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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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I fail to share your extraordinary disgust at Jared.

From the looks of it, his objective was to make his career, and he did his best with the cards he was dealt. You seem to be disappointed that he showed no solidarity to his fellow Blacks (by entering a white fraternity) nor to the Machine (by calling it non-inclusive) nor to the liberals. I am sure he will find a bus to throw under his fellow LGBTs eventually.

This is just what you would expect of a successful politician. Given his marriages, Trump is certainly not personally anti-immigrant, but if anti-immigrant politics get him elected, that is what he will argue.

In the end, each of us has to decide to what groups they are loyal. Some groups we are members of whether we want it or not due to accident of birth. I think how much loyalty one should show to these groups (family, ethnicity, country, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion) depends on how these groups are treating you: if your family treats you like shit, you don't have to be loyal to them. And sometimes you might decide that it is moral to defect against a group even if it is treating you well (such as an upper class member turning Marxist or a white civil rights supporter). Some other groups we join formally or informally by choice (political movements, religions, fraternities, religious orders, military branches). Some of these groups (think a dominant political party) are almost entirely filled with egoists bent on furthering their own career, others (think EA) contain a lot of people who actually believe in the mission statement. Personally, I find backstabbing in the former much less bad than in the latter, and I think that the Machine totally qualifies as a group of the former sort.

There are obvious, mechanical reasons why someone may not want to live in a frat house with a homosexual. That is not discrimination in and of itself. It’s not clear to me what a gay kid would really want out of fraternity life, other than, you know, the obvious.

I don't think that there are obvious, mechanical reasons? Gay and lesbian soldiers are serving along with straight soldiers in accommodations which are likely tighter than a frat house, which presumably has single shower cabins? Every time I go to a gendered public changing room, I risk that some gay dude who might find me hot (fat chance!) sees me naked. The horror, the horror.

I think that the straight frat guy wants two groups of things from the fraternity:

  • Entertainment (partying including booze, sex, drugs)
  • Connections (academic support (illicit or otherwise), making powerful friends, finding a suitable spouse, having impressive students offices on their CV)

The connections (sans the spouse, perhaps) apply equally to a gay person (and given what we know of Jared, they were his major motivation).

Contrary to common belief, homosexuals can party with straight people and have fun at it, playing beer pong or whatever.

I think that a fraternity which is explicitly anti-gay is a pretty terrible place to find a gay partner. Even if by chance the first man you make advances to is actually into men, he made the decision to join an organisation which is anti-gay for some purpose (likely the connections) and is unlikely to jeopardize that to have sex with you.

And raping your fellow frat members while they are blackout drunk also does not seem very sustainable. While your bros may or may not cover up a sex act with a woman whose ability to consent was questionable, they will likely be much less inclined to cover up gay sex, consensual or otherwise (unless the gays have already secretly taken over, but that seems unlikely).

The only point I could see for joining a fraternity for gay sex would be if they have homoerotic initiation rituals which you like. "I thought that making out with another freshman was just a humiliation ritual, but later I learned that that monster is actually turned on by kissing men. Now I feel so violated!" The horror, the horror.

Frat brothers can't date other frat brothers. It throws off the whole system. Your argument assumes one homosexual, but 1) it's even weirder to have a one-homo-at-a-time policy than a no-homos policy, 2) brothers, like Jared, could present as straight on arrival so you don't know if you get one open one who else might wander out of the closet.

I do assume that Jared was the gay chicken champion of his entering class. Absolute tank!

My argument was not at all about whether the no-homo policy of the fraternities was right or wrong, it was entirely about that given such a policy, a gay man looking for sex has likely better options to get laid than joining a fraternity and hoping to meet another closet gay or bi man willing to break the fraternity rules.

Tuscaloosa is a city with 100k residents, AU has 40k students. Even in Alabama, a few of them are likely on grindr.

We can of course debate if it is immoral to join an organization who requires you to be or behave a certain way in your past or present life outside that org under false pretenses.

For most of the cases, I think lying is fine:

  • It is ok to lie to the question "are there nude photographs of you?" to get into a sorority
  • It is ok to lie about your sexual orientation to get into an organization which has not yet adopted 'don't ask, don't tell'
  • It is ok to lie to an employer about your religious beliefs
  • It is ok to lie to your liberal study group about never having voted Republican
  • It is ok to lie to with regard to having or not having Jewish ancestors
  • It is ok to lie to some McCarthy goons about not having commie leanings
  • It is ok to lie to your church community about never having been married

Rule of thumbs, if the honest answer would be "that is none of your fucking business", then lying is fine. In an ideal world, you would find another organization which offers the same opportunities, but is not as noisy, so you don't run the risk of being found out, but often we don't live in such an ideal world.

Again, the US military -- which is hardly an early adopter of woke policy -- has been tolerating closet gays since 1994 and openly gay people since 2011. It looks to me like it can still fulfill its mission despite having gays and lesbians. I propose that the mission of fraternities (whatever the heck it may be) would likely also survive having non-straight people.