Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

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Thank you for locating this.

After reading, I'm not sure what to think. I do not have the subject matter familiarity necessary to take a position on his claims, nor does he cite anything other than personal experience and his own research.

If his historical claims with regard to homosexuality are correct, then I can say with great certainty that his other claim as to how these facts will be interpreted in the modern climate is distressingly right.

Worth noting that he takes no position on the rights of homosexual couples. The only value judgement made therein is that (assuming the information used to reach this conclusion is correct) that historically, homosexuality been associated with some pretty ugly and downright evil things.

If they're not correct, then this amounts to a very, very disgusting and ugly smear piece worthy of groups like the infamous Westboro church.

So now I wonder.. which is it?

If it weren't for the Eich/Mozilla thing from a few months ago, I'd have looked at these claims a lot less skeptically coming from a technologist who's intimately familiar with logic, and who would necessarily place facts above all else when it comes to arguing a point. That's not a thing I can do anymore, especially considering the tendency of actual bigots to couch their own personal prejudices in superficially-correct-sounding scientific language.

I'm not trying to interpret him, just to answer the question about whether there's evidence that his thoughts have evolved.

Here's a more recent example:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5651

The only analysis I'll give for it is that I was also disturbed by the idea of Eich being forced out, but would never donate a penny to organizations fighting marriage equality; two wrongs can't make a right.

OK I give up.

I find his thoughts on race to be alarming, too.

It's hard for me to reconcile the idea that ESR's beliefs are germane and troubling with the principle of tolerance for other people's beliefs. But: I think there's something substantively and intrinsically disturbing about the specific things ESR says. I don't think I'd have trouble being friends with someone who opposed marriage equality. But I do have trouble with what ESR says about LGBT people. It might be the whole package of positions that ESR takes, not just about LGBT issues but about race, politics, &c.

I have friends with very conservative beliefs (though none, to my knowledge, have ever argued that homosexuality is inextricably bound with pederasty). But none of them have a cohesive worldview in which their own attributes just happen to define the ideal human, compared against which all nonconformant humans are inferior. ESR, on the other hand...

ESR's general observation that the ancients often saw homosexual as being about dominance is probably correct. However, the framing makes it sound like this is specific to homosexual relationships. In fact ancient cultures often saw ALL male sexual relationships as being about dominance. Of course they didn't really need to spend a lot of time discussing who was being dominated in a heterosexual relationship: it was always the woman in pretty much all pre-modern civilizations.

This makes his second point about a supposed biological predisposition towards domination sex really apply to all men. If gay men are struggling with this "biological headwind" then so are straight men.

This point appears to deflate the whole blog post.

> The only value judgement made therein is that (assuming the information used to reach this conclusion is correct) that historically, homosexuality been associated with some pretty ugly and downright evil things.

> If they're not correct, then this amounts to a very, very disgusting and ugly smear piece worthy of groups like the infamous Westboro church.

> So now I wonder.. which is it?

Well, that's tricky. Most of the historical associations he makes are roughly correct as stated, but what is misleading is the implicit claim that underlines the whole piece -- that equivalent historical associations don't exist to each of those for heterosexuality, which they do -- romantic heterosexuality only became a cultural norm (rather than something portrayed as exceptional, often dangerous, and very frequently as a source of deviance from cultural norms relating to the family) in the Western world only fairly recently historically. The "massive reinvention" of (male) homosexuality that ESR refers to is real, but its part and parcel of a broader reinvention of sexuality in general from a very similar starting point and in a very similar direction.

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