Audio only:
In this episode, Trent explores the deeper philosophical reason many people are repulsed by the Viking’s male cheerleaders.
God and the Gay Christian: A Critical Review
Transcription:
Trent:
The Minnesota Vikings made headlines recently when they debuted their first male cheerleaders, which led many conservative commenters to ask what happened to professional football. Now, we could do a long video just on the topic of bad ideas from the NFL in recent years and why maybe we were foolish to give up on the XFL in 2001 just because they didn’t actually have football players go up against tanks and semi-truck. But instead, I want to focus today’s episode on the deeper philosophical reason so many people are frankly repulsed by these particular male cheerleaders and how this instinct should guide our moral reasoning. I also want to remind you that the instinct to like this episode and subscribe to this channel is a completely natural one and I encourage you to follow it, and if you really want to support us, please visit our premium community trenthornpodcast.com. Now, a lot of people will say, I’m overcomplicating this. If I asked a random guy on the street why he doesn’t like these particular male cheerleaders on the field, you’d probably say something like this gay. Well, it’s a start, but let’s put on our philosophy hats and ask a deeper question. Why do many people think that in this case it isn’t? Just because cheerleading is a predominantly female activity. Men on competitive cheerleading teams whose job is to lift their female teammates into the air don’t elicit this kind of response, which is why will Cain on Fox News makes this point.
CLIP:
There have been male cheerleaders around for a long time. There is something different with what is going on in the NFL. Yeah, and if we’re really being honest, we’re talking about male cheerleaders being female.
That’s what’s happening with these men who are cheering on the Minnesota Vikings or the Philadelphia Eagles or these other franchises. They’re not out there dressed like the Texas a and m fight. Aggies and their painter suits white from neck to ankle. These are men dressed virtually as women acting as women.
Trent:
One critic of Keynes wrote this in an article, the Vikings cheerleaders crime existing while presumably queer in public dancing at a football game, having the audacity to do the same job as their female colleagues without performing the kind of aggressive masculinity that would make guys like Cain comfortable. Except what this critic calls aggressive masculinity is just masculinity. The problem is that our modern culture believes that to consider men and women equals we also have to consider men and women interchangeable. When this is coupled with LGBT ideology, you get sexual anarchy where the only rule is that you can’t judge behaviors merely because of the sexes involved in those relationships. What’s ironic is that many gay and lesbian activists are now being condemned by this very standard. That’s because they reject the idea that lesbians are transphobic if they don’t date transgender women because as lesbians, they aren’t fans of the male genitalia.
These self-professed women tend to possess and this kind of sexual anarchy, it’s nothing new. In Romans chapter one, St. Paul says that all people know the moral law and can respond to God in that way, including the Gentiles or non-Jews. They didn’t have the mosaic law of the Old Testament, but they did have the natural law through their consciences and they could know basic moral facts like the wrongness of idolatry or homosexual conduct. However, most of them didn’t. So according to Paul, they did the following. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and serve the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever. For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another. Men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.
In one Corinthians six, nine St. Paul says, those who engage in man betting will not inherit the kingdom of God. And the Greek word that he coined are kote. That literally means man betting matches the Greek translation of Leviticus 1822. You shall not lie with a male as with a woman, it is an abomination. In other words, men were biologically designed to be the sexual penetrators and women were designed to receive sexual penetration. Obviously the marital act is about much more than organ insertion, but this is still a fundamental part of our identities as men and women. So when men engage in behavior ordered towards arousing the male desire to engage in sexual penetration, this is disordered. And even if you can’t fully catalog it, we know there are certain ways of hip thrusting and posterior shaking that are used by women for that purpose.
Now, I’m not saying sideline cheerleaders and professional sports leagues are basically strippers on AstroTurf, but there’s no denying that sex appeal is a part of the reason they are used as entertainment for a primarily male audience and for women who don’t think this is a big deal, think about how you feel when you see women contradict their femininity by acting like sexually aggressive men, and you’ll understand a little bit about how men feel when they see other men act like sexually aggressive women and contradict their masculinity. While it isn’t an exact parallel, women feel a distaste towards other women who exhibit dominant aggressive characteristics and physiques that would be attractive to women, not men. So when it comes to sexually disordered behavior, we often have a gut feeling that tells us the behavior is wrong, even if we can’t fully give a reason to explain why it’s wrong.
