Book Review: Al Mohler: Desire and Deceit (Part 2)

You can find the first part here, which ends with a quote from the end of chapter 9:

To the homosexual, as to all others, we must speak in love, never in hatred. But the first task of love is to tell the truth, and the sign of true hatred is the telling of a lie.

And with that, on with chapter 10, The End of Friendship: How Sexual Confusion Has Tainted Friendship Between Men.

(It never ceases to amaze me how these anti-gay hate mongers love to portray homosexuality as an exclusively male phenomenon.)

He begins with the example of Brokeback Mountain as representing "something new in mainstream America---a celebration of homosexual romance on the big screen.”

Anthony Esolen, professor of English at Province College in Provincetown, Rhode Island, warns that this breakdown of the natural sexual order has lead to the death of friendship---particularly to the death of male friendships.

Get this, Mohler then actually claims, through Esolen, that “words like love, friend, male, female, and partner” have been “transformed in a new sexual context”, intentionally by “pansexualists” “in order to normalize sexual confusion and anarchy.”

He then goes on to assert that these mainstream depictions of affection between gay men, now makes heterosexual male bonding virtually impossible without the suspicion of it being ‘a gay thing.’ And that male bonding “requires an uncomplicated heterosexual expectation,” part of which, he also claims through Esolen, requires “The stigma against sodomy…”

He all but says outright that gays should be forced back into the closet, along with any expression of gayness, anywhere. This chapter makes it abundantly clear that Al Mohler’s America has no room for gay Americans to publicly express themselves in any way shape or form, lest we corrupt the conceptual idol of the all powerful male -- who’s testicles would invariably shrink to the size of peas at the thought of two men kissing as they shriek in holy horror like school girls running to their mamas for the reassurance that they truly are indeed still men.

The worst part, and most egregious offense of this chapter is when he attempts to equate the so-called consequences of "normalization of homosexuality," as described above, with the consequences of the normalization of incest -- as all familial relationships would then come under sexual suspicion.

First of all, the comparison itself is a lie. The implication is that sexual attraction to one’s family members, is the same as sexual attraction to one’s gender. It’s the same as the anti-gay comparison that equates same-sex desire with the desire to commit adultery. The attempt here is to equate the desire for a partner, with the desire to cheat on one’s partner. Same principle with the incest comparison, except with a gratuitous stomach churning slant.

Furthermore, there are very cogent reasons for stigmatizing incest. The family -- which the anti-gay right is so fond of touting as the backbone of society -- is supposed to be the one place of safety for children. Turn affection between family members into suspicion of sexual desire, and all expressions of love and support become suspect. Leading to a perpetual state of insecurity as a child, and resulting in an adult who is incapable of trust.

Either Al Mohler is an extremely stupid person, or is just jumping on the anti-gay bandwagon to make LGBT Americans out to be fiendish ghouls in the public mind, who are worthy of all that God’s contempt has to offer.

I vote for the latter.

More to come.