodness does not cash out in "causes civilization to continue."

If it indeed doesn't matter, it would not be worth it to develop and distribute this pill. All the subsequent pushing of the pill would of course not be happening until it's good that it is.

I am a little confused, you take it as a premise that the pill has already been developed. I am not particularly interested in developing a pill to convert straight people into gay people so my beliefs seem already consistent with believing it doesn't matter. I also am skeptical that leftists would be pushing anyone to take this who didn't want to.

It has to be pushed because to claim that gay and straight are equally good is to discredit pride and everything leftists have been saying and doing for 70 years.

I think this misunderstands the purpose of pride.

If gay is not better, why are we painting/waving the pride flag everywhere and explicitly preferring homosexuals in hiring decisions?

Pride is named the way it is explicitly as a response to the historical belief that being gay was something one ought to be ashamed of. Similarly we sometimes have preferences for gay people in hiring decisions for the same reasons we sometimes have them for African-Americans and women, because these groups have been historically discriminated against in those decisions. You identify this motivation in your own comment! It is not related to believing that being gay is better than being straight, it's a reaction against the idea that being gay is worse than being straight.

Why do kids need to attend drag queen story time?

Kids don't need to attend drag queen story time. I think it may even be wrong to force kids to attend one if they didn't want to. But it is also wrong to prevent all such events, even for those who want to attend them or put them on.

Do you also think it's okay to show kids ordinary porn? (Even relatively vanilla porn?)

No, but how is this related to my comment at all? Is a fully clothed person reading a childrens book pornographic?

The whole point of drag queens is sexuality. A better analogy would be like having a famous porn star read a children's book, under circumstances where it's obvious the porn star was chosen specifically for being a porn star. That's a way to sneak sexuality in front of kids while keeping plausible deniability.

I don't agree. People do drag for lots of reasons, including non-sexual ones.

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