And one prominent bioethicist has argued that we should give this instinct more credit, especially when modern people are often told to ignore it. In 1997, bioethicist Leon Cas wrote an article called The Wisdom of Repugnant as part of an argument against human cloning, which was a big topic of discussion due to the cloning of the first mammal dolly, the sheep that occurred a year earlier. Cass writes, offensive, grotesque, revolting, repugnant, repulsive. These are the words most commonly heard regarding the prospect of human cloning. Such reactions come both from the man or woman in the street and from the intellectuals, from believers and atheists, from humanists and scientists. Even Dolly’s creator has said he would find it offensive to clone a human being. Cas goes on to say the following about the role of repugnant and disgust and how it should play in our moral reasoning.
Revulsion is not an argument and some of yesterday’s nancie are today calmly accepted. Though one must add, not always for the better. In crucial cases, however, repugnant is the emotional expression of deep wisdom beyond reasons power fully to articulate it. Can anyone really give an argument fully adequate to the horror, which is father daughter incest even with consent or having sex with animals or mutilating a corpse or eating human flesh or even just raping or murdering another human being? Would anybody’s failure to give full rational justification for his or her revulsion at these practices make that revulsion ethically suspect? Not at all. On the contrary, we are suspicious of those who think that they can rationalize away our horror say by trying to explain the enormity of incest with arguments only about the genetic risks of inbreeding. The repugnant at human cloning belongs in this category.
So while many people think that right and wrong only deals with violating the consensual rights of other people, ca shows that there are many behaviors that are evil that don’t violate other people’s consent or rights, and yet we know they’re evil through the revolting response that we have at observing or talking about these behaviors. Now, a lot of people dismiss Cass’s argument as committing the fallacy of emotional appeal. X is bad because it makes me feel bad, but this is an informal fallacy that depends on context and language. I agree with Cass that repugnant isn’t a complete argument, but it is a helpful alarm that should wake us up to evils that we ignore at our own peril. Although some critics who always cry emotional appeal border on psychopathy, it’s impossible to engage in moral philosophy without some foundational moral intuitions to guide us that themselves don’t rely on other premises.
The atheistic philosopher Walters sin at Armstrong put it this way, we could never get started on everyday moral reasoning about any moral problem without relying on moral intuitions. Even philosophers and others who officially disdain moral intuitions often appeal to moral intuitions when refuting opponents or supporting their own views. The most sophisticated and complex arguments regularly come down to, but surely that is a moral. Hence, without some move like this, there would be no way to construct and justify any substantive moral theory. Another objection is that repugnant is unreliable because it was used in the past to condemn behaviors we now see as morally unproblematic. And I agree this is why repugnant is not an infallible criterion, but more of a helpful alarm. Lots of tools we use to warn us about danger from smoke detectors to antivirus filters produce false positives, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t generally useful.
It’s true repugnant intuitions have been wrong in the past like moral opposition to interracial marriage, but in the majority of other cases, the intuitions were correct. In fact, many of the counter examples critics use against the wisdom of repugnant are themselves controversial. Martha Nesbaum is a philosopher who is extensively criticized Cass’s ideas and she uses sodomy as such. A counter example in her 2010 book From Disgust to Humanity, she describes male disgust towards men who have sexual relations with men in this way. Thus disgust is ultimately discussed at one’s own imagined penetrability and ooziness, and this is why the male homosexual is both regarded with disgust and viewed with fear as a predator who might make everyone else disgusting. The very look of such a male is itself contaminating as we see in the extraordinary debates about showers in the military. Well, is it too much to ask that a person be able to shower without the unnerving feeling someone else is looking at him with thoughts of penetration in his mind?
After all, most women would be disgusted at the thought of having to shower with men for precisely that reason. And so public facilities use segregated locker rooms. Would nesbaum take a similar dismissive tone to these women’s concerns? She continues in heterosexual sex. The male imagines that not he but a lesser being, the woman seen as animal receives the pollution of bodily fluids. In imagining homosexual sex, he is forced to imagine that he himself might be so polluted. This inspired a stronger need for boundary drawing or and hear me out on this one. Maybe the deep human revulsion to bestiality necrophilia sexual attraction to inanimate objects and other kinds of fetishes is rooted in the basic human idea. That’s not what the sexual act is for. That’s not what these sexual organs are for, which would also apply to things like sodomy. Maybe men just naturally know that their seed is a life promoting gift designed explicitly and only for the unique life sustaining properties of a woman’s womb.
