Date: Fri, 3 Jan 1997 15:26:47 +0100 (MET)
Subject: M-G: Re: Dr Sendepause & Klasberries posting again!


Justin S. wrote, on 02.01,

>I'm disinclined to pursue this, as I think that Martens' loathsome views
>are not shared by anyone else on the list, and besides it makes me very
>angry, but a few comments.

I too am disinclined to pursue this, and have been staying out of
earlier "queer debates" because I know they're a messy business, but
now that the thing has started, just a few more comments, now on yours.
The matter involves not only those less than 1% of the population in
the USA, for instance, who in a fairly recent survey defined themeselves
as "being hmomosexual", but also important element of present-time
bourgeois propaganda and culture, which is becoming increasingly rotten.

>There are two different issues here. One concerns equal treatment under
>law. The other is the ethical appraisal of homosexuality.
>
>The first seems a fairly simple issue. Even if Martens disapproves of
>homosexuality, he also disapproves of persecution of gays and lesbians.
>But denial of equal rights is a form of persecution.

No, the men (who say they're "glooms") can marry women and the women
(who say they're "lesbians") men, just like everybody else. I disapprove
of those stamps on the individuals. They've been caught up in a certain
way of thinking and feeling because of certain elements in culture.
On principle, that way of thinking and feeling can be changed. I do
know that for some, it may be difficult.

To illustrate what I mean, an example from my own circle of
aquaintances. One friend, from the days before I was "into politics",
long ago was said by some others to "be a homosexual". I never to him
or to others referred to such statements, the truth of which I didn't
know, and valued that friend for his qualities in general. On a trip
he and I and some others made to another country a couple of decades
ago, he got laid (with a woman, I mean), I'd guess, for the first time;
he wasn't all that young. He said to me it was like "...." (an old word
meaning sex with animals that isn't even in my English dictionary); he
must have guessed I'd understand, and probably there were not many
others he would have confided in in such a manner. Much later he on one
occasion referred to homosexuality in quite negative terms. Possibly
what you, Justin, would have called a "reformed gay", then. I think my
always having avoided to put a "gloom" stamp on him just *might* have
helped a little in the process of his changing his mind - if he did,
now, which, again, I don't know.

>To deny gaysa nd
>lesbians the right to marry and enjoy the legal and social benefits
>accoerded to straights is no different in principle from forbidding Blacks
>and whites from marrying.

Yes, of course it is.

>(Many states in the US had such laws up until
>Loving v. Virginia, 1967.) That was a form of persecution of Blacks and
>motivated by animus. There was not even a rational basis for it, no
>conceivable grouns for treating Black-white marriages differently from
>Black-Black or white-white marriages, except to say that Balcks were
>unworthy of marrying whites. It's the same with gaysa nd lesbians. Denying
>them the right to marry--in America this is a fundamental right, which
>means that attemopts to regulate it get the toughest judicial
>scrutiny--reflects nothing more than the moral judgment of bigots that
>gays and lesbians are perverts. It is driven by sheer hatred and animus,
>nothing more.

It's by no means driven by that.

>Martens mentions as a possible non-bigoted basis for such a policy the
>idea that it's good for people to have children. But in that case the
>policy is not what American law calls narrowly tailored to its end. It is
>underinclusive: many straights do not want to have children, and the
>policy of the U.S. and I think Sweden too,a s with most advanced
>countries, is to allow and encoureage this by legalizing contraception and
>abortion. It is overinclusive: at least some and perhaps many gays and
>lesbians might well want to have children. (I know that my sister's
>partner does, or did, so want; my sister didn't, so that settled it.)

I must admit that I favour contraception and, in general, ordinary
normal sex without its in all cases resulting in children.

On the whole, there are *two* bourgeois lines on the "sex-and children"
question. One is the older, conservative or *church* one: No (normal)
sex without resulting children, none outside of marriage either (this
has to do with the wish for conservation of property of course), no
perversions. The bourgeoisie in its earlier days did want there to
be many people. On that point, the Marxists agree.

The other, present-time and extremely rotten, bourgeios line is
what you might call the *queer* line: The one *in favour of* all
possible perversions, *against* ordinary normal sex. It's a line
for *splitting (even more) between the sexes* and for *reducing
the population*. It's even worse than the "church" line. *One* of
its manifestations is that "gloom marriages" idea.

