Okay, you know what? I’m not finished. Anyone who’s grown up gay or bisexual in a small town knows how isolating and hellish an experience it is. And Dreher’s bitching because there’s some place in America where kids can grow up and NOT feel like freaks? And in Texas, no less?
Fuck you, Rod, and the sanctimonious hetero pony you rode in on.
As Roy Edroso has noted many times, Dreher’s wound so tight one day he’s going to snap and go Full Metal Mohammed.
9.
bootlegger
@Ricky Bobby: The "shock" is bisexuals in a small East Texas town, cuz, you know, they just don’t raise ’em that way down thar.
10.
El Cid
I think he’s just saying he expects grisly family murders in small East Texas town, but not anything which smacks of cultural modernity.
11.
Zifnab
Listen, kids flipping out and murdering family and friends in a blood-soaked orgy of violence happens often enough in the Lone Star State (on account a’ those family values). But the real news is Gay Texans.
This is just like Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Brokeback Mountain, expect completely different.
Some commenter just posted on an earlier thread here that he or she taught Dreher at LSU! Whoever you are, share the details! As you like, that is.
No. That would be unprofessional and total BS and I will delete any comment that goes into details like that. I have no problem with someone saying “I taught so and so,” but going into details beyond that would be a horrible breach of privacy.
Not to mention, go google FERPA.
14.
Shinobi
The point of my post was not that one thing is worse than the other, but that I personally found one thing more shocking than the other. Shocking, in the sense of being surprised by something. From my point of view, both are violations of the moral order. Murder is unspeakably worse, but I am not surprised to find that in small towns (alas). I would be, and was, surprised to find the claim that bisexuality was trendy in a tiny Texas town’s high school.
From the clarification on the original post.
I guess I’ll get back to violating the moral order now. (Bisexuality, y’know not murder… yet.)
15.
bootlegger
Apparently the Crunch Con is noticing that he is being noticed
Ah, so now I get where the unusual traffic has been coming from.
Andrew Sullivan linked to this post, calling my point of view "clinical." So it must be to someone with his values. I think I have said five times here that murder is incomparable to bisexuality in terms of moral meaning, but why let that clarification get in the way of a good snit? The point of my post was not that one thing is worse than the other, but that I personally found one thing more shocking than the other. Shocking, in the sense of being surprised by something.
From my point of view, both are violations of the moral order. Murder is unspeakably worse, but I am not surprised to find that in small towns (alas). I would be, and was, surprised to find the claim that bisexuality was trendy in a tiny Texas town’s high school. This post was entirely about how little I know about teenage culture today, and its sexual mores.
One thing I do know about is how Andrew writes about people who disagree with him on sexual matters. So I’m not surprised, but I am grateful for the extra traffic.
I would agree to the extent that the purported professor should not reveal grades or anything written in tests or papers meant only for the eyes of the professor. However, I think anything that may have been said in open discussion in class would not be off-limits.
Back to the post, however, most of the gays I knew in college were from small towns. They turned 18 and went to college in biggest city they could as far away from those small towns as they could. As my wife and I have discussed before, nothing like those small town values of intollerence, bigotry and repression.
18.
canuckistani
Speaking as the father of daughters, I would much rather they experiment with bisexuality than murder me.
19.
Leo
I love all of the updates where he’s like: "I’m not saying being bisexual is worse than murder, just that it’s more shocking than murder."
Thanks dude. That clears things up.
20.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
However, this sounds like one f**ked-up kid.
What’s Dreher totally missed was that it was the daughter’s thuggish *boyfriends* who did the horrific attack.
Despite pulling her out of school and homeschooling her ‘cos she was being hit on by girls at high school. Win for homeschooling, I guess.
Homeschooling probably was a bad idea and overly controlling for a wild child like this daughter, but it’s hard to know what to do with them. At least in high school there would might have been a child psychologist who could find an outlet for the daughter. That is, if child welfare services weren’t cut out of the budget by anti-tax GOP jihadis.
I had a relative who was driven nuts by a wild child: sent her to boarding school, which she ran away from. All ended up bad in the end, despite the best efforts of family and social workers. But that at least was mostly self-destructive, not like this.
I have a feeling this guy pens about 3-4 columns a week, and is used to getting about 3-4 comments per column, max. This response blew his mind, which is why he took the chickenshit way out and closed the comment section.
Typical rightie — when shown to be wrong/stupid, just shut off debate.
23.
feral1
What’s really striking about Dreher’s post is that he takes the extremely religous, conservative, home schooling father’s comments about a burgeoning bisexual community in a small east Texas town at face value. This reminds me of Tom Coburn ranting that lesbianism in Oklahoma schools was so out of control that they only let girls go to the bathroom one at a time.
24.
The Moar You Know
The killings aren’t what shocked me about this story.
Then, by his own admission, Rod Dreher is absolutely lacking any humanity.
This post was entirely about how little I know about teenage culture today, and its sexual mores.
Then what Rod Dreher doesn’t know would fill a set of encyclopedias. Doesn’t take a lot of effort – the man has an internet connection, does he not? – to find out that teens today are a bit more liberal sexually than their predecessors. Browse a few MySpace profiles, Rod. You’ll figure it out.
He sounds like one of those Mayberry worshippers who believes in small-town moral exceptionalism. I’ve known people from small towns; those places are the centers of the most fucked-up debauchery ever. Bisexuality is vanilla normal by comparison.
25.
bootlegger
@John PM: Off-limits to FERPA perhaps, but as a college prof I have to say that gossiping about students in a public forum seems unethical or at the very least sophomoric (pun intended).
26.
TheFountainHead
Can’t decide which is more flabbergasting, this type of crap or the type of crap they’re flinging at Chas Freeman. I guess I’ll just have to be pissed at both today.
I would agree to the extent that the purported professor should not reveal grades or anything written in tests or papers meant only for the eyes of the professor. However, I think anything that may have been said in open discussion in class would not be off-limits.
Agreed, and I do apologize to John for implying otherwise! Trust me, I work in libraries — privacy is v. important, to put it mildly.
28.
Tom65
One more "clarification" like that and I’m going to have to start drilling holes in my head.
Dreher is one of those useless people for whom history and human variation begins and ends in the subjects on the front page of a newspaper in Omaha in 1957. No matter how many time he’s exposed to evidence contravening that narrative he professes shock, and so never learns enough to discuss the world as it exists outside of his own mind. A fool, a simpleton, an intellectual charlatan, a bigot, a man of no account or honor. Contemptible. I’d be happy to mount a more sustained or specific attack on his thought on the subject if I could find a starting point, but "gee, I never thought Texans might be homosexual" isn’t a thought, it’s a prejudice.
Beliefnet is becoming FaithMouse, without the clever drawings or social relevance…
Someone enlighten me: What’s a "bisexual culture"? Do they have parades, fundraisers, and the like? Is it something I might find in some popular European brands of yogurt?
And how can it be "shocking" that ANY town in the US has one–are there parts of these here States that don’t get "Gossip Girl"?
But, yeah, to extrapolate from Rod’s hastily-scrawled-during-a-pre-church-on-Sunday-morning/post-first-cup-of-coffee-dump: mass murder in Texas, a God-fearing place that gets Rod’s thumbs-up: Not shocking. Teens experimenting with sex: Shocking.
This reminds me of Tom Coburn ranting that lesbianism in Oklahoma schools was so out of control that they only let girls go to the bathroom one at a time.
I think that was just a personal fantasy for him. He could imagine himself as the school janitor, there to set the girls Straight. Yesssss, I can see the opening line of the Forum Letter now, "It was a school rule that girls went alone to the bathroom and it was my job to straighten things out…"
@John PM: I disagree. Even if you look past the ethical and legal aspects, I will not divulge or allow anyone to divulge anything said in open discussion, particularly because of how people distort what people say. I took part in some pretty gruesome and macabre discussions in ethics and philosophy classes in which people argued positions they do not believe, and I know how people would distort those discussions.
Off limits. Verboten. Not going to happen. Any creepy attempts to link to people’s private, professional, or educational lives beyond what they themselves have divulged is off limits. And that goes for Sarah Palin and all the truthers with her baby, for the average Joe in the comments section, and for John Edwards. I have seen too many people trying to destroy people. Screw that nonsense. It is not happening here.
Besides- what could Dreher say privately that is more idiotic and more revealing than that post. “Hey- you know what really surprised me about the Tonton Macoute? Did you know some of them were vegetarians!” His statement is ample fertile ground in and of itself.
