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The new House Speaker, Mike Johnson, is an Evangelical Christian that has positions and stances on homosexuality that I do not share (I confess, I remain a Millennial lib that has no problem with gay people doing gay things). Nonetheless, this CNN video where they discuss his positions on homosexuality and conversion therapy just seems so bizarre to me. In it, they refer to the idea of someone going from gay to straight as "debunked", quote Johnson saying, "there's freedom to change if you want to", and "homosexual behavior is something you do, not who you are".
Despite my own inclination to completely accept gay people qua gay people, I find nothing objectionable about Johnson's statements and see them as a much more accurate model of reality than what the CNN crew is expressing. I have zero doubt that sexual preferences and predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition. I'm agnostic on whether this could allow someone who has a natural inclination towards homosexuality (or heterosexuality) to groom attraction for the sex that they didn't initially prefer, but it's not obvious to me, and I don't think there's good reason to say that it's deboonked as though this is just a common stylized fact. Likewise, even if it proves impossible to change one's underlying preference, it certainly remains true that one can elect to follow a different pattern of behavior than their natural tendency. I might have a natural tendency to hook up with a flirtatious woman at the bar while I'm on a work trip, but Mrs. O'Dim wouldn't appreciate this and I value her so much more than some stupid hookup. Were I a religious man, I might be inclined to view my religious obligations through the same sort of lens.
But really, the thing that keeps hitting me with dissonance isn't even the above points, which I can at least countenance reasonable counterarguments to, but the incongruity with the belief that gender itself is a mere social construct that is fully malleable to an individual's stated preference. A man attracted to other men cannot become a straight man, but he can become a straight woman. Do the people articulating this view not notice that this is at least a difficult pair of propositions to adhere to? Do they see no conflict? Do they understand the conflict, but believe that it's a question that's been solved by The Science, so better to just trust The Science and move on? Cynically, I think it's mostly that expressing the opposite view will get you bullied and fired.
And if this isn't true then we should seriously consider making pedophilic urges result in irreversible life imprisonment (but I bet a popular alternative would be execution).
I dislike the idea of thought crimes, even if they are heinous thoughts.
Agreed.
But if predilections are indeed not mutable by conditioning or therapy, then at the very least all convicted pedophiles must never be released from prison.
Not just this, but by not imprisoning high propensity to pediophilia people there are children who will end up getting abused who would not have been abused in the counterfactual. Now you can say that's fine and accept the background level of child abuse this causes as you believe this is less damaging than mass incarceration but you actually have to make an argument about the tradeoff between potential pedophile's freedom and the rights of children to not be abused, and I do not see anyone in modern western society being willing to touch that with a 100 ft barge pole.
The majority of child abuse, including sexual abuse, is committed by non-pedophiles so society is apparently already on board with such trade-offs. Advocating the incarceration of pedophiles simply due to their attractions is just a way for lazy self-righteous people to feel like they are protecting children without having to do the work of actually looking into the causes of abuse and thinking seriously about the trade-offs that would be required to avert it.
Not every slope is slippery. Pedophiles are reviled in a much different manner than internet contrarians. Some guy posting about how he votes libertarian isn't in danger of imprisonment.
what about an internet contrarian posting about holocaust denial? or maybe one posting a meme?
not only is this slope slippery, we already slipped off and fell down quite a ways with no bottom in sight
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