>Martens, in lines that could have been written by the most right wing and
>homophobic Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia, and probably
>will be written by him when the Hawaii gay marriage case gets to the
>Court, sets out a parade of horribles. What about incestuous marriages?
>Polygamous ones? Paedophilia? Necrophilia?  Bestiality? These cases,
>polygamy apart, are not comparable. Polygamy is illegal, but it shouldn't
>be.

I'm not advocating that the bourgeois state introduce marriages
A) 1 man - several women B) 1 woman - several men or C) several men -
several women. Type C *was* the normal one several thousand years ago,
and I wrote I wouldn't oppose such an idea on the part of the
bourgeois state. But it hardly *is* going to get such an idea. It
would go completely against all bourgeois intentions on such things,
against *both* their "church" line *and* their "queer" line.

With incest, there are well-grounded basis for preventing such
>marriages, having to do with both the likelihood of genetic damage to any
>offspring and with the discouragement of incest in general, since that
>typically involves sexual abuse.

Some people are saying that the likelyhood of such genetic damage
is small or even nil. I cannot say I know what are the facts here.
An interest in incest (except in very small and isolated societies)
would arise only or mainly because of the oppressive efforts at
banning normal sex, I should think. Normally, people abhor it, by
tradition. You're right in that it typically involves abuse.

So OK, you're *not* advocating incestuous marriages and perhaps
it wasn't quite fair of me to suggest that the "gloom-wedding"
advocates, if consistent, would have to favour them.

> Paedophilia, even more than incest,
>involves sexual abuse and advantage taking, and, moreover, the children so
>abused are too young to marry. Necrophilia, well, you can't marry the dead
>anyway. Ditto with bestiality. You can screw your sheep, but you can't
>marry it.

That depends on what you mean by "marrying". Up until recently, this
concept was strictly limited to a business between 1 man and 1 woman.
The bourgeois "queer line" wants to change that (or in some places
has already changed it). This then gives the concept of "marrying"
a wider meaning. So when you're saying that people "can't" marry the
dead or their sheep, that is *not* consistent of you. Yesterday,
a man *couldn't* marry a man, or a woman a woman. When/if the law
gets changed on that point, things become different.

You, in your own terminology, *are* "discriminating against" the
necrophiles and the bestials, since you don't want the concept
of marriage to be widened to "accomodate" them too.

Now I don't really want to put a label on someone who once screwed
his sheep either (see above), just as much as I'm against saying
that some people just "are" "glooms" or "lesbos".

>Gay and lesbian marriage, by contrast, involves consensual
>relations among adults who happen to love members of their own sex.

It's true that *this* thing is the same in those "same-sex marriages"
as in the "traditional" ones. But once widened in one respect,
the "marriage" concept could be widened in others too: The deceased
June in my example, would she be hurt by a quick little marriage
ceremony in which she didn't even have to say "yes"?, and there
could be ways of finding out the opinion of the sheep, who might
get slaughtered afterwards anyway. 

>What it comes down to is that Martens thinks that homosexuality is sick,
>immoral, and perverted, which is why he lumps it together wuith activities
>like necrophilia, bestilaity, and paedophilia, which are in fact sick,
>immoral and perverted.

Sick and perverted I'm saying, yes. "Immoral", I'm not using that
concept on these questions. The things have to be put into proportions
too, of course. The harm done to other people by the acts in question
or to the ones involved in them isn't that big, if it's there at all -
this may be very different in different cases too. But such "ways of
life", the whole thinking, the ideology, which such acts are a part
of and is a result of, is very sick and perverted.

But he can offer no reasons for this, because there
>are none. It's sheer prejudice, hateful and raw. Look what Martens gives us:
>
>1. A quote from Engels, indicating that Engels shared his view. And so?
>Why should we believe something because Engels thought it?

No, of course, we shouldn't. And I did point out that there were
some things on which Engels IMO was wrong here. But you had earlier
written that holding homosexuality to be sick and perverted was "not"
a Marxist standpoint. And several lines below, you do repeat it's

>antithetical to Marxism

This is upside-down and an invention of yuors.

>2. Invocations of "normality." If "normal" means statistically normal,
>homosexuality certainly is that. All societies have had it. Current
>estimates, based on the Kinsey report, suggest that one in ten people are
>homosexual (mainly or entirely erotically directed at their own sex).