Remember, Rod moved *out* of Soddom and Gomorrah to a place he hates for fear of being exposed too often to the kinds of people who aren’t the kinds of people he wants to be exposed to. And he moved out of Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy because Catholicism was too loosy goosey and modern for him. So there’s always a place, just over the horizon, that he imagines has greener gods and less sexy teens. Today it happens to be called "Texas" but tomorrow he’ll believe its in Kansas.
aimai
37.
MikeJ
This was in Texas? Dreher must think they’ve got nothing but steers down there.
38.
YellowJournalism
Did I miss an epidemic of ‘this kind of thing’?
If the MSM reports on something more than once, it’s an epidemic of dire proportions. Don’t you know that school shootings happen at least twice a day in our nation’s public schools and that little white girls should never be left unattended on the playground?
Don’t you know that school shootings happen at least twice a day in our nation’s public schools and that little white girls should never be left unattended on the playground?
What, are you some kind of socialist?
41.
Anoniminous
Before getting all excited I would like to point-out:
1. this is a web site run by a Conservative, on beliefnet no less
2. thus one has to suspect only the part of the story that will throw Conservatives, Fundies, and wingnuts into a frothing rage has been related.
3. who knows what else is going on in that family
4. if they, as Texans, had concentrated on the old Texan practice of sheep fucking this tragedy could have been avoided.
The problem here is that Sully is the rational, reasonable, approachable one of the two, but he’s also by far the more invested in controlling the behavior of the population. He thinks that if people who are rich have guaranteed access to health care by virtue of their riches it has no impact on their character whatsoever, but if the non-rich have access to healthcare it sinks them in a morass of dependency that saps their spirit and removes an incentive to get rich. Because if you don’t put the fear of impending death into a population they’ll take life easy and spend more time with their families, and that’s bad. Or something.
Sully imagines a world where nobody cares who or how you fuck, but where you have virtually no choice in how you live. I can’t read a post like this one of his without wondering: if homosexuality interfered with a healthy profit margin, would he still be who he is today, or would he be a closeted self-loather who ranted about the way these gay economic parasites sapped the lifeblood of global capitalism?
43.
r€nato
Did I miss an epidemic of ‘this kind of thing’?
if you watch enough Fox News Channel – hell, if you watch enough TV news – it’s not much of a stretch to get the idea that this kind of violence is an everyday occurrence.
The media regularly exploits fear. FNC is just more overt and clumsy and in-your-face about it. Michael Moore makes this point quite well in some of his films, particularly Bowling For Columbine, less explicitly so in Fahrenheit 911.
But, you know, he’s fat so it’s OK to dismiss anything he has to say.
44.
r€nato
I’m thinking Dreher was not so much ‘scared’ by the daughter’s bisexuality, as much as he was ‘titillated’ by it.
In fact I am pretty certain of that. If it had been a bisexual son instead of a daughter, I’m sure he would have been holding up this instance as proof that homosexuality leads to all sorts of evil.
45.
Church Lady
Dreher is employed by The Dallas Morning News. I think he’s the editor of the Opinion Page.
46.
DougJ
It is my fervent hope, as a father and a bisexual, that every last one of Dreher’s kids turns out to be gay.
That’s quite kind of you, given the alternative that his post suggests.
if you watch enough Fox News Channel – hell, if you watch enough TV news
*shudders*
The one thing I did on 9/11 was to decide to stop watching TV news, something I’ve followed to this day. At that point in time I felt that there was enough out there in terms of alternate news sources via the net and otherwise for me to get both what I liked to call my ‘news junkie fast food’ fix and more in-depth approaches.
I tend to think of Sully these days as a man with very strong moral beliefs which run off at right angles to each other and are occasionally/frequently irreconcilable, so that his take on any given issue or subset of an issue depends on which of those beliefs it hits first as it falls through his consciousness. Thus you get weeks of him defending Obama from the sillier media attacks as he genuinely believes him to be a conservative and largely in the right on current issues, followed by his demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate and failing to see how these two impulses may be in opposition.
50.
The Moar You Know
@John Cole: Exactly. I don’t need to hear anything from Dreher’s teachers or fellow students about his beliefs or intellectual capacities, as it is already self-evident from what he writes that he is a complete idiot.
I see your point, and I forgot that you are a teacher and thus have more immediate experience with this sort of thing. And I understand that it is important to distinguish between someone arguing a position they do not believe as a theorethical exercise ("Look, in college when I debated that cannibalism could be a cure for overpopulation, I did not actually subscribe to that position…), as in law school we were often put into that position, and it is actually a great way to challenge peoples’ preconceived notions.
However, my thought was more along the types of comments that truly reveal a person’s intollerence; e.g.:
Q. What would Aristotle have to say about that?
A. Anything Aristotle would have to say is invalid because he liked to f-ck little Greek boys. The Bible says this is the answer, so your philosophy class is a waste of time.
BTW, I am curious about what you say to your students about classroom discussions. Do you have an actual written policy that anything said in class should not be divulged outside of class? Some of my best experiences in undergrad and in law school were when the discussion would continue after class in a different location and involve people who were not in the class. After all, shouldn’t the ultimate rule for class discussion (as for life in general) be to not say anything in class that you would not be willing to say in public?
52.
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
I dunno, this sounds to me just like the line you hear almost every day after some crime or another:
"I never thought that something like this could happen here."
Really? I mean, really?
If people are stupid enough to think that some crime or another can’t "happen here" then bisexuality is going to be way over their heads.
Dreher is employed by The Dallas Morning News. I think he’s the editor of the Opinion Page.
. . .and I occasionally see his dribble run on the op-ed pages of the Cleveland PD when they pick it up from The Dallas Morning News (I think there was one yesterday or maybe Saturday).
54.
Zifnab
@Ned R.: I hear you. I’ve more or less sworn off TV news. NPR and the net (which is really just newspaper redux) are my reliable news sources. Every now and again I venture back on to CNN or MSNBC (or FOX, if I haven’t eaten recently) and get another forehead pounding realization why I turned them off in the first place.
But even network news is depressing and disappointing.
55.
bh
@john cole
I don’t believe that this is as clear an issue as you would like to portray it. In terms of disclosing information that is obviously meant to be private, of course the professor or teacher should refrain from comment.
But your position that people don’t report accurately report what somebody says is only an argument against ever reporting what someone’s says. It has nothing to do with the specifics of this issue (as right as you may be)
In a short comment like this I don’t believe it possible to really get into the different issues this topic raises and it is your blog which means obviously that you can make your policy as you see fit.
Among other things I have been an English teacher for a long time. In Miami I had a class once with two students. One was from Venezuela – he was the guy that during the attempted coup against Chavez announced in congress the Chavez was gone and replaced by a Pedro Carmona. The other guy was a former defense minister from Bolivia who has subsequently been charged with crimes against humanity.
(btw i found this out just after their classes were finished. I would have never agreed to do the class if i had known prior)
Now maybe english class isn’t college so i don’t know if you would consider this a similar situation. But, while i would not talk about specific private elements of the class i have absolutely no problem in talking about what kind of guys they were, how intelligent they seemed and some of their political observations (which invariably we got into during the class).
This is a tricky issue and it’s certainly best to err on the side of privacy. i just don’t think it’s so black and white as you make it.
56.
cmorenc
Beneath the superficially torpid, conservative surface of small-town life everywhere in the US, and especially areas like the south where nostalgia over small-town values can almost make regressiveness seem charming, there’s nonetheless nearly ALWAYS a much stronger, more prevalent undercurrent of twisted eccentricity (often involving sexuality) than is apparent at the surface. YES it is noteworthy that a teenage cult of bisexuality existed in this small Texas town, but not to the extent it overrides the significance that somehow, malignant personal and interpersonal pathology exploded into murder. The bisexuality aspect does little to nothing by itself toward explaining the murder, unless perhaps discovery of the daughter’s bisexuality by the parents led to an escalating cycle of disapproval that became explosive.
However, the fact that a subset of teenagers in a small town mutually discover their bisexuality and more or less form a discreet cult – is simply garden-variety sexual eccentricity (relative to town "norms") that can be found in various forms in hundreds, if not thousands, of small towns all across American. The bizzare is in fact mundane.
57.
norbizness
To be fair, if he actually knew something, he wouldn’t be a (relatively) successful conservative columnist, would he? That’s like oil and water or a Scotsman and a 20% gratuity.
58.
CMcC
Dreher: "I would be, and was, surprised to find the claim that bisexuality was trendy in a tiny Texas town’s high school."
Isn’t the Repub Party the party of Mark Foley, Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, David Vitter, etc., etc.? Don’t these men represent the "red states" of America, including Texas and its small towns?
Furthermore, don’t people in those states watch a lot of porn? Isn’t a lot of porn…?
