Your experience with Cheyanne Mountain Charter Academy is very similar to mine at Clark County Christian School, except you got out after one year and I went there K-6. Also, I got paddled A LOT for things like bringing in a book on dinosaurs for Show & Tell and telling the class about Charles Darwin and Evolution. Thank you so much for putting words to experience.
The evangelical terror of a child talking about evolution is something we don't talk about enough, I remember very clearly a classmate yelling that they watched their baby brother being born and he didn't turn from a monkey into a child and then punching me
The thing I keep coming back to is that any grooming that is happening kerps turning out to be the right. People that agree with Walsh and Pool et al are caught out time and again as pedophiles. Same with voter fraud and many otger issues. Projection. Interesting that Walsh describes the left in the same exact terms as the left describes the right. Horrible awful irredeemable people who eitger have to get with HIS program or be subject to violence. They espouse the same use of violence against leftists that they claim leftist are engaging in, yet the reality I experience doesn't have leftists going to straight bars and shooting people. White Christian churches are not being attacked by gunman but synagogues and mosques ARE.
Absolutely. There's a whole article in here about how Walsh & co also view children as sexual commodities being stolen away by the queers
It's all very much like the Southern terror of slave revolts and mass rape in the antebellum south. The terror of someone treating you the way you treat them
At the risk of making yet another Infinite Jest reference, your Person In Pink reminded me of Poor Tony Krause. That character's suffering was terrible to behold. When a person is told they are monstrous, etc. - especially at a young age - it damages them permanently.
This statement, "I am cisgender. My relationship with that gender, however, is…tenuous." describes something I've been trying to put into words for a while. I've never questioned that I am a cis-het male, but in social settings, I would much rather listen to women talk about their kids than listen to men talk about college sports or their golf games. I'd much rather have a woman as a primary care physician. 4 of my last 5 have been women. This shouldn't be a big deal, but it seems like the guys who bullied me in school and the "mean girls" they married still have too much control over gender definitions in the national conversation.
If you end up agreeing with the old "we are what we repeatedly do", then I would say that you agree with Matt Walsh's characterization of the foundation of Queerness. It would be true to say that Walsh* doesn't legitimize that existence precedes essence, so he would not see queerness as an identity since it can only be fundamentally defined by the actions of a person.
So you might say that a sexual act does not encapsulate Queerness (i.e. Queer culture), but then, how DO you encapsulate queer culture?
Is the culture queer because it is essentially queer, without the necessity of Queer people to make it Queer? How can a culture exist independent of its members?
Or rather, is the culture Queer because the people who partake in it are Queer? In that case, there must be something other than their actions (In this case, the cultured acts they participate in) which makes individuals queer. Is there something other than sexuality (even in the case of asexuality) which could be the necessary thing to understand Queerness?
The alternative to this attempt at encapsulation is to say Queerness cannot be encapsulated (which many people agree with), which is anti-definitive (which many people think), such that Queerness is only what people say is Queer (which many people would say). It would be arbitrary and Queerness would have no definition at all, and a so-called "Queer identity" would be vapid and hollow. In which case, why consider it an identity at all?
*I think it's also worth saying that a person who does not legitimize that existence precedes essence is not essentially dehumanizing a trans person, since they could understand their humanity and person-hood to be grounded in their essence, as Walsh does (I assume).
I am sorry about your terrible experience at that school.
It seems to me that you clearly identified the view of queerness from many influences on the right. That is, "Queerness is a thing you do," as opposed to an identity. However, while you seem to try to make a claim that the identity of queerness (can be?) independent of (let's say) the ACT of queerness, I think confidence in that claim would have to stem from a coherent secular anthropology (the kind of which I've never heard of).
In a secular modern philosophical sense, Existentialism replaces the anthropology of western Christianity (rooted in Genesis 1:27).
"Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position."
and further...
"If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. "
- Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre
Therefore, the identity of a person IS what they do, as Sartre later claims:
"The doctrine I am presenting before you is precisely the opposite of this, since it declares that there is no reality except in action. It goes further, indeed, and adds, “Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.” - Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre
This understanding of personhood seems to be consistent with popular opinion, since it is almost always that case that if the "Queer" actions of a person are said to be wrong, then the queer person in question takes offense upon their very selves, as if their very being is being offended. By this view, it seems like Walsh and other making claims from the same framework are not misidentifying how it is that queer people identify themselves.