This explains why many women are disgusted by anal penetration, be it with men or women, but not other forms of what Nusbaum calls bodily pollution like the marital act itself. When you divorce sex from proper Christian anthropology, you get one of two things. The first is a weird puritanism where radical feminists say that which is good is actually evil. This can be seen in the idea that power imbalances between men and women mean that all sex is rape. An idea associated with a radical feminist Andrea din. The second is a gross hedonism that is incapable of condemning any consensual act. I wonder how nesbaum, for example, would condemn bestiality without relying on appeals to disgust that she says are invalid. For more on that subject and why modern arguments rooted in the sexual revolution don’t work against it. See my episode link below. This also reminds me of Isaiah five 20 where the prophet says, woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.
Nesbaum is correct. That disgust has been used to motivate irrational evils against groups of people such as antisemitism or things like the Hindu caste system. She then tries to say disgusted at homosexual people. The term she uses should be considered just as illegitimate, but it is not discussed at people or things that is helpful for our moral analysis, but discussed at particular actions showing that something is being used improperly or not the way it’s supposed to be used or done. All people, regardless of their sexual orientation are made in the image and likeness of God, and so no human being is disgusting. However, human acts can be disgusting if they contradict our human nature including the act of sodomy. And to be fair, this act is disgusting whether people of the same sex commit it or what happens far more often in the general population when people of the opposite sex commit it for various reasons that I’d rather not get into because it would be repugnant indeed when you start talking about the physical act itself and its unfortunate side effects as I did on Monday’s show when I showed the clip of Sarah stock replying about sodomy on Jubilee, the repugnant becomes overwhelming and hard to defend even LGBT advocates admit this.
In 1999, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madson published a book called After the Ball, how America will Conquer its Fear and Hatred of Gaze. In the nineties, it was a propaganda manual to change public opinion on sexual morality and many of its techniques were used with great success. In many parts of the book, the authors criticized members of their own community who engaged in shocking and perverted public displays of fetishized sexuality. They argued for a gradual approach that used normalcy to pave the way for deviancy. They write the following. If gays present themselves or allow themselves to be presented as overwhelmingly different and threatening, they will put straits on a triple red alert driving them to overt acts of political oppression or physical violence. If however, gays can live alongside straits visibly, but as in offensively as possible, they will arouse a low grade alert only, which though annoying to straits will eventually diminish.
For purely psychological reason, straits will be desensitized. Put more simply. If you go out of your way to be unendurable, people will try to destroy you. Otherwise they might eventually get used to you. This common sense axiom should make it clear that living down to the stereotype Allah, gender bending is a very bad idea. And now 35 years later, this advice is back in vogue as some LGBT advocates want to drop the T or transgender identity Allah gender bending from their movement. You can also see it in how LGBT propaganda succeeds when it only focuses on inoffensive similarities like humorous, flamboyant behavior, but fails when it focuses on the graphic differences between people who are attracted to the opposite sex or the same sex and in particular people who prefer to engage in the marital act and those who prefer to engage in sodomy. As depicted in the 2022 Film Bros, which tried to be a mainstream romantic comedy featuring two men, but whose graphic orgy scenes prove too much even for many so-called progressives.
For more on that controversy, see my episode in the link below. Finally, some critics claim that our feelings about homosexual conduct or the Bible and that church’s teachings on the matter are not rooted in God’s design but merely in prejudice. Specifically that opposition to homosexual conduct is rooted in misogyny or hatred of women. I’ll walk you through it. Matthew Vines is a self-identified gay man who got a lot of press a few years ago for his viral video attempting to show the Bible does not condemn modern same-sex sexual relationships, something he also followed up with in his book God and the Gay Christian. You can read my full review of that book at the link below, but I’ll just address Vines argument that the Bible and the church only condemned homosexual conduct because they hated women and so they hated when men acted like ontologically inferior women.
For example, when Leviticus says, do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman, vines would say the wrongness here involves the act of being like a woman, not the sexual act itself between the two men. Vines writes the following, Clement of Alexandria, a second century Christian writer said, passive men suffer the things of women. He warned against removing body hair, writing that a man’s willingness to engage in a feminine activity meant he would take the woman’s role in sex. He who in the light of day denies his manhood will prove himself manifestly a woman by night vines and summarizes this view saying that because women are inferior to men, it is degrading for a man to be treated like a woman. The problem with Vines objection is that he’s half right. It is degrading for a man to be treated like a woman, but that doesn’t mean women are inferior to men or that social hierarchies are the only justification for the marital act.