Exactly. The wife and I recently watched "Peyton Place" and people knew this 50 years ago during the good old days that conservatives like to talk about so much. And of course "Peyton Place" was set in 1940-1942, so even before the good old days everyone knew about the strong sexual undercurrents in most places.
"Speaking as the father of daughters, I would much rather they experiment with bisexuality than murder me."
That’s exactly the kind of soft, liberal attitude that’s ruining GM and our Great Nation.
62.
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
nostalgia over small-town values can there’s nonetheless nearly ALWAYS a much stronger, more prevalent undercurrent
Nostalgia for small town values is almost sure to be based on myth. More likely it is nostalgia for small-town isolation, mis-remembered as "values."
The most open-minded and helpful people I ever encountered were in a small town, in an area roughly known as the Four State Area: Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas.
63.
DFS
It’s a strange world the internet hath wrought. 25 years ago, Dreher would have just been some random crackpot, perhaps distributing little xeroxed pamphlets of his lunacy to a mailing list of a few dozen people. Now, he sets up a blog and all of a sudden allegedly significant thinkers feel compelled to actually treat his demented bullshit seriously.
64.
Bubba Dave
Here’s my defense of Dreher, as emailed to Andrew:
This is coming from someone as far from a "crunchy con" as you can get– call me a squishy lib, perhaps. But as a resident of Dallas, I saw and agree with his essential point:
East Texas small town with hideous murder? Unsuprising, alas.
East Texas small town with openly bisexual teens? Stunning. I mean, there’s a reason so many gays live in cities and away from red-state rural outposts, and it’s not because they find life too easy in redneck areas. I would have expected any gay or bisexual teens in Emory, TX to be so far in the closet they got mistaken for sweaters. I find the fact that teens in rural towns are free to be themselves to be a huge leap forward; Dreher might well disagree. But I too saw that detail as the one truly shocking part of the story, for what it’s worth.
65.
celticdragon
I am the commenter "Celtic Trolls and Dragons"
in the now closed comments thread at "Crunchy Con"
Rod is an intellectually pretentious gasbag and regularly deletes any mention of the word bigot, but he accuses me of being a troll who writes like a 13 yr old girl…
I don’t believe that this is as clear an issue as you would like to portray it. In terms of disclosing information that is obviously meant to be private, of course the professor or teacher should refrain from comment.
It may not be clear as an “issue” in the abstract, but it is pretty clear what my position on this is and what the rules are for this blog.
It ain’t happening here. Period.
67.
ricky
YES it is noteworthy that a teenage cult of bisexuality existed in this small Texas town, but not to the extent it overrides the significance that somehow, malignant personal and interpersonal pathology exploded into murder
No, this is not noteworthy. Nor is it factual.
What is noteworthy is that apparently there is no evidence whatsover that there was any "cult" of bisexuality, or any bisexuality at all other than the observation of a father that his daughter, upon enrolling at a new school in a small Texas town, encountered one girl who wanted to be his daughter’s "little girlfriend." From that he inferred there were lots of bisexuals in this little town and that kids thought it was cool to be bisexual.
Dreher earns the rage directed at him for his whacky priorities. But I ask why the observation of the father about one incident involving his daughter was even placed in the first of a three part series about this crime by the reporter for the Dallas Morning News. There is no evidence his daughter was bisexual, that there is any such activity out of the ordinary in the town involved, or that it played any part in the crime.
That the reporter would include it, that Dreher would inflate it and prioritize it, and that commenters here would focus on the "culture" as if it were true is beyond me.
Yeah! What’s with kids these days? Why can’t they set fire to the home of that Chinese family. Lynch a few negros. You know, non-shocking stuff.
However, I disagree with Sullivan on Dreher’s mental status. If he were clinical that would mean he deserved help and sympathy. The man’s a nasty asshole in need of a kicking.
69.
Brandon T
I think a lot of you haven’t read Dreher before. The comment doesn’t surprise me, because he’s pretty retrograde on moral matters, but he has voiced some pretty interesting contrarian conservative positions–being skeptical of the conservative focus on freedom to gain extreme wealth, skepticism of pro-business ideology, etc.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned here, but a few years back Dreher wrote about how he was nearly sexually assaulted by classmates while he was a teenager. It could be part of the reason why he is so ‘clinical,’ to use Sully’s excellent term, in the DefCon5 Gay Panic that drives so much of his writing about bi/homosexual issues.
73.
Dracula
The most open-minded and helpful people I ever encountered were in a small town, in an area roughly known as the Four State Area: Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas.
If there was any stronger evidence than this comment that you are white heterosexual, I cannot find it.
74.
Sarcastro
I would be, and was, surprised to find the claim that bisexuality was trendy in a tiny Texas town’s high school.
I’m rather unsurprised that such a claim comes from a man who’s child attempted to murder him.
Dreher is such a moron. The last sentence of his original post leaves you with the impression-quite naturally-that he think that the culture of bisexuality is the blame for the murders. Then he goes on to "clarify" that what he really meant was that he was merely surprised that anybody can manage to be gay and hang out with other gay people in East Texas, one of the most backward, repressive and homophobic venues in America, leaving one naturally that he would approve of the successful repression of homosexuality (or at least gays hanging out together.) Then he updates again trying to explain why a bisexual "culture" would be more "shocking" than a family being being shot and stabbed to death, and derides Sullivan for describing his post as "clinical." Which of course it is, as it perfectly exemplifies the conservative mindset. Horrific violence perpetrated by kids? No biggies. Girls kissing and hanging out together? Decline of civilization!! Yeah, we get the lesson alright.
What a fucking douche.
77.
ironranger
Dreher seems to be mystified by people’s reactions expressing a ‘what’s the big deal’ response. Clueless and clinical.
78.
bootlegger
@John PM: IMO its not that what is said in class is sacred or secretive, but that to recount it later as a mark on someone’s character is not really fair to the person. It’s hearsay, first of all, and as you point out in class people are, or should be, free to express radical ideas.
I have a written policy that all opinions are welcomed and respected, but that respect has to extend to everyone in the class. I frame is a "rights" and "responsibilities" concept. You have the right to express yourself and the responsibility to respect others’ right to do the same.
I clicked on the link to Dreher’s "near sexual assault" as a child and find that he was bullied. Quel surprise. And yet the implication of his comments about the bisexuality issue, and any issue involving women and sexual harrassment, is that they asked for it. Dreher left the Catholic church, he says, over the child sex abuse scandal because it resonated for him since it was about boys and men abusing boys. Any sane feminist left the church long before that over the systematic abuse of women, but that is invisible to Dreher. His sympathy exists only in proportion to his empathy. If he can’t imagine himself in your pants, being depantsed, its just not an issue for him.
aimai
80.
celticdragon
Dreher has shut down the comment thread and opened another one here…
@bh: But as you correctly infer, its one thing to talk in generalities about an anonymous person, and another to say "Bob was an idiot, he once said…."
@Josh Hueco: If nearly being pantsed is nearly sexual assault, what does that make a wedgie?
As I said, the man needs a kicking.
83.
bootlegger
@Bubba Dave: As another poster mentioned up thread, the claim of an open bisexual cult was made by the surviving ultacon father. He said another girl had a crush on his daughter and from this inferred the rampant bi-cult. I suspect there is nothing of the sort taking place there, though, again as stated up thread, small towns have their own fair share of sexual deviants (which bisexuality is not of course).
If nearly being pantsed is nearly sexual assault, what does that make a wedgie?
I’ll defend Dreher here. I take his word that it was traumatic for him, and I think it is nonsense for you all to mock that event. Saying it was just a “pantsing” is not far removed from the limp defenses of hazing and other stuff, which can lead to some pretty awful outcomes. I’m also willing to bet that there is ample literature out there that shows a link between childhood bullying and suicide, acts of school violence, and other anti-social and possibly criminal behavior later on in life.
Not to be a concern troll, but snickering about what happened to Dreher just makes you look like a dick. Maybe it wouldn’t have bothered you, but it clearly upset him.
And Idon’t buy some of the bad faith arguments being leveled at Dreher. What surprised me was what stuck out for him. His “what shocked me” bit was what surprised me, which I interpreted as not unlike saying “You know, reading about the stories regarding Hitler, what really shocked me was that he was a vegetarian!”
It was just a remarkably silly statement, and I just find it amazing how wrapped up people are about other people’s sexualtiy. Hence the “wow.”
86.
Andrew
OH JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
The bisexuality mentioned in the article doesn’t even reach the level of a stupid Katy Perry song. It’s primarily a figment of the fevered imaginations of some conservative assholes.
87.
John T
Dreher’s idea of what is or isn’t "shocking" is pretty much in line with the MPAA’s ratings system.