PERHAPS you could make the claim that queerness can exist independent of the body and of action, but then the question would come up of why queerness would need to be embodied at all? Then we would have people who may claim to be queer but are heteronormative in every way (and I suppose there are people like that today). In such a case, queer means nothing at all, but perhaps that is the intention. An alternative is the presentation of an anthropology of the queer human, of which I am genuinely curious to know if it exists.
This is a compelling argument for the old "we are what we repeatedly do" argument, which I would agree with
If we're going to get super technical I'd respond that queerness encompasses many things you do that aren't sex, in the same way heterosexuality encompasses many things that aren't sex. You could argue that the sexual attraction part is what differentiates the two, but that attraction manifests itself outside the bedroom in a variety of ways. Sex is an important part of romantic love for many people but not the only thing by a long stretch. Also, queer culture exists and that has nothing to do with the sex act at all
Put another way, we see queerness as overriding all other actions but not heterosexuality overriding all other actions. A man and a woman having romantic dinner is not interpreted as sexual in the way that two men having a romantic dinner often is. Or, you know, a trans person sitting at the bar just vibing
I'll just point out that "Queer" has been a catchall label. To quote:
""
queer (adj.)
c. 1500, "strange, peculiar, odd, eccentric," from Scottish, perhaps from Low German (Brunswick dialect) queer "oblique, off-center," which is related to German quer "oblique, perverse, odd," from Old High German twerh "oblique" (from PIE root *terkw- "to twist").
""
So "Queer" doesn't just cover GLBT folks, it covers asexual ones too. And that means that "Queer" is a noun, not a verb; an identity, not an action.
It seems like the source you cited considers Queer as an adjective, not a noun. Also, I’ve 100% heard queer used as a verb before, but maybe that’s beside the point.
Existentialist personhood defines identity by action, so this form of identity (the Queer identity) would be defined by the participation in queer (the adjective) acts.
Your experience with Cheyanne Mountain Charter Academy is very similar to mine at Clark County Christian School, except you got out after one year and I went there K-6. Also, I got paddled A LOT for things like bringing in a book on dinosaurs for Show & Tell and telling the class about Charles Darwin and Evolution. Thank you so much for putting words to experience.
Good god, that's so much worse. Fuck these people
The evangelical terror of a child talking about evolution is something we don't talk about enough, I remember very clearly a classmate yelling that they watched their baby brother being born and he didn't turn from a monkey into a child and then punching me
The thing I keep coming back to is that any grooming that is happening kerps turning out to be the right. People that agree with Walsh and Pool et al are caught out time and again as pedophiles. Same with voter fraud and many otger issues. Projection. Interesting that Walsh describes the left in the same exact terms as the left describes the right. Horrible awful irredeemable people who eitger have to get with HIS program or be subject to violence. They espouse the same use of violence against leftists that they claim leftist are engaging in, yet the reality I experience doesn't have leftists going to straight bars and shooting people. White Christian churches are not being attacked by gunman but synagogues and mosques ARE.
Absolutely. There's a whole article in here about how Walsh & co also view children as sexual commodities being stolen away by the queers
It's all very much like the Southern terror of slave revolts and mass rape in the antebellum south. The terror of someone treating you the way you treat them
That was so well expressed, Laura. You brought some tears to my eyes. We’re all lucky you never learned to shut up.
Happy to say I been a Laura Jedeed fan since before she became famous. Well done.
At the risk of making yet another Infinite Jest reference, your Person In Pink reminded me of Poor Tony Krause. That character's suffering was terrible to behold. When a person is told they are monstrous, etc. - especially at a young age - it damages them permanently.
Absolutely yes to all of that, best literary comparison I can think of
This statement, "I am cisgender. My relationship with that gender, however, is…tenuous." describes something I've been trying to put into words for a while. I've never questioned that I am a cis-het male, but in social settings, I would much rather listen to women talk about their kids than listen to men talk about college sports or their golf games. I'd much rather have a woman as a primary care physician. 4 of my last 5 have been women. This shouldn't be a big deal, but it seems like the guys who bullied me in school and the "mean girls" they married still have too much control over gender definitions in the national conversation.
