THE PSYCHOLOGIST : The rise of anti-LGBTQ extremism in America

The rise of anti-LGBTQ extremism in America

It's true in physics that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It's largely true in psychology and sociology too. As someone trained in psychology who taught sociology for a number of years, I am well aware of that. And what we read below is an example of it.

The excessive valorization of homosexuality by the Left is only too evident. You can even lose your job by saying skeptical things about homoxsexuals. It has forced even some of the more more fundamentist religions -- such as the Salvation Army -- to abandon loyalty to the Bible -- which calls homoxsexuality "an abomination unto the Lord"

And that runs against justice for a start. Where is the equality or "equity" that Leftists are always preaching? Why must homosexuals get privileged treatment? Additionally, it runs against the instinctive distaste that many men have for the very idea of homosexuality.

And so we should not be surprised that Leftist extremism and imbalance sometimes produces an "equal and opposite reaction". There are of course reasons for unequal treatment of homosexuality but we must expect that to come at a price

First came the carnage, then came the vitriol. As a shattered community in Colorado Springs grieved the victims of last month’s mass shooting at gay hotspot Club Q, it didn’t take long for the condolences to be offset by hundreds of hateful, homophobic messages.

“The shooter was doing God’s work: five less faggots,” said one.

“I hope more shootings happen. Have a blessed day!” said another.

Club Q founder Matthew Haynes was saddened but hardly surprised as he saw the comments flash up on his screen. After all, LGBTQ people represent about 7 per cent of the US population, but make up 20 per cent of the nation’s hate crimes, according to the latest FBI data.

As a congressional hearing in Washington was told this month, the horrific attack that killed five people in Colorado Springs was merely emblematic of a growing trend of anti-LGBTQ extremism, fuelled in part by a rise in hostile public rhetoric - on social media, among some right-wing commentators or by politicians attempting to rile up their base.

Coupled with access to military-style assault weapons, Haynes said, “we were lucky that night that the casualties were not much higher.”

Demonstrators gather on the step of the Montana State Capitol in 2021 after the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance two bills targeting transgender youth despite overwhelming testimony opposing the measures.

According to tracking data by LGBTQ lobby group GLAAD, more than 300 anti-LGBTQ bills have been considered by state legislatures this year - from blocking trans participation in sports, to barring access to gender-affirming care, to removing books about sexual orientation and gender identity.

Among the most high profile has been Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws, enshrined by Donald Trump’s Republican rival Ron Desantis, which bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through to the third grade.

Twenty children’s hospitals that provide trans medical care to minors have also received bomb threats - prompting calls by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association for the Justice Department to intervene – and nearly 150 attacks on LGBTQ events have been reported publicly.

In Oklahoma last month, for instance, a doughnut shop was firebombed with a Molotov cocktail after hosting a drag event - its second attack in less than two months.

In Texas, an inclusive church’s drag bingo night was mobbed by hundreds of far-right extremists in September after Trump ally Steve Bannon amplified a call for the event to be protested.

And in Massachusetts, a man was charged two weeks ago for making a death threat against a physician who cares for gender-nonconforming children.

Both sides of politics accept that violence is a growing concern. About 7300 hate crimes were reported to the FBI in 2021, including nearly 1400 offences targeting LGBTQ people. However, due to under-reporting, varying definitions of hate crimes in different states and the patchy nature of the FBI’s hate crime data in general, these figures are widely accepted to be far worse.

But what both sides can’t agree on is what should be done about it. Republicans blame Democrats for “soft on crime” policies, particularly the push by some progressives to “defund the police” - a contentious slogan used to describe reallocating funds from police departments for other forms of public safety and community support, such as mental health services, youth services, housing and education.

They have also highlighted violent attacks by the left: such as the Bernie Sanders supporter who shot Republican whip Steve Scalise in 2017, or the dozens of church organisations attacked after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn federal abortion rights in June.

“It’s easier to blame Republicans than have a serious discussion about the rise of violent crimes across the nation,” says deputy chair James Comer.

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

The rise of anti-LGBTQ extremism in America

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