Cartoon violence = rated G (or shown on broadcast TV to children on saturday mornings)
A glimpse of a man’s naughty bits in an erotic context, or a man-on-man sex scene that lasts more than 5 seconds = NC-17
88.
ricky
Through careful editing I have attempted to make Mr. Cole’s crtiques of some commenters also apply to Mr. Dreher himself.
I’ll defend Dreher …..mock … limp defenses … can lead to later …in life… snickering… like a dick.
89.
Mnemosyne
Add me to the chorus of people pointing out that the only person claiming there was a "cult of bisexuality" at the public school is the guy who was almost murdered by his daughter and her male friends. And even then it’s really just an aside and there’s no implication that his daughter was involved in any way. Especially since he has long rants in the same article about her bad taste in men and how much he hated all of her boyfriends.
But trust Dreher to pull one tiny detail from an article and blow it up into a vast conspiracy in his head.
90.
Barbar
Here’s the shocking quote from the father:
"It’s almost as if bisexuality was cool."
Almost.
Some girl supposedly made a pass at his daughter. A man who gets upset about her daughter’s boyfriend posture thinks there’s a culture of bisexuality. Truly shocking.
A few years later the daughter, her boyfriend, and a couple of other guys break into the house and murder the family. Shrug. I mean, that stuff is just bound to happen, in a world where people have non-missionary sex.
91.
gex
@John Cole: Quite fair, Cole. I however would like to note that it is irrational to develop a phobia about gay people when straight people try to sexually assault you. I assure you, the bullies in question weren’t a roving band of gay toughs.
92.
BethanyAnne
@aimai: And so too for Andrew Sullivan. It’s my main complaint about him. He’s great on any issue that affects him personally. Anything else? Those people should just get over it.
@John Cole: Please, he’s attempting to legitimize his opinions by drawing parallels between his own experiences and something that was much worse. It’s like the useless turd who will listen to to someone choke out a horrifying story of child abuse and respond by whittering about the time mommy swatted his bottom in the middle of the grocery store.
Because we’re a basically civilized society, no one shoves these people into industrial meat grinders.
You can argue that bullying is a bit like pantsing is a bit like hazing is a bit like assault is a bit like manslaughter but that doesn’t make them equivalent and it doesn’t make Dreher less of a bigotted brain dead waste of skin.
95.
bago
@John T: The Watchmen might send him over the edge almost as much as Debbie Schussel. That review is a laugh riot.
96.
Jon Karak
I always had the vague sense that Rod Dreher was a jerk, but now I know he is far worse than that. He is a dishonest hack who doesn’t have the gut to level with people. His specialty is emotional innuendo, and the corruption of reason. Then when his rouse is exposed, he tries to back-track with this asinine facade of non-apology and wonderment.
97.
Persia
Andrew Sullivan linked to this post, calling my point of view "clinical." So it must be to someone with his values.
To be fair to Dreher he didn’t make the connection "I was bullied in school" and that was as bad as bisexual girls in texas leading to murder. Those are completely different blog posts/essays from him. But that’s part of the problem of Dreher. He puts up this stream of consciousness shit and then imagines that his readers can’t read forward and back through his ouvre and discover that, as bethany pointed out above, things are terribly important when they impact Rod and completely unimportant *even if they are the same thing* if they impact other people.
If you read the essay about Rod’s sexual harrassment–which drove him as he says to basically run away from home and abandon his parents–The lesson that Rod took from the horrific moment when he was bullied by the boys in his school while parents looked on is that his parents, and all parents, should protect *people like Rod* if they have trouble with their social circle.
The takeaway implication of his imaginary discovery that bisexuality is tolerated among Texas teens is that this is more surprising and horrifying than an actual heterosexual intra family murder. The link that he makes, though vague, is that a school situation in which bisexual teens are not bullied and humiliated into silence and running away leads in some fashion to horrifice crimes like Murder.
I mean, isn’t that basically the argument? Its not like Rod doesn’t think that there are bisexual teens. Or straight teens "experimenting." Its just that he thinks that East Texas ordinarily and magically suppresses them. Is there some other method of suppression than hazing, humiliation and violence? So in the first essay Rod is against hazing and humiliation because its happening to him. In the second essay he is puzzled at a lack of hazing and humiliation and essentially wishes it would happen so that no straight girls with homocidal boyfriends would ever encounter dangerous bicurious teens again.
Actually, I think you give him slightly too much credit; I read him as not quite having been aware that bisexuality/experimenting/etc. was even happening in Places Like East Texas. He seems to think that they’re not things endemic to the human condition which arise everywhere and may be suppressed in some places, but instead things which are created in otherwise hetero people by "The Culture." See: "I am so not going to give my children over to this culture, if I can help it". He speaks about it as an external, invasive, possessive force.
things are terribly important when they impact Rod and completely unimportant even if they are the same thing if they impact other people.
That reminds me of a Crunchy Con post a while back where (IIRC) he called a bride with kids profiled in the New York Times ‘slutty’ because she was wearing a white(!) dress with an open back that revealed her lower-back tattoo. I can guarantee you if Dreher or any other man was the father or the groom of said bride and someone called her get-up ‘slutty’ he’d hunt the prick down and beat him senseless. But Dreher’s always throwing stones at people whose cirumstances he doesn’t understand, braying ‘O Tempora, O Mores’ while he does it.
One thing I do know about is how Andrew writes about people who disagree with him on sexual matters.
Yeah, see, Sullivan thinks he’s a human being with dignity and equal rights, and Dreher disagrees.
Forcing me to take that hack Sully’s side: add that to the social conservatives’ myriad crimes.
105.
Texas Mike
1. I used to work at Dreher’s paper, and he’s pretty annoying. While a lot of radio personalities and Republican D.C. operatives eventually get columns, the pool of young conservatives wishing to become opinion writers is really pretty small. Thus, Dreher’s career. Spend 2 minutes with the resumes submitted for internships at The American Prospect and TNR vs. National Review and Washington Times, and I guarantee you’ll see a huge difference in both quality and quantity. There are only a few wannabe Ross Douthats (whatever you think of him), whereas there are many budding Yglesias and Ezra Kleins. Around 95 percent of the real smart conservatives I know end up in profit-maximizing careers; only around half of the smart liberals do.
2. To be fair, my brothers (17 and 15) have both reported being at parties where girls "lezzed out," which I take to mean pressured to make out in front of guys. Now, there’s 1) bisexuals, there’s 2) those college girls we all knew who fooled around with a friend one night but had mixed feelings, and then there’s 3) girls who get pressured into fooling around with another girl or think it’s sexy or what guys want to see due to Girls Gone Wild, porn, or overall culture. I fully support 1 and 2, but the 3rd segment makes me a little queasy. Dreher’s blanket statement would be in bad taste by itself. That it’s accompanied by the murderous circumstances makes it odious. But, having read his mediocre copy more than a few times, I get from where he’s coming.
106.
Punchy
I’m also willing to bet that there is ample literature out there that shows a link between childhood bullying and suicide, acts of school violence, and other anti-social and possibly criminal behavior later on in life.
Good God. You’ve not just dropped the R brand, you’ve jettisoned it 3 miles away, burned any remaining reminants of it, and jettisoned the ashes. And then picked up a book by Marx, befriended Kos, and probably have dreadlocks and a Jesus beard.
Even some of us lefties don’t see any harm in a pantsing; certainly not evolving into suicide or crime. Christ.
What is noteworthy is that apparently there is no evidence whatsover that there was any "cult" of bisexuality, or any bisexuality at all other than the observation of a father that his daughter, upon enrolling at a new school in a small Texas town, encountered one girl who wanted to be his daughter’s "little girlfriend." From that he inferred there were lots of bisexuals in this little town and that kids thought it was cool to be bisexual.
[. . .] There is no evidence his daughter was bisexual, that there is any such activity out of the ordinary in the town involved, or that it played any part in the crime.
Amen, bro’. (I am learning to read all the comments here before jumping in with my own [repetitive] ones.) That is exactly what struck me when I went to Dreher’s blog and read the post: the whole "bisexual subculture" thing apparently was taken from one comment by the girl’s father. I don’t doubt there are bisexual teens in small-town Texas–as there are everywhere else–but to infer a whole "subculture" I would want more than the comment of one disturbed (possibly in multiple senses of the word) parent.
As the father of 29 & 20 year old daughters, I would just like to say that this type of shit has nothing what.so.ever to do with bisexuality, homosexuality, or any other kind of sexuality, unless we are talking about a pedophiliac type of sexuality ( and I don’t think that we are). No, this type of shit is all about parents who insist that their kids live up to some type of unreasonable/ unacceptable/ unconditional ( to the kids) standard of conduct, or in other words, some really.suck.ass.parenting.
