Fight the Freakazoid Spin on Jason Collins

Because the repugs never accept defeat in the culture wars; they just spin new lies.
sek at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

What was once thought to be a loathsome inversion of God’s love has become what happens to children when they watch Glee. Because when you introduce contemporary American culture into the classic conversion narrative you end up with a system of dissemination indistinguishable from infection. You don’t need to convince someone to “turn with” you if society’s “putting in” or “doing to” them what the homosexual agenda wants it to. Which is why conservatives express their concerns about Collins’s revelation by not caring with thunder. So long as they ignore its importance the epidemic can be contained. They want Collins to become a non-story.

Hence the significance of the fact that Jason Collins has an identical twin brother who’s straight. The temptation to use Jarron Collins’s heterosexuality as proof that Jason was either converted to or infected by homosexuality will prove too great. That Jarron shares Jason’s DNA but not his perversion demonstrates once and for all that God doesn’t sanction the birth of gay babies. Jason couldn’t have been born this way because Jarron was too and look at him. Which means homosexuality is essentially a function of bad parenting: parents either didn’t pay enough attention to who tended to or played with their children or they allowed their children to be exposed to the pernicious influence of American culture. Better parenting can prevent children from being converted or infected by homosexuality by regulating who their children meet and what culture they partake.

That Jason and Jarron met the same people and partook of the same culture isn’t significant because the first theoretically employable openly gay male in a major American sport couldn’t have been born homosexual. Science says that stuff with the same genes is identical and therefore the gay can’t be genetic. You’ll see this argument repeatedly in the coming months — not because it’s valid but because Jarron Collins prefers sex with women. No grand conversation about how the same genes can express themselves differently depending on environmental factors will be had. The word “epigenetic” will not enter the national discourse. Why not?

Because as I type these words conservative “journalists” are combing through Jarron Collins’s life trying to discover where it differs from Jason’s. They’re searching for the Holy Grail of Gay and will use their rudimentary understanding of genetics to prove that someone either proffered Jason a sip or forced it down his throat. Jarron will become proof that Jason could’ve been “normal.” In short the “facts” of this particular case — as they understand them — accord too neatly with operative conservative metaphors for them to let it become a non-story. They will run with this because they mistake language for logic. They will run with this because they mistake logic for science. They will run with this because it eliminates God from the suspect pool.

And unless we point out that theories based on “conversion” and “infection” as are arbitrary as those predicated on “inversion” they will be successful.