If you end up agreeing with the old "we are what we repeatedly do", then I would say that you agree with Matt Walsh's characterization of the foundation of Queerness. It would be true to say that Walsh* doesn't legitimize that existence precedes essence, so he would not see queerness as an identity since it can only be fundamentally defined by the actions of a person.
So you might say that a sexual act does not encapsulate Queerness (i.e. Queer culture), but then, how DO you encapsulate queer culture?
Is the culture queer because it is essentially queer, without the necessity of Queer people to make it Queer? How can a culture exist independent of its members?
Or rather, is the culture Queer because the people who partake in it are Queer? In that case, there must be something other than their actions (In this case, the cultured acts they participate in) which makes individuals queer. Is there something other than sexuality (even in the case of asexuality) which could be the necessary thing to understand Queerness?
The alternative to this attempt at encapsulation is to say Queerness cannot be encapsulated (which many people agree with), which is anti-definitive (which many people think), such that Queerness is only what people say is Queer (which many people would say). It would be arbitrary and Queerness would have no definition at all, and a so-called "Queer identity" would be vapid and hollow. In which case, why consider it an identity at all?
*I think it's also worth saying that a person who does not legitimize that existence precedes essence is not essentially dehumanizing a trans person, since they could understand their humanity and person-hood to be grounded in their essence, as Walsh does (I assume).
I am sorry about your terrible experience at that school.
It seems to me that you clearly identified the view of queerness from many influences on the right. That is, "Queerness is a thing you do," as opposed to an identity. However, while you seem to try to make a claim that the identity of queerness (can be?) independent of (let's say) the ACT of queerness, I think confidence in that claim would have to stem from a coherent secular anthropology (the kind of which I've never heard of).
In a secular modern philosophical sense, Existentialism replaces the anthropology of western Christianity (rooted in Genesis 1:27).
"Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position."
and further...
"If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. "
- Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre
Therefore, the identity of a person IS what they do, as Sartre later claims:
"The doctrine I am presenting before you is precisely the opposite of this, since it declares that there is no reality except in action. It goes further, indeed, and adds, “Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.” - Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre
This understanding of personhood seems to be consistent with popular opinion, since it is almost always that case that if the "Queer" actions of a person are said to be wrong, then the queer person in question takes offense upon their very selves, as if their very being is being offended. By this view, it seems like Walsh and other making claims from the same framework are not misidentifying how it is that queer people identify themselves.
PERHAPS you could make the claim that queerness can exist independent of the body and of action, but then the question would come up of why queerness would need to be embodied at all? Then we would have people who may claim to be queer but are heteronormative in every way (and I suppose there are people like that today). In such a case, queer means nothing at all, but perhaps that is the intention. An alternative is the presentation of an anthropology of the queer human, of which I am genuinely curious to know if it exists.
This is a compelling argument for the old "we are what we repeatedly do" argument, which I would agree with
If we're going to get super technical I'd respond that queerness encompasses many things you do that aren't sex, in the same way heterosexuality encompasses many things that aren't sex. You could argue that the sexual attraction part is what differentiates the two, but that attraction manifests itself outside the bedroom in a variety of ways. Sex is an important part of romantic love for many people but not the only thing by a long stretch. Also, queer culture exists and that has nothing to do with the sex act at all
Put another way, we see queerness as overriding all other actions but not heterosexuality overriding all other actions. A man and a woman having romantic dinner is not interpreted as sexual in the way that two men having a romantic dinner often is. Or, you know, a trans person sitting at the bar just vibing
I'll just point out that "Queer" has been a catchall label. To quote:
""
queer (adj.)
c. 1500, "strange, peculiar, odd, eccentric," from Scottish, perhaps from Low German (Brunswick dialect) queer "oblique, off-center," which is related to German quer "oblique, perverse, odd," from Old High German twerh "oblique" (from PIE root *terkw- "to twist").
""
So "Queer" doesn't just cover GLBT folks, it covers asexual ones too. And that means that "Queer" is a noun, not a verb; an identity, not an action.
It seems like the source you cited considers Queer as an adjective, not a noun. Also, I’ve 100% heard queer used as a verb before, but maybe that’s beside the point.
Existentialist personhood defines identity by action, so this form of identity (the Queer identity) would be defined by the participation in queer (the adjective) acts.