That's the propaganda of the bourgeois "queer" line, yes. But that
recent survey in the USA showed: Less than 1% called themselves by
those terms.

>A
>great many more people than that who are not self-identified as gay or
>lesbian have had same-sex experiences. Any activity that that many people
>engage in is "normal" in the statistical sense.
>
>If what is meant, though, that same sex-activity is "abnormal" because it
>doesn't fit into someone's conception of what sex organs were "made for" I
>have news for Martens. Teleology is dead. Sex organs were not "made for"
>anything. They evolved as they did because that maximized evolitionary
>fitness, a fact that confers on reproductive use no moral authority.
>Unless, that is, we want to say taht sex for fun is immoral, that it's
>wrong to use contraceptives or have abortions, or for women to have sex
>after menopause, or indeed for sterile men to have sex. Sex is good
>because it's fun and sometimes expresses our deepest feelings of love for
>one another, not because it makes babies. And boys and boys and girls and
>girls can have just as much fun as boys and girls, and love each other
>every bit as much.

Se above. I've never argued with teleology, nor with "immorality",
on this question. Buggery is no good, but there are many things that
do much more real damage.

>Finally we have the assertion that homosexuality is a "symptom" of a
>society in decline. I suppose that this right wing cliche

Sorry, Justin, if a "cliché", then at least a left wing one. It's
part of a Marxist analysis of these things.

>alludes the
>prevalevance of homosexuality in late imperial Britain, at least among the
>upper classes and the decline of the Roman Empire (although homosexuality
>was practiced throught the history of Rome). Right winger will say things
>like: homosexuality _causes_ social decay, without a shred of evidence
>beyong these sorts of examples; I suppoose taht Martens is materialist
>enough not to go taht far. But the fact is that homosexuality is normal in
>all societies and doesn't correlate with social growtyh of decay.

Not true!

>Love
>knows no laws, including the laws of history.

Ah - now we've arrived at "love". That's a big and complicated subject.
You're using the concept in a *religious* way, in my opinion. Many things
I'd like to write on this - but some other time.

>Martins says that homosexuality represents gay men's fear of women and
>lesbian's hatred of men. I don't know on what basis he asserts this
>absurdity. Even if true, it shows nothing about whether men who are afraid
>of women or women who hate men are to be condemned and denied eqyual
>treatment in their own innocuous preferences. If, hypothetically, I feared
>red-heads or hated Italians (the latter would be a loathsome prejudice,
>but that doesn't matter here), that would be no raeson to prevent me from
>marrying a Black woman from Sudan, even if a main considation in my choice
>was taht she wasn't a red-headed Italian. Or indeed, from marrying a Black
>man from Sudan, same deal.

But that fear I wrote about is such an *awful* thing, separating (where
it exists, and unfortunately, it *is* a quite real phenomenon in many
societies at present) the two halves of the population from each other!
There's much more involved here too than those of the (not unimportant)
actual sex act, big cultural things.

>In any case most of the gays and lesbians I know don't fear and hate the
>other sex. They're just not sexually attracted to it. Or anyway not enough
>to want to marry or make love to it on a regular basis. And what's wrong
>with that?

I don't know the persons you're mentioning. In my experiance, in those
people I've met or seen on TV etc who're defining themselves in that
way, there *is* an underlying massive fear. And it *is* a very bad thing.

>Martens hatred of fags, queers, homos, and dykes puts him in the compnay
>of some of the most reactionary forces in the world.

No. See above on the two bourgeois lines on "sex-and-kids". The
"church" line agrees with mine on some point. And yes, that line
*is* quite reactionary in some other respects. The *most* reactionary
bourgeois line however is the "queer" propaganda one, which *you're*
supporting.

>The fag-bashers in
>America are virtually uniformly right wing nuts who want women to be
>barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen, niggers to be bootblacks and
>maids, unions to be outlawed and communists and Jews to killed. Elsewhere
>I think it's pretty much the same. The Nazis went loopy over
>homosexuality, rounded up the gyas nd sent them to the camps.

An important portion of the early Nazi leaders *were* fags. Typically,
also such forces as the fundamentalists in Iran want to execute
people for homosexual acts - which precisely are massively encouraged
by their own system of oppression against women.

>The FN and
>Foraz Italia hate homos too. I don't think it's unfair to point out to
>Martens the compnay he keeps.

But I sharply differ from those people on crucial points. See above.
*Your* ideas stem from an extremely right-wing bourgeois faction indeed.