It just means men should act like men and women should act like women. As Robert Gagnan notes in his book The Bible and Homosexual Practice, other cultures in Old Testament times were misogynistic, but they allowed high status men to use low status men as concubines. In these cultures, women were inferior to men, but many men were inferior to other men and could lawfully be part of homosexual conduct and relationships where they played the inferior passive role. However, Israel was unique among these ancient cultures in its universal opposition to homosexual conduct. Gagnan writes the following, if maintaining proper hierarchical roles had been the main concern of ancient Israelites society in prescribing male homosexual behavior, then one has to ask why Israelite society was more unequivocally opposed to male homosexual practice than other ancient near Eastern cultures. Should we conclude that ancient Israelite society was the most misogynistic culture in the ancient near East?
Not likely that women were treated better in Israel than in other cultures can be seen in the fact that you have prominent roles for women in Israelite society, such as the Judge Deborah or the Queen Mother Bathsheba. What was more important to Israel was being faithful to God’s design for sexual union, which was established in the first two chapters of the TaNaK or the Hebrew Bible. When it comes to the time of the new covenant, Clement of Alexandria isn’t only concerned about male degradation. He also condemns lesbian relationships and says the following luxury has deranged all things. It is disgraced man, a luxurious niceness seeks everything, attempts, everything, forces everything. Coerces nature. Men play the part of women and women that of men. Contrary to nature, women are at once. Wives and husbands, no passages closed against libi and their promiscuous lecturey is a public institution.
Notice Clements appeals to nature since he like the rest of the early church grounded sexuality in God’s created order. The problem is that vines has missed this point due to a modern sense of political correctness. For example, saying an adult is being childish does not mean children are bad subhuman or detestable. It doesn’t even mean children have less worth than adults. It just means adults are not children and so they shouldn’t act like children. Likewise, ancient writers calling men in the passive role of anal intercourse, effeminate or man women does not mean women are bad and therefore men shouldn’t be brought down to their level. It just means men are not women and so they should not be treated like women by being sexually penetrated. The patriarchy argument also returns in vines as treatment of Romans 1 26 through 27. A passage I referenced earlier, vines claims that the unnatural intercourse in this passage involved men taking the woman’s passive role in sex and women taking the man’s active role.
It had everything to do with ancient patriarchy and nothing to do with either the anatomy of men and women or the body’s natural purpose, but vines exegesis misses the point of the exchange repetition. In Romans chapter one, prior to Romans 1 26, St. Paul says that creation shows there’s one true God and the idolaters have no excuse not to worship him, but their minds were darkened and they exchange the proper end of their worship God for an improper end idols. Next, their bodies were defiled and they exchanged the proper object of their belief, the truth about God. For a lie, this could only happen because they suppress knowledge of God. That becomes obvious when we think about creation. Finally, their passions were degraded and women exchanged the natural object of their sexual desires. Men for women and men did Likewise, what all of these exchanges have in common is not failing to adhere to society’s moral norms.
It’s a failure to adhere to the natural order seen in creation itself, whether it’s the natural duty to worship the creator rather than an idol or the natural duty to engage in sexual relations with the natural partner. Paul even uses the Greek words, male and female in this passage instead of the Greek words for man and woman. No doubt. To harken back to the creation account in Genesis one, which describes how God made human beings male and female. Now to be fair, some people view male and female roles in society too rigidly. You don’t have to agree with Clements claim that men must have beards to be manly and you don’t have to agree with some modern believers who think that certain occupations like being a doctor for example, is only appropriate for men. In fact, I wonder about Catholics who say mothers should not work outside the home and what they think about who should be in OB, GYNA doctor who specializes in treating pregnant women and helping them to give birth.
I doubt these men would want their wives seeing a male gynecologist, but they also don’t want to support a married female physician who knows what it’s like to give birth. Someone like St. Gianna Moola who the Vatican said harmonize the demands of mother, wife, doctor and her passion for life, but just because some people have two rigid rules about male and female behavior, that doesn’t mean there should not be any rules at all to keep our sexuality well ordered, and one of those rules should be not having men engage in behavior meant to arouse the idea of sexual penetration while people are trying to watch a football game. And honestly, maybe women shouldn’t do that either at football games. Maybe cheerleaders could just encourage people to cheer loudly for the home team and we can reserve behavior designed to arouse people to engage in the marital act to the confines of the marital bedroom. Would that be too much to ask for? Thank you all so much for watching, and if you’d like to learn more about these topics, check out the links in the description below, and of course, I hope you have a very blessed day.