\nSomeone in our Saturday morning women\u2019s prayer group prayed for LGBT people to come to faith in Christ. For some reason, it made me suddenly fix on the \u201cB\u201d part of the acronym\u2014\u201cbisexual.\u201d<\/p>\n
I think this is because all the individuals we had interceded for up to that moment, since 7:30 a.m., had been sufferers of ailments like cancer and back pain. These are certifiable conditions. Even many lesbian (L), gay (G), and transgendered people (T) are arguably sufferers in some way. (Who would go through the trouble and financial burden of surgical anatomical alterations if he weren\u2019t suffering\u2014if only from profound confusion?)<\/p>\n
But \u201cB,\u201d or bisexual, means that you have sex with both males and females, right? What\u2019s up with that?<\/p>\n
My friend Bill has a friend who enjoys a ride aboard the LGBT quasi\u2013civil rights bandwagon in the \u201cB\u201d category. Bill finally said to him one day, \u201cOK, so you\u2019re bisexual, not homosexual and not heterosexual. Doesn\u2019t that mean you fool around with whoever you want to?\u201d After a pause, his friend answered, \u201cPretty much.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Whaaaat?!<\/p>\n
That is not<\/em> what bisexual means.<\/p>\n\nWhen I was a kid, my cousins and I put on a play in our grandfather\u2019s barn. It was a big production and we practiced for weeks, made props, hung curtains, and sold tickets. Our parents and some neighbors came and paid admission. After the show, all the cousins raided the money jar to split the take, and Donald Barrette from next door, who had done nothing but lend his red wagon for one of the scenes, walked away with as much money as the rest of us (which was actually my fault, but that\u2019s too long a story). The cousins were angry by the way Donald slyly infiltrated our ranks and cashed in unseen on the coattails of the thespian afterglow.<\/p>\n
I feel that way about the \u201cB\u201d people in LGBT. The LGT guys should be asking themselves about now, \u201cWhat\u2019s with this \u2018B\u2019 guy standing over there in a circle having laughs and a martini at our party? He\u2019s not a real\u00a0anything<\/em>! He\u2019s not hard-wired homosexual or a tortured misfit in his own body trying to climb out; he\u2019s just coming along for a free ride. He makes us look bad, because intelligent people will come to their senses and say to themselves, \u2018The whole LGBT movement is as phony as a three-dollar bill; look at this \u201cB\u201d thing in the middle that\u2019s just clear-cut straight-up promiscuity.\u2019 This \u2018B\u2019 guy blows our cover!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\u201cHe\u2019s not a real <\/em>anything!\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\u201cThat\u2019s just clear-cut straight-up promiscuity.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nSiiiiiiigh.<\/p>\n
Someone needs to tell Andr\u00e9e\u00a0that people can be plenty promiscuous with members of only one gender. She seems to be missing that.<\/p>\n
\nIf there were a book for gays with parables in it like the Bible, the \u201cB\u201d guy would be the one at the wedding feast who gets kicked out when it is noticed by his lack of proper wedding attire that he is an imposter.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I don\u2019t get this perspective\u2014at all<\/em>. Andr\u00e9e\u00a0seems to be aware that straight people are sexually attracted to members of the opposite gender, and that gay people are sexually attracted to members of the same gender. But when told that bisexuals are attracted to individuals of more than one gender, she concludes that they are . . . simply\u00a0promiscuous?<\/em>\u00a0How does that make any sense at all?<\/em><\/p>\nLook, you can\u2019t just choose<\/em> to be attracted to members of more than one gender. It doesn\u2019t work that way! Someone should ask Andr\u00e9e\u00a0if she could choose to be sexually attracted to women as well as men, in order to widen the pool of people she could date. I\u2019m thinking her\u00a0answer would be no<\/em>. If you can\u2019t choose to be bisexual, being bisexual\u00a0clearly has nothing at all<\/em> to do with being \u201cpromiscuous.\u201d<\/p>\nAnd actually, bisexual individuals often find that their bisexuality limits, rather than increases, the pool of available sex partners. Many people, both gay and straight, don\u2019t want to be with someone who is bisexual. I\u2019ve heard stories of bisexual women being turned down by lesbians because they\u2019re \u201cnot lesbian enough\u201d and then viewed with apprehension by boyfriends out of an (unfounded) assumption that they\u2019re more likely to cheat. And it works the other way, too\u2014many women would look askance on the idea of being with\u00a0a man who had been with other men, and so forth.<\/p>\n