110.
Blue Raven
And how much do I have to pay to get the words "bisexual" and "chic" or "trendy" to stop appearing in the same sentence? We’ve ALWAYS been here. We are NOT a fucking trend.
Comments are closed.
Share this ArticleLike this article? Email it to a friend!
rustydude
Wow! The kids these days experiment sexually. I never would have guessed. And in Texas! Nooooooo!
Ricky Bobby
"Homicidal maniacs or bisexuals, which is scarier?"
That’s a really good question Rod! Thanks for playing!
Jay Andrew Allen
It is my fervent hope, as a father and a bisexual, that every last one of Dreher’s kids turns out to be gay.
rustydude
Someone should carbon date the sand existing around Rod Dreher’s head so we know how long it’s been there.
Ned R.
Anyway, it’s kinda appropriate this post follows the ‘less religulous’ one, really.
SpotWeld
That’s not "failing to see the forest because of the trees" that "failing to see the forest because of the map you left at home".
I think some folks really need to get over the fact that Mayberry was fictional.
Jay Andrew Allen
Okay, you know what? I’m not finished. Anyone who’s grown up gay or bisexual in a small town knows how isolating and hellish an experience it is. And Dreher’s bitching because there’s some place in America where kids can grow up and NOT feel like freaks? And in Texas, no less?
Fuck you, Rod, and the sanctimonious hetero pony you rode in on.
Josh Hueco
As Roy Edroso has noted many times, Dreher’s wound so tight one day he’s going to snap and go Full Metal Mohammed.
bootlegger
@Ricky Bobby: The "shock" is bisexuals in a small East Texas town, cuz, you know, they just don’t raise ’em that way down thar.
El Cid
I think he’s just saying he expects grisly family murders in small East Texas town, but not anything which smacks of cultural modernity.
Zifnab
Listen, kids flipping out and murdering family and friends in a blood-soaked orgy of violence happens often enough in the Lone Star State (on account a’ those family values). But the real news is Gay Texans.
This is just like Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Brokeback Mountain, expect completely different.
Brien Jackson
Dreher finds it easier to believe there are shockingly brutal murder in Texas than that there are non-heterosexuals there?
Why is Rod Dreher such an elitist who obviously thinks people who don’t live on a coast are a bunch of bigoted rednecks with no teeth, etc. etc.?
John Cole
No. That would be unprofessional and total BS and I will delete any comment that goes into details like that. I have no problem with someone saying “I taught so and so,” but going into details beyond that would be a horrible breach of privacy.
Not to mention, go google FERPA.
Shinobi
From the clarification on the original post.
I guess I’ll get back to violating the moral order now. (Bisexuality, y’know not murder… yet.)
bootlegger
Apparently the Crunch Con is noticing that he is being noticed
Party-on Garth.
bootlegger
@John Cole: You are correct sir.
John PM
@John Cole: #14
I would agree to the extent that the purported professor should not reveal grades or anything written in tests or papers meant only for the eyes of the professor. However, I think anything that may have been said in open discussion in class would not be off-limits.
Back to the post, however, most of the gays I knew in college were from small towns. They turned 18 and went to college in biggest city they could as far away from those small towns as they could. As my wife and I have discussed before, nothing like those small town values of intollerence, bigotry and repression.
canuckistani
Speaking as the father of daughters, I would much rather they experiment with bisexuality than murder me.
Leo
I love all of the updates where he’s like: "I’m not saying being bisexual is worse than murder, just that it’s more shocking than murder."
Thanks dude. That clears things up.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
However, this sounds like one f**ked-up kid.
What’s Dreher totally missed was that it was the daughter’s thuggish *boyfriends* who did the horrific attack.
Despite pulling her out of school and homeschooling her ‘cos she was being hit on by girls at high school. Win for homeschooling, I guess.
Homeschooling probably was a bad idea and overly controlling for a wild child like this daughter, but it’s hard to know what to do with them. At least in high school there would might have been a child psychologist who could find an outlet for the daughter. That is, if child welfare services weren’t cut out of the budget by anti-tax GOP jihadis.
I had a relative who was driven nuts by a wild child: sent her to boarding school, which she ran away from. All ended up bad in the end, despite the best efforts of family and social workers. But that at least was mostly self-destructive, not like this.
cleek
i agree with what El Cid said.
that is all
Punchy
I have a feeling this guy pens about 3-4 columns a week, and is used to getting about 3-4 comments per column, max. This response blew his mind, which is why he took the chickenshit way out and closed the comment section.
Typical rightie — when shown to be wrong/stupid, just shut off debate.
feral1
What’s really striking about Dreher’s post is that he takes the extremely religous, conservative, home schooling father’s comments about a burgeoning bisexual community in a small east Texas town at face value. This reminds me of Tom Coburn ranting that lesbianism in Oklahoma schools was so out of control that they only let girls go to the bathroom one at a time.
The Moar You Know
Then, by his own admission, Rod Dreher is absolutely lacking any humanity.
Then what Rod Dreher doesn’t know would fill a set of encyclopedias. Doesn’t take a lot of effort – the man has an internet connection, does he not? – to find out that teens today are a bit more liberal sexually than their predecessors. Browse a few MySpace profiles, Rod. You’ll figure it out.
He sounds like one of those Mayberry worshippers who believes in small-town moral exceptionalism. I’ve known people from small towns; those places are the centers of the most fucked-up debauchery ever. Bisexuality is vanilla normal by comparison.
bootlegger
@John PM: Off-limits to FERPA perhaps, but as a college prof I have to say that gossiping about students in a public forum seems unethical or at the very least sophomoric (pun intended).
TheFountainHead
Can’t decide which is more flabbergasting, this type of crap or the type of crap they’re flinging at Chas Freeman. I guess I’ll just have to be pissed at both today.
Ned R.
@John PM:
Agreed, and I do apologize to John for implying otherwise! Trust me, I work in libraries — privacy is v. important, to put it mildly.
Tom65
One more "clarification" like that and I’m going to have to start drilling holes in my head.
Brendan
Dreher is one of those useless people for whom history and human variation begins and ends in the subjects on the front page of a newspaper in Omaha in 1957. No matter how many time he’s exposed to evidence contravening that narrative he professes shock, and so never learns enough to discuss the world as it exists outside of his own mind. A fool, a simpleton, an intellectual charlatan, a bigot, a man of no account or honor. Contemptible. I’d be happy to mount a more sustained or specific attack on his thought on the subject if I could find a starting point, but "gee, I never thought Texans might be homosexual" isn’t a thought, it’s a prejudice.
In short, he’s a butthead.
Jamey
Beliefnet is becoming FaithMouse, without the clever drawings or social relevance…
Someone enlighten me: What’s a "bisexual culture"? Do they have parades, fundraisers, and the like? Is it something I might find in some popular European brands of yogurt?
And how can it be "shocking" that ANY town in the US has one–are there parts of these here States that don’t get "Gossip Girl"?
But, yeah, to extrapolate from Rod’s hastily-scrawled-during-a-pre-church-on-Sunday-morning/post-first-cup-of-coffee-dump: mass murder in Texas, a God-fearing place that gets Rod’s thumbs-up: Not shocking. Teens experimenting with sex: Shocking.
bootlegger
@feral1:
I think that was just a personal fantasy for him. He could imagine himself as the school janitor, there to set the girls Straight. Yesssss, I can see the opening line of the Forum Letter now, "It was a school rule that girls went alone to the bathroom and it was my job to straighten things out…"
Svensker
@rustydude:
Ha ha ha ha.
Fern
@John PM:
Trust me, it would be completely unethical for a teacher to blab about a student in any way, shape, or form.
Now if you could find a fellow student of this individual, anything goes, I say.
Ned R.
Actually here’s the comment in Dreher’s post that makes me scratch my head the most:
Did I miss an epidemic of ‘this kind of thing’?
John Cole
@John PM: I disagree. Even if you look past the ethical and legal aspects, I will not divulge or allow anyone to divulge anything said in open discussion, particularly because of how people distort what people say. I took part in some pretty gruesome and macabre discussions in ethics and philosophy classes in which people argued positions they do not believe, and I know how people would distort those discussions.
Off limits. Verboten. Not going to happen. Any creepy attempts to link to people’s private, professional, or educational lives beyond what they themselves have divulged is off limits. And that goes for Sarah Palin and all the truthers with her baby, for the average Joe in the comments section, and for John Edwards. I have seen too many people trying to destroy people. Screw that nonsense. It is not happening here.
