Liberal Cohen Critics’ Disdain Misdirected

It seems that liberals have finally had their fill of Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. As fun as it might be to watch the left cannibalize one of their own, they’re doing it for all the wrong reasons.

Writing about Chris Christie’s TEA Party problem, Cohen followed much of the liberal playbook. Heck, along with attacking the TEA Party (Cohen admitted, “Why can’t intelligent liberals see I’m only mirroring their loathing of the Tea Party?”), he even insulted Sarah Palin. What got him in trouble with his pals is the last sentence of this paragraph:

“Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children.”

Cohen was summarily deemed a racist across the spectrum of the liberal media. Many calls for his firing ensued. The Huffington Post pleaded “Dear Washington Post: Please Fire This Man.” Salon.com tweeted, “His horrifying new column reminds us why old racists like Richard Cohen need to be fired.” ThinkProgress declared, “Even if Richard Cohen Isn’t Racist, He’s Incompetent.”

Following the outrage, Cohen insisted (as his quote above indicates) that he is a good liberal and that he has been grossly misinterpreted. That is probably the case. However, in all of their caterwauling over Cohen’s supposed racist comment, liberals have missed a more blatant, albeit subtle, betrayal of left-wing doctrine.

Immediately following the sentence that got him in so much trouble, Cohen asked “Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?”

“Used to be a lesbian?” Given the worldview of modern liberalism, how is that possible? Isn’t homosexuality supposedly innate (genetic) and unchangeable? And if it is possible to turn from homosexuality (which it is), why would today’s liberals want such as that bandied about in the pages of the Washington Post?

In fact, even Chris Christie himself, the focus of Cohen’s column, in August of this year signed a bill into law that banned licensed therapists from performing homosexual conversion therapy. New Jersey became the second state (after California) to ban this practice.

After signing the law, Christie parroted typical liberal speak (joining such esteemed company as Lady Gaga), saying that he believed that people are born gay and that homosexuality is not a sin. I wonder if Ms. McCray’s conversion was as a result of therapy.

McCray has addressed this issue and said that she once “identified” as a lesbian, but, according to Out.com, “renounced her lesbian lifestyle after meeting her husband.” So, after meeting Mr. Right (or course, given de Blasio’s politics, “Mr. Left” is more appropriate) Ms. Mcray decides that she’s no longer a lesbian.

There is nothing at all surprising about this. As renowned psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Jeffrey Satinover noted over a decade ago, the idea of “sexual orientation” is pure fiction. He refers to a 1994 University of Chicago study which states, “…it is patently false that homosexuality is a uniform attribute across individuals, that it is stable over time, and that it can be easily measured.”

Dr. Satinover adds that, “Studies across the globe that have now sampled over 100,000 individuals have found the same. We now know that in the majority of both men and women, ‘homosexuality,’ as defined by any scientifically rigorous criteria, spontaneously tends to ‘mutate’ into heterosexuality over the course of a lifetime.”

In 2003, testifying before the Massachusetts Senate Judicial Committee, as they were considering the legalization of gay marriage, Dr. Satinover stated that the belief that homosexuality is a genetic and unchangeable condition is not “even remotely true.”  He continued, “however widely believed (these claims) may have become; the evidence of the kind that ‘everyone knows’ simply does not exist; even a cursory examination of the actual sources behind these claims will reveal a very strong preponderance of evidence to precisely the contrary; the claims are simply fiction.”

C.S. Lewis wrote in the mid 1940s that “…you and I, for the last twenty years, have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex. We have been told, till one is sick of hearing it, that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other natural desires…Our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so ‘natural,’ so ‘healthy,’ and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them.”

Seven decades later, the lies persist. So much so that pornography, prostitution, same-sex marriage, “transgenderism,” and the like enjoy not only widespread support among the populace, but also legal protection. Laws banning such behavior have been virtually wiped from our legal system. As recently as the early 1960s, every state in the U.S. had laws against homosexual behavior (sodomy). (Thomas Jefferson himself authored an anti-sodomy law for the state of Virginia.)

Also, as recently as 1986, upholding Georgia’s anti-sodomy law, the U.S. Supreme Court declared, “Proscriptions against [homosexual] conduct have ancient roots. Sodomy was a criminal offense at common law and was forbidden by the laws of the original 13 States when they ratified the Bill of Rights. . . . In fact, until 1961, all 50 States outlawed sodomy, and today, 24 States and the District of Columbia continue to provide criminal penalties for sodomy performed in private and between consenting adults. Against this background, to claim that a right to engage in such conduct is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition,’ or ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’ is, at best, facetious [silly].”

Of course, the Court reversed itself in Lawrence vs. Texas in 2003, which nicely coincides with when the first state in the U.S. (Massachusetts) legalized same-sex marriage. So in a matter of about four decades, the U.S. went from laws against homosexual behavior to laws encouraging it. With 15 states joining Massachusetts—Hawaii’s governor just signed a law legalizing same-sex marriage that takes effect December 2, and the governor of Illinois is poised to sign a similar law this week that will take effect in 2014—and in spite of any real science to support such a position, the idea that homosexual behavior is normal, innate, and unchangeable is pervasive.

What’s more, as noted above, such a position now also has legal protection in two states. Just as with pornography, same-sex marriage, and “transgenderism,” how long until other states follow? Never mind that there are countless individuals like Ms. McCray (thanks for the publicity Mr. Cohen!) who have left the homosexual/transgender lifestyle behind, and many others who wish to do so.

In mathematics and philosophy, Ms. McCray is what is called a “counterexample.” And to prove a conjecture (“homosexuality is genetic and unchangeable”) false, only a single counterexample is necessary. Again, thank you Mr. Cohen.

Copyright 2013, Trevor Grant Thomas

At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason

Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World

tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com