And if Andr\u00e9e had any idea what she was talking about, she would know that bisexual\u00a0individuals\u00a0do not<\/em>\u00a0currently\u00a0exist without tension\u00a0alongside the L and the G in LGBT, as she seems to assume that they do. They don\u2019t always feel welcome, and are sometimes viewed as flaky or simply unwilling to choose a gender and stick with it. Of course, transgender individuals do not always exist tranquilly alongside the L and the G either. And honestly, the L and the G do not always tranquilly coexist! Andr\u00e9e\u00a0seems to think the L, G, and T fit well together and that the B is\u00a0the odd one out, but that in practice all four currently coexist without tension\u00a0because (she argues) the L, G, and T don\u2019t see B for the imposter it is. All of this is false! The real problem here is that she\u2019s talking about something she appears to know literally nothing<\/em> about.<\/p>\nI want to note one last mistake I think Andree is falling into. In fact, I think it\u2019s a fairly common mistake among conservatives. Let me explain!<\/p>\n
Remember that conservatives often urge women to dress modestly and \u201ccover up\u201d in order to keep men from lusting after them, and argue that rape victims who were dressed too skimpily were \u201casking for it,\u201d as though men are incapable of resisting. There seems to be this idea that (straight) men would have sex with every attractive woman they come in contact with if they only had the chance.<\/p>\n
Conservatives then apply this to gay and lesbian individuals. Because men are seen as interested in sex with everything that moves, gay men are seen as especially promiscuous, because men want sex constantly and it is women who are ordinarily the limiting factor (again, in\u00a0this conception). Because women initiating\u00a0sex with women is seen as turning everything about sex and gender on its head, lesbian women are also seen as especially (and disorderly) promiscuous.<\/p>\n
So when conservatives like Andr\u00e9e\u00a0look at bisexual individuals, I suspect that this equation of the L and the G with sex sex SEX gets multiplied and thus amplified. In other words, in this conception a bisexual man is obsessed with having sex with every woman out there, and also interested in having sex with men, which multiplies the chance of sex happening by a lot (again, in this conception). A bisexual woman is seen as available both to heterosexual men (who are naturally highly sexual) and lesbian women (who are also seen as highly sexual). This, I suspect, may play a role in Andr\u00e9e\u2019s claim that being bisexual is simply about\u00a0being promiscuous.<\/p>\n
Of course the problem with this is that the rest of the world is not nearly as sex-obsessed as conservatives are. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals\u2019 lives do not typically revolve around sex. Being gay, lesbian, or bisexual is about who one is sexually attracted to<\/em>, not about how frequently or with how many people someone has sex. And in the real world, we\u2019re constantly around people we find sexually attractive but make no plans to have sex with. That\u2019s simply how it works.<\/p>\nOne last note. Notice that Andr\u00e9e\u00a0does not appear to actually know any bisexual individuals. Instead, she mentions something a friend of hers told her about a friend of his\u2014this appears to be the closest she is to a bisexual person. Well you know what? I have bisexual friends, and I am somewhere on the spectrum myself.\u00a0I\u2019m kind of appalled that Andr\u00e9e\u00a0felt some abstract thinking on her part combined with a second-hand account through a likely\u00a0unreliable narrator was enough of a basis for a piece voicing\u00a0such strong opinions.<\/p>\n
Actually, you know why I\u2019m appalled? Andr\u00e9e\u00a0sounds like Matt Walsh here, and while I get that both Matt Walsh and World Magazine are conservative, I\u2019d thought better of World than this. And yet here they are, sinking so low that what they print is practically\u00a0indistinguishable from the tripe that is a Matt Walsh rage piece. I didn\u2019t think my opinion of World Magazine could sink lower, but apparently it can.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One last note. Notice that Andree does not appear to actually know any bisexual individuals. Instead, she mentions something a friend of hers told her about a friend of his—this appears to be the closest she is to a bisexual person. Well you know what? I have bisexual friends, and I am somewhere on the spectrum myself. I’m kind of appalled that Andree felt some abstract thinking on her part combined with a second-hand account through a likely unreliable narrator was enough of a basis for a piece voicing such strong opinions. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[110],"class_list":["post-25458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evangelicalism-fundamentalism","tag-lgbtq"],"yoast_head":"\n
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