Besides- what could Dreher say privately that is more idiotic and more revealing than that post. “Hey- you know what really surprised me about the Tonton Macoute? Did you know some of them were vegetarians!” His statement is ample fertile ground in and of itself.
aimai
Remember, Rod moved *out* of Soddom and Gomorrah to a place he hates for fear of being exposed too often to the kinds of people who aren’t the kinds of people he wants to be exposed to. And he moved out of Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy because Catholicism was too loosy goosey and modern for him. So there’s always a place, just over the horizon, that he imagines has greener gods and less sexy teens. Today it happens to be called "Texas" but tomorrow he’ll believe its in Kansas.
aimai
MikeJ
This was in Texas? Dreher must think they’ve got nothing but steers down there.
YellowJournalism
If the MSM reports on something more than once, it’s an epidemic of dire proportions. Don’t you know that school shootings happen at least twice a day in our nation’s public schools and that little white girls should never be left unattended on the playground?
Ned R.
@aimai:
The latest Decembrists album title, I think.
Ned R.
@YellowJournalism:
What, are you some kind of socialist?
Anoniminous
Before getting all excited I would like to point-out:
1. this is a web site run by a Conservative, on beliefnet no less
2. thus one has to suspect only the part of the story that will throw Conservatives, Fundies, and wingnuts into a frothing rage has been related.
3. who knows what else is going on in that family
4. if they, as Texans, had concentrated on the old Texan practice of sheep fucking this tragedy could have been avoided.
jenniebee
The problem here is that Sully is the rational, reasonable, approachable one of the two, but he’s also by far the more invested in controlling the behavior of the population. He thinks that if people who are rich have guaranteed access to health care by virtue of their riches it has no impact on their character whatsoever, but if the non-rich have access to healthcare it sinks them in a morass of dependency that saps their spirit and removes an incentive to get rich. Because if you don’t put the fear of impending death into a population they’ll take life easy and spend more time with their families, and that’s bad. Or something.
Sully imagines a world where nobody cares who or how you fuck, but where you have virtually no choice in how you live. I can’t read a post like this one of his without wondering: if homosexuality interfered with a healthy profit margin, would he still be who he is today, or would he be a closeted self-loather who ranted about the way these gay economic parasites sapped the lifeblood of global capitalism?
r€nato
if you watch enough Fox News Channel – hell, if you watch enough TV news – it’s not much of a stretch to get the idea that this kind of violence is an everyday occurrence.
The media regularly exploits fear. FNC is just more overt and clumsy and in-your-face about it. Michael Moore makes this point quite well in some of his films, particularly Bowling For Columbine, less explicitly so in Fahrenheit 911.
But, you know, he’s fat so it’s OK to dismiss anything he has to say.
r€nato
I’m thinking Dreher was not so much ‘scared’ by the daughter’s bisexuality, as much as he was ‘titillated’ by it.
In fact I am pretty certain of that. If it had been a bisexual son instead of a daughter, I’m sure he would have been holding up this instance as proof that homosexuality leads to all sorts of evil.
Church Lady
Dreher is employed by The Dallas Morning News. I think he’s the editor of the Opinion Page.
DougJ
That’s quite kind of you, given the alternative that his post suggests.
The Moar You Know
@MikeJ: So….much…win….must….close….thread
Ned R.
@r€nato:
*shudders*
The one thing I did on 9/11 was to decide to stop watching TV news, something I’ve followed to this day. At that point in time I felt that there was enough out there in terms of alternate news sources via the net and otherwise for me to get both what I liked to call my ‘news junkie fast food’ fix and more in-depth approaches.
Brendan
I tend to think of Sully these days as a man with very strong moral beliefs which run off at right angles to each other and are occasionally/frequently irreconcilable, so that his take on any given issue or subset of an issue depends on which of those beliefs it hits first as it falls through his consciousness. Thus you get weeks of him defending Obama from the sillier media attacks as he genuinely believes him to be a conservative and largely in the right on current issues, followed by his demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate and failing to see how these two impulses may be in opposition.
The Moar You Know
@John Cole: Exactly. I don’t need to hear anything from Dreher’s teachers or fellow students about his beliefs or intellectual capacities, as it is already self-evident from what he writes that he is a complete idiot.
John PM
@John Cole: #36
I see your point, and I forgot that you are a teacher and thus have more immediate experience with this sort of thing. And I understand that it is important to distinguish between someone arguing a position they do not believe as a theorethical exercise ("Look, in college when I debated that cannibalism could be a cure for overpopulation, I did not actually subscribe to that position…), as in law school we were often put into that position, and it is actually a great way to challenge peoples’ preconceived notions.
However, my thought was more along the types of comments that truly reveal a person’s intollerence; e.g.:
Q. What would Aristotle have to say about that?
A. Anything Aristotle would have to say is invalid because he liked to f-ck little Greek boys. The Bible says this is the answer, so your philosophy class is a waste of time.
BTW, I am curious about what you say to your students about classroom discussions. Do you have an actual written policy that anything said in class should not be divulged outside of class? Some of my best experiences in undergrad and in law school were when the discussion would continue after class in a different location and involve people who were not in the class. After all, shouldn’t the ultimate rule for class discussion (as for life in general) be to not say anything in class that you would not be willing to say in public?
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
I dunno, this sounds to me just like the line you hear almost every day after some crime or another:
"I never thought that something like this could happen here."
Really? I mean, really?
If people are stupid enough to think that some crime or another can’t "happen here" then bisexuality is going to be way over their heads.
Napoleon
@Church Lady:
. . .and I occasionally see his dribble run on the op-ed pages of the Cleveland PD when they pick it up from The Dallas Morning News (I think there was one yesterday or maybe Saturday).
Zifnab
@Ned R.: I hear you. I’ve more or less sworn off TV news. NPR and the net (which is really just newspaper redux) are my reliable news sources. Every now and again I venture back on to CNN or MSNBC (or FOX, if I haven’t eaten recently) and get another forehead pounding realization why I turned them off in the first place.
But even network news is depressing and disappointing.
bh
@john cole
I don’t believe that this is as clear an issue as you would like to portray it. In terms of disclosing information that is obviously meant to be private, of course the professor or teacher should refrain from comment.
But your position that people don’t report accurately report what somebody says is only an argument against ever reporting what someone’s says. It has nothing to do with the specifics of this issue (as right as you may be)
In a short comment like this I don’t believe it possible to really get into the different issues this topic raises and it is your blog which means obviously that you can make your policy as you see fit.
Among other things I have been an English teacher for a long time. In Miami I had a class once with two students. One was from Venezuela – he was the guy that during the attempted coup against Chavez announced in congress the Chavez was gone and replaced by a Pedro Carmona. The other guy was a former defense minister from Bolivia who has subsequently been charged with crimes against humanity.
(btw i found this out just after their classes were finished. I would have never agreed to do the class if i had known prior)
Now maybe english class isn’t college so i don’t know if you would consider this a similar situation. But, while i would not talk about specific private elements of the class i have absolutely no problem in talking about what kind of guys they were, how intelligent they seemed and some of their political observations (which invariably we got into during the class).
This is a tricky issue and it’s certainly best to err on the side of privacy. i just don’t think it’s so black and white as you make it.
cmorenc
Beneath the superficially torpid, conservative surface of small-town life everywhere in the US, and especially areas like the south where nostalgia over small-town values can almost make regressiveness seem charming, there’s nonetheless nearly ALWAYS a much stronger, more prevalent undercurrent of twisted eccentricity (often involving sexuality) than is apparent at the surface. YES it is noteworthy that a teenage cult of bisexuality existed in this small Texas town, but not to the extent it overrides the significance that somehow, malignant personal and interpersonal pathology exploded into murder. The bisexuality aspect does little to nothing by itself toward explaining the murder, unless perhaps discovery of the daughter’s bisexuality by the parents led to an escalating cycle of disapproval that became explosive.
However, the fact that a subset of teenagers in a small town mutually discover their bisexuality and more or less form a discreet cult – is simply garden-variety sexual eccentricity (relative to town "norms") that can be found in various forms in hundreds, if not thousands, of small towns all across American. The bizzare is in fact mundane.
norbizness
To be fair, if he actually knew something, he wouldn’t be a (relatively) successful conservative columnist, would he? That’s like oil and water or a Scotsman and a 20% gratuity.
CMcC
Dreher: "I would be, and was, surprised to find the claim that bisexuality was trendy in a tiny Texas town’s high school."
Isn’t the Repub Party the party of Mark Foley, Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, David Vitter, etc., etc.? Don’t these men represent the "red states" of America, including Texas and its small towns?