>Martens gets upset when I says that many workers who share his views about
>homosexuality are also racist, sexist, and right wing. He says it ain't
>so. I don't know what planet he lives on. Maybe it's different in Sweden.
>(Although I gather that at least racism is very strong in the Scandanavian
>working class.)

You're quite misinformed. Your error here is that you *believe* what
the ultra-reactionary bourgeois media are saying. *Very* naive, if
nothing worse.

>But let me tell you from America that it's true. Never
>mind communism or socialism, mild social democracy or even what is called
>here in America "liberalism" is unpopular among the workers.

Are you correctly informed here? I doubt it. In the USA, which is
"the world's policeman No. 1" today of course, possibly, labour
aristoctatism may be bigger than here. But my guess is you're
believing in some lies here too.

>Male workers
>tend to vote Republican. (Union workers tend to vote Democratic, not that
>that's a great improvement, but union density in America is about 15% of
>the workforce.)

Those two bourgeois parties are *both* *very* bad, each in its own way.
In reality, voting for (the i.a. more hypocritical Democratic) does
not at all necessarily mean a more pgogressive standpoint.

The white working class is desperately racist here. I can
>produce the statistics if you insist. Sexist, ditto. And my impression
>from living in England is taht while the working class there is of course
>less right wing, being still (barely) majority Labourite, it is no less
>racist and sexist than it is homophobic.

The evidence of several massive anti-racist demonstrations, for instance,
speak against you. There no doubt remains massive labour aristocratism
in Britain. But it's *not* the *main* element, as far as I can tell.

>As evidence of Martens' views being driven by hate, consider that he
>crudely calls homosexuality "buggery," in a quaint British expression:
..........
>
>Basically Martens use of this term shows that what bends him out of shape
>about homosexuality, what he cannot stand, is the thought of someone's
>dick up someone else's ass. At least if the ass is male. But since there's
>nothing wrong with that, since indeed it can be fun and pleasurable and is
>so for a lot of people, the thing to be said to him is taht if it doesn't
>turn him on, he shouldn't do it. Not being turned on by it, in fact, even
>being disgusted by it, however, is no reason to deny the fundamental
>rights of people who are turned on by it.

You mean, that "same-sex marriage right". It's not a "fundamental" one.
See above.

>Martens asks about which societies I maent that were more civilized than
>ours in countenanceing homosexuality. I was thinking of ancient Greece and
>Rome and possibly mod-medieval Europe (where, I gather, there were
>same-sex m,arriages performed at late asd the 11th century). I do not mean
>that they were more civilized tout court, just in this respect. I am aware
>of the degraded position that women occupied in those societies and of the
>existence of slavery, etc.

Yes, that *degraded position* that women occupied in *those* societies,
that's precisely what I pointed to. You're honest enough to acknowledge
that this was a fact. This is what Engels pointed to as an explanation
of the phenomenon in question.

>But my point was just that in the ancient and
>possibly the early or mid-medeival world of Europe, there was a sane
>attitude towards homosexuality, the sanity of which is not diminished by
>the bad practices of those societies in other regards. 19th and early
>20th Century Britain, to which Martens alludes, was quite intolerant towards
>homosexuality, despite its widespread practice among the upper class.
>Oscar Wilde (a socialist, incidentally) was imprisoned for it: that was
>the occasion of The Ballad of Reading Gaol. E,M, Forster, Ford Madox Ford,
>Keynes and Virginia Woolf, homosexuals all, endured severe repression
>because of reactionary British laws and attitudes.

As I wrote above, it's the typical case that certain societies, on the
one hand, are *causing* homosexuality, on the other hand, they're
extremely (and overly) frightened by it - which has to do, too,
whith their hatred also of normal sex - and are persucuting people
violently for it.

I advocate what *I* would call a "sane" attitude towards the
phenomenon: 1) *not* exaggerating its damaging effects and *not*
exaggerating the size of it either - which is precisely what the
bourgeois "queer propaganda" line *and* the bourgeois "old church"
ine are *combinding* to do and which *you're* doing too. 2) being
very much against it.

>I won't continue this any more, except to reinterate that homophobia is
>antithetical to Marxism, which is about human liberation, gay and
>straight, man and woman.
>
>--Justin Schwartz

And I'd just like to reiterate: Please read some more actual Marxism.

Rolf M.



     --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---