The Galloping Beaver
This is why feminism is humanism. Men need to be saved from life destroying indoctrination as much as women do.
It can't be a very happy home if she's going on at the husband about this. Nevermind what the son must be picking up in signals from his mother.
Knowing many homosexual men attempt a heterosexual life before, if ever, coming out honestly with their preferences, it can't be discounted the husband /might/ be gay, or at least bi, but to use his love of food and cleanliness as signs is repulsive.
As repulsive as school bullying where even if the targeted boy is hetero, it's incidental to labeling his behaviours as worthy of violence and repression. The object lesson is more telling to the children around them. Mom's castigating of Dad must be very telling to Son.
We'll never know how Dad has reacted to Mom's insinuations/accusations. I vote, whatever his sexuality, he either get his wife to deprogrammers, or find a mate less basely critical of how he is.
I'd use that letter to sue for full custody of the kid too. Leaving the son with a mother who would stuff him full of the crap Dobson and his ilk spew...nothing good can come of this.
One wonders whether she's following all of Dobson's dictates in raising her son - especially the ones pertaining to physical discipline. Is so, she's an abuser. That aside, I wonder if she's aware that men comprise the largest percentage of Master Chefs in the world, and those guys are totalitarian dictators when it comes to cleanliness and food. They are almost all heteros, and they make mega bucks.
Sigh, we really are going back to the 13th century aren't we.
I simply can't wrap my brain around this crap. My husband cooks, grocery shops, vaccuums, etc., not only as his part in taking care of the house, but especially when I'm super busy in my job. And there is absolutely no way you can claim that he is not heterosexual. I'm horrified that homophobia is attached to something as simple as routine household chores.
What I do wonder about is; why was this woman seeking out a second opinion? (clearly she wasn't all that thrilled with Dobson's opinion). I suspect that realized what a great deal she had, and was very unwilling to give up a great cook/co-operative house cleaner/husband. And so she should!!!!
As the lucky recipient of an equally great husband, I wouldn't give it up for anything in the world! Damn Dobson and his ilk!!!!
Earlier this late afternoon/early evening I read this post but I didn't have time to respond. I was busy making dinner for 4 - red snapper Vera Cruz, toasted brown rice mushroom pilaf cooked in chicken stock, blanched asparagus and green salad if you're curious. Plus I had to tidy up the house a bit before the company arrived.
A man's work is never done.
I find this funny. I come from a conservative Christian family. My parents have read Dobson's books. My parents are not keen on "the gays."
But my mom had us doing dishes, doing the housework and taught us to bake, do laundry, iron clothes and so on. We did domestic chores for as long as i can remember.
This is not a universal thing. But it does exist. And is disgusting.
What is most disgusting is that people let others do the "thinking" for them. Either Dobson or Dear Abby. Either way, it is a bunch of canned answers. Advice is cheap and you get what you pay for.
Surely the crux of the issue here isn't so much that WMIF, following Dobson, thinks that cooking and cleaning are somehow unmasculine, but rather the implication that sexual orientation is somehow a learned rather than innate behavior. This is actually a slight advance in sophistication in the Christian fundementalist position, which has long held that homosexuals somehow "choose" to be gay. By blaming environmental factors they actually come a small part of the way to conceding what gay people themselves have long held, that sexual orientation is in fact innate and not the product of conscious choice. The beauty of this position is that it allows fundementalists to simultaneously accept that homosexuals don't consciously choose to be gay, while at the same time defending the crux of their position, which is that sexual orientation is ultimately still determinable by factors within our conscious control.
The alternative -that some people are actually born with an attraction to members of the same sex- is obviously inherently unacceptable to fundementalists because it is almost impossible to concede that point without simultaneously conceding that homosexuality is somehow part of the natural order and therefore of God's grand and ultimately inscrutable plan.
And that way, as we all know, lies anarchy.
You will notice btw that Abby very deliberately avoids challenging WMIF's belief that sexual orientation is learned and also implicitly abnormal and undesireable. Doing so would be controvertial, and nothing is more poisonous to a lucrative career dissemenating bland pap to the credulous masses than anything carrying even a feint whiff of controversy.
Lexington, an excellent synopsis of environment versus inherent. I've loved a number of folks who are gay for a long time. I never considered them as anything other than wonderful, caring, giving people who have contributed to this life far more than I. I find it really offensive that Dobson and his ilk are trying, with some success, to make my friends' lives count for less. And I find it more offensive that people like WMIF doesn't bother to educate herself before she relies on Dobson to tell her how to raise her child, then when she has doubts about a man I wish I had met, a agony aunt to tell her how to live her life. Wonder whether she was home schooled?
It makes me wonder what she'd be fretting about if there wasn't the modern buzz-word "problem" of being gay.
Is the fundie preacher also whisper hints about people in the immediate vicinity who might indeed qualify as real men, or was that implicit and went right over my head?
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