Furthermore, don’t people in those states watch a lot of porn? Isn’t a lot of porn…?
chopper
@canuckistani:
same here. jesus, the fact that i feel the need to clarify this makes me sad to live in this country.
John PM
@cmorenc: #57
Exactly. The wife and I recently watched "Peyton Place" and people knew this 50 years ago during the good old days that conservatives like to talk about so much. And of course "Peyton Place" was set in 1940-1942, so even before the good old days everyone knew about the strong sexual undercurrents in most places.
jetan
"Speaking as the father of daughters, I would much rather they experiment with bisexuality than murder me."
That’s exactly the kind of soft, liberal attitude that’s ruining GM and our Great Nation.
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
Nostalgia for small town values is almost sure to be based on myth. More likely it is nostalgia for small-town isolation, mis-remembered as "values."
The most open-minded and helpful people I ever encountered were in a small town, in an area roughly known as the Four State Area: Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas.
DFS
It’s a strange world the internet hath wrought. 25 years ago, Dreher would have just been some random crackpot, perhaps distributing little xeroxed pamphlets of his lunacy to a mailing list of a few dozen people. Now, he sets up a blog and all of a sudden allegedly significant thinkers feel compelled to actually treat his demented bullshit seriously.
Bubba Dave
Here’s my defense of Dreher, as emailed to Andrew:
This is coming from someone as far from a "crunchy con" as you can get– call me a squishy lib, perhaps. But as a resident of Dallas, I saw and agree with his essential point:
East Texas small town with hideous murder? Unsuprising, alas.
East Texas small town with openly bisexual teens? Stunning. I mean, there’s a reason so many gays live in cities and away from red-state rural outposts, and it’s not because they find life too easy in redneck areas. I would have expected any gay or bisexual teens in Emory, TX to be so far in the closet they got mistaken for sweaters. I find the fact that teens in rural towns are free to be themselves to be a huge leap forward; Dreher might well disagree. But I too saw that detail as the one truly shocking part of the story, for what it’s worth.
celticdragon
I am the commenter "Celtic Trolls and Dragons"
in the now closed comments thread at "Crunchy Con"
Rod is an intellectually pretentious gasbag and regularly deletes any mention of the word bigot, but he accuses me of being a troll who writes like a 13 yr old girl…
heh!
John Cole
It may not be clear as an “issue” in the abstract, but it is pretty clear what my position on this is and what the rules are for this blog.
It ain’t happening here. Period.
ricky
No, this is not noteworthy. Nor is it factual.
What is noteworthy is that apparently there is no evidence whatsover that there was any "cult" of bisexuality, or any bisexuality at all other than the observation of a father that his daughter, upon enrolling at a new school in a small Texas town, encountered one girl who wanted to be his daughter’s "little girlfriend." From that he inferred there were lots of bisexuals in this little town and that kids thought it was cool to be bisexual.
Dreher earns the rage directed at him for his whacky priorities. But I ask why the observation of the father about one incident involving his daughter was even placed in the first of a three part series about this crime by the reporter for the Dallas Morning News. There is no evidence his daughter was bisexual, that there is any such activity out of the ordinary in the town involved, or that it played any part in the crime.
That the reporter would include it, that Dreher would inflate it and prioritize it, and that commenters here would focus on the "culture" as if it were true is beyond me.
jake 4 that 1
Yeah! What’s with kids these days? Why can’t they set fire to the home of that Chinese family. Lynch a few negros. You know, non-shocking stuff.
However, I disagree with Sullivan on Dreher’s mental status. If he were clinical that would mean he deserved help and sympathy. The man’s a nasty asshole in need of a kicking.
Brandon T
I think a lot of you haven’t read Dreher before. The comment doesn’t surprise me, because he’s pretty retrograde on moral matters, but he has voiced some pretty interesting contrarian conservative positions–being skeptical of the conservative focus on freedom to gain extreme wealth, skepticism of pro-business ideology, etc.
gex
@jenniebee: Overflowing with win.
Corner Stone
@canuckistani
What? They can’t do both? What kind of intolerant, selfish pig of a father are you? How else are they supposed to learn?
Josh Hueco
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned here, but a few years back Dreher wrote about how he was nearly sexually assaulted by classmates while he was a teenager. It could be part of the reason why he is so ‘clinical,’ to use Sully’s excellent term, in the DefCon5 Gay Panic that drives so much of his writing about bi/homosexual issues.
Dracula
If there was any stronger evidence than this comment that you are white heterosexual, I cannot find it.
Sarcastro
I would be, and was, surprised to find the claim that bisexuality was trendy in a tiny Texas town’s high school.
I’m rather unsurprised that such a claim comes from a man who’s child attempted to murder him.
feral1
ricky@68- Exactly the point I was making.
Xanthippas
Dreher is such a moron. The last sentence of his original post leaves you with the impression-quite naturally-that he think that the culture of bisexuality is the blame for the murders. Then he goes on to "clarify" that what he really meant was that he was merely surprised that anybody can manage to be gay and hang out with other gay people in East Texas, one of the most backward, repressive and homophobic venues in America, leaving one naturally that he would approve of the successful repression of homosexuality (or at least gays hanging out together.) Then he updates again trying to explain why a bisexual "culture" would be more "shocking" than a family being being shot and stabbed to death, and derides Sullivan for describing his post as "clinical." Which of course it is, as it perfectly exemplifies the conservative mindset. Horrific violence perpetrated by kids? No biggies. Girls kissing and hanging out together? Decline of civilization!! Yeah, we get the lesson alright.
What a fucking douche.
ironranger
Dreher seems to be mystified by people’s reactions expressing a ‘what’s the big deal’ response. Clueless and clinical.
bootlegger
@John PM: IMO its not that what is said in class is sacred or secretive, but that to recount it later as a mark on someone’s character is not really fair to the person. It’s hearsay, first of all, and as you point out in class people are, or should be, free to express radical ideas.
I have a written policy that all opinions are welcomed and respected, but that respect has to extend to everyone in the class. I frame is a "rights" and "responsibilities" concept. You have the right to express yourself and the responsibility to respect others’ right to do the same.
aimai
I clicked on the link to Dreher’s "near sexual assault" as a child and find that he was bullied. Quel surprise. And yet the implication of his comments about the bisexuality issue, and any issue involving women and sexual harrassment, is that they asked for it. Dreher left the Catholic church, he says, over the child sex abuse scandal because it resonated for him since it was about boys and men abusing boys. Any sane feminist left the church long before that over the systematic abuse of women, but that is invisible to Dreher. His sympathy exists only in proportion to his empathy. If he can’t imagine himself in your pants, being depantsed, its just not an issue for him.
aimai
celticdragon
Dreher has shut down the comment thread and opened another one here…
http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/03/teen-sexual-culture.html#preview
bootlegger
@bh: But as you correctly infer, its one thing to talk in generalities about an anonymous person, and another to say "Bob was an idiot, he once said…."
jake 4 that 1
@Josh Hueco: If nearly being pantsed is nearly sexual assault, what does that make a wedgie?
As I said, the man needs a kicking.
bootlegger
@Bubba Dave: As another poster mentioned up thread, the claim of an open bisexual cult was made by the surviving ultacon father. He said another girl had a crush on his daughter and from this inferred the rampant bi-cult. I suspect there is nothing of the sort taking place there, though, again as stated up thread, small towns have their own fair share of sexual deviants (which bisexuality is not of course).
Edit: Ah, someone beat me to it.
John Cole
I’ll defend Dreher here. I take his word that it was traumatic for him, and I think it is nonsense for you all to mock that event. Saying it was just a “pantsing” is not far removed from the limp defenses of hazing and other stuff, which can lead to some pretty awful outcomes. I’m also willing to bet that there is ample literature out there that shows a link between childhood bullying and suicide, acts of school violence, and other anti-social and possibly criminal behavior later on in life.
Not to be a concern troll, but snickering about what happened to Dreher just makes you look like a dick. Maybe it wouldn’t have bothered you, but it clearly upset him.
John Cole
And Idon’t buy some of the bad faith arguments being leveled at Dreher. What surprised me was what stuck out for him. His “what shocked me” bit was what surprised me, which I interpreted as not unlike saying “You know, reading about the stories regarding Hitler, what really shocked me was that he was a vegetarian!”
It was just a remarkably silly statement, and I just find it amazing how wrapped up people are about other people’s sexualtiy. Hence the “wow.”
Andrew
OH JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
The bisexuality mentioned in the article doesn’t even reach the level of a stupid Katy Perry song. It’s primarily a figment of the fevered imaginations of some conservative assholes.
John T
Dreher’s idea of what is or isn’t "shocking" is pretty much in line with the MPAA’s ratings system.
Cartoon violence = rated G (or shown on broadcast TV to children on saturday mornings)
Mild violence, fistfights, offscreen murders = rated PG
Gun violence, bloody violence, on-screen murders = rated PG-13
Brutal violence, blood and gore = rated R
A glimpse of a man’s naughty bits in an erotic context, or a man-on-man sex scene that lasts more than 5 seconds = NC-17
ricky
Through careful editing I have attempted to make Mr. Cole’s crtiques of some commenters also apply to Mr. Dreher himself.
Mnemosyne
Add me to the chorus of people pointing out that the only person claiming there was a "cult of bisexuality" at the public school is the guy who was almost murdered by his daughter and her male friends. And even then it’s really just an aside and there’s no implication that his daughter was involved in any way. Especially since he has long rants in the same article about her bad taste in men and how much he hated all of her boyfriends.
But trust Dreher to pull one tiny detail from an article and blow it up into a vast conspiracy in his head.
Barbar
Here’s the shocking quote from the father:
"It’s almost as if bisexuality was cool."
Almost.
Some girl supposedly made a pass at his daughter. A man who gets upset about her daughter’s boyfriend posture thinks there’s a culture of bisexuality. Truly shocking.
A few years later the daughter, her boyfriend, and a couple of other guys break into the house and murder the family. Shrug. I mean, that stuff is just bound to happen, in a world where people have non-missionary sex.
gex
@John Cole: Quite fair, Cole. I however would like to note that it is irrational to develop a phobia about gay people when straight people try to sexually assault you. I assure you, the bullies in question weren’t a roving band of gay toughs.
BethanyAnne
@aimai: And so too for Andrew Sullivan. It’s my main complaint about him. He’s great on any issue that affects him personally. Anything else? Those people should just get over it.
bago
Only two things come out of Texas boy…
jake 4 that 1
@John Cole: Please, he’s attempting to legitimize his opinions by drawing parallels between his own experiences and something that was much worse. It’s like the useless turd who will listen to to someone choke out a horrifying story of child abuse and respond by whittering about the time mommy swatted his bottom in the middle of the grocery store.
Because we’re a basically civilized society, no one shoves these people into industrial meat grinders.
You can argue that bullying is a bit like pantsing is a bit like hazing is a bit like assault is a bit like manslaughter but that doesn’t make them equivalent and it doesn’t make Dreher less of a bigotted brain dead waste of skin.
bago
@John T: The Watchmen might send him over the edge almost as much as Debbie Schussel. That review is a laugh riot.
Jon Karak
I always had the vague sense that Rod Dreher was a jerk, but now I know he is far worse than that. He is a dishonest hack who doesn’t have the gut to level with people. His specialty is emotional innuendo, and the corruption of reason. Then when his rouse is exposed, he tries to back-track with this asinine facade of non-apology and wonderment.
Persia
Does he even read the stuff he writes?
aimai
To be fair to Dreher he didn’t make the connection "I was bullied in school" and that was as bad as bisexual girls in texas leading to murder. Those are completely different blog posts/essays from him. But that’s part of the problem of Dreher. He puts up this stream of consciousness shit and then imagines that his readers can’t read forward and back through his ouvre and discover that, as bethany pointed out above, things are terribly important when they impact Rod and completely unimportant *even if they are the same thing* if they impact other people.
If you read the essay about Rod’s sexual harrassment–which drove him as he says to basically run away from home and abandon his parents–The lesson that Rod took from the horrific moment when he was bullied by the boys in his school while parents looked on is that his parents, and all parents, should protect *people like Rod* if they have trouble with their social circle.
The takeaway implication of his imaginary discovery that bisexuality is tolerated among Texas teens is that this is more surprising and horrifying than an actual heterosexual intra family murder. The link that he makes, though vague, is that a school situation in which bisexual teens are not bullied and humiliated into silence and running away leads in some fashion to horrifice crimes like Murder.
I mean, isn’t that basically the argument? Its not like Rod doesn’t think that there are bisexual teens. Or straight teens "experimenting." Its just that he thinks that East Texas ordinarily and magically suppresses them. Is there some other method of suppression than hazing, humiliation and violence? So in the first essay Rod is against hazing and humiliation because its happening to him. In the second essay he is puzzled at a lack of hazing and humiliation and essentially wishes it would happen so that no straight girls with homocidal boyfriends would ever encounter dangerous bicurious teens again.
aimai
Brendan
Actually, I think you give him slightly too much credit; I read him as not quite having been aware that bisexuality/experimenting/etc. was even happening in Places Like East Texas. He seems to think that they’re not things endemic to the human condition which arise everywhere and may be suppressed in some places, but instead things which are created in otherwise hetero people by "The Culture." See: "I am so not going to give my children over to this culture, if I can help it". He speaks about it as an external, invasive, possessive force.
Josh Hueco
@aimai:
That reminds me of a Crunchy Con post a while back where (IIRC) he called a bride with kids profiled in the New York Times ‘slutty’ because she was wearing a white(!) dress with an open back that revealed her lower-back tattoo. I can guarantee you if Dreher or any other man was the father or the groom of said bride and someone called her get-up ‘slutty’ he’d hunt the prick down and beat him senseless. But Dreher’s always throwing stones at people whose cirumstances he doesn’t understand, braying ‘O Tempora, O Mores’ while he does it.
Persia
The followup post is also full of crazy.
wasabi gasp
It’s shocking that someone can be shocked by any teen having any sex anywhere in this post-priest-rape-in-church world.
Persia
And Jon Swift with the takedown.
gil mann
Yeah, see, Sullivan thinks he’s a human being with dignity and equal rights, and Dreher disagrees.
Forcing me to take that hack Sully’s side: add that to the social conservatives’ myriad crimes.
Texas Mike
1. I used to work at Dreher’s paper, and he’s pretty annoying. While a lot of radio personalities and Republican D.C. operatives eventually get columns, the pool of young conservatives wishing to become opinion writers is really pretty small. Thus, Dreher’s career. Spend 2 minutes with the resumes submitted for internships at The American Prospect and TNR vs. National Review and Washington Times, and I guarantee you’ll see a huge difference in both quality and quantity. There are only a few wannabe Ross Douthats (whatever you think of him), whereas there are many budding Yglesias and Ezra Kleins. Around 95 percent of the real smart conservatives I know end up in profit-maximizing careers; only around half of the smart liberals do.
2. To be fair, my brothers (17 and 15) have both reported being at parties where girls "lezzed out," which I take to mean pressured to make out in front of guys. Now, there’s 1) bisexuals, there’s 2) those college girls we all knew who fooled around with a friend one night but had mixed feelings, and then there’s 3) girls who get pressured into fooling around with another girl or think it’s sexy or what guys want to see due to Girls Gone Wild, porn, or overall culture. I fully support 1 and 2, but the 3rd segment makes me a little queasy. Dreher’s blanket statement would be in bad taste by itself. That it’s accompanied by the murderous circumstances makes it odious. But, having read his mediocre copy more than a few times, I get from where he’s coming.
Punchy
Good God. You’ve not just dropped the R brand, you’ve jettisoned it 3 miles away, burned any remaining reminants of it, and jettisoned the ashes. And then picked up a book by Marx, befriended Kos, and probably have dreadlocks and a Jesus beard.
Even some of us lefties don’t see any harm in a pantsing; certainly not evolving into suicide or crime. Christ.
Steeplejack
@ricky:
Amen, bro’. (I am learning to read all the comments here before jumping in with my own [repetitive] ones.) That is exactly what struck me when I went to Dreher’s blog and read the post: the whole "bisexual subculture" thing apparently was taken from one comment by the girl’s father. I don’t doubt there are bisexual teens in small-town Texas–as there are everywhere else–but to infer a whole "subculture" I would want more than the comment of one disturbed (possibly in multiple senses of the word) parent.
gnomedad
@John Cole:
I love the smell of integrity in the morning.
Also: this thread reminds me that recognizing that Rush is a tool does not certify general sanity.
Et Tu Brutus?
As the father of 29 & 20 year old daughters, I would just like to say that this type of shit has nothing what.so.ever to do with bisexuality, homosexuality, or any other kind of sexuality, unless we are talking about a pedophiliac type of sexuality ( and I don’t think that we are). No, this type of shit is all about parents who insist that their kids live up to some type of unreasonable/ unacceptable/ unconditional ( to the kids) standard of conduct, or in other words, some really.suck.ass.parenting.
Blue Raven
And how much do I have to pay to get the words "bisexual" and "chic" or "trendy" to stop appearing in the same sentence? We’ve ALWAYS been here. We are NOT a fucking trend.