Equality foe, anti-gay activist, and general tough guy Matt Barber gives us this wonderful statement.
[Homosexuality] is a deviation from the norm, that’s why you call it “deviant sexual behavior.” It’s not a pejorative. We’re not saying “you’re a deviant.” We’re saying “your sexual behavior is deviant.”
Matt Barber’s thinking is crap. Crap’s just another word for manure, which real Americans spread on their lawns to make them healthy and gorgeous. It’s not a pejorative. I’m not saying, “Matt Barber’s a piece of crap.” I’m saying, “Matt Barber’s thinking is crap.” I don’t mean anything bad.
Mm hmm.
We see this all the time. People use a word in one context, then grease it up with rancid oil and slide into a whole new context, often in a single sentence. Mostly I see this with “normal”: Homosexuality is not the norm, gays are not normal, gays are abnormal, abnormalities are bad (like we’re a problem on a biopsy). Matt’s testing the rhetorical perimeter, though, by claiming “deviant” as a neutral adjective.
Matt Barber (on the inside)
I hate this because it’s so fundamentally dishonest. It lets people see if they can get away with something outrageous, and if they get blowback they can blink their eyes like a simple-minded ingenue and murmur, “Heavens, I didn’t mean that.”
Meanwhile I’m proposing a ban on using the terms “norm” and “normal” until our opponents can define them. Usually it comes down to what most people do/have/think. Of course, under that definition, red hair is abnormal (deviant!). And they’ll reply, “But it’s normal for some people to have red hair.” Just like it’s normal for some people to be gay? But they won’t go for that. So can someone supply me with a definition?
My take on Matt’s argument
Ultimately they don’t rely so much on reason as whatever is palatable to the mind. Since they begin with the conclusion “gay behavior [persons, in many cases] is wrong and cannot be condoned,” any attempt at justifying their position is disingenuous. They don’t approach it with an eye to look at the evidence, only to confirm their basic point.
Even if there was absolutely no evidence at all, they’d still have the “God disapproves” default with the truth of this moral claim revealed internally through their repulsion (the “ick” factor) to gay sex acts.
It’s laudable you’d take them at face value for what they say, but I’m not even sure people like Matt or Maggie believe half of what they spew so much as it works to energize the base. The main reason they are against gays doesn’t sell as well as pseudo-fears they can concoct.
Any form of excellence, by definition, is not the norm, and thus deviant. Listening to moral preachers, living a virtuous life is not common, not the norm, and hence should be called deviant. On the other hand, given that most marriages are divorced, divorce is the norm making lifelong marriage deviant. Most people lie, rather often, which makes truthfulness deviant.
So, being gay is in the same group as being excellent, virtuous, faithful, and truthful. Relax, Rob, Matt paid you a rather great compliment, albeit involuntarily, don’t you think? (Actually, include your example of being a red-head… who wouldn’t want to be one?) Let him join the ranks of the overweight, stupid, cheating, sinful “normal” masses.
Quoting dorothy parker: Heterosexuality isn’t normal. It’s just common.
And adding Ben in oakland: And exclusive heterosexuality is a lot less common than somepeople would like ot think.
I am not aware of any definition of normal that is not essentially arbitrary as to where the line between normal and abnormal is drawn. They will only ever accept definitions in which homosexuality is abnormal.
Barber is using the unspoken assumption that what is abnormal must also be a disease / morally wrong. As Martin Stennert points out above this assumption is very easy to disprove.
Oh, while the sociological definitions of deviance and abnormal behaviour are indeed so unclear as to be practically useless, the mathematical concept of standard deviation, i.e. the famous bell curve, is pretty clearly defined – and useful to boot. I was using that definition to point out that “normal” – what mathematics calls the Median – is rarely desirable in social traits, or at best needs to be evaluated individually from trait to trait.
Of course Rob is quite correct when he points out the inherent dishonesty of using implied assumptions and double meanings to besmirch an opponent while pretending to wash one’s hands in innocence. (And Brutus is an honourable man.)
The greatest danger of these sneaky arguments – just like the “is-homosexuality-a-choice” debate – is that in our reaction we too often betray our hidden agreement with our attackers.
The problem is not the definition of the norm or of deviance, however explicit or implied. Without a doubt homosexuality is far from the centre of the bell curve, not as far as some still common forms of human sexuality, but definitely a good bit from the Median. Even trying to argue with that implies that there is virtue in being in that centre. If you do that, you have already conceded the most important point of the argument.
And that is wrong. The point is that there is no virtue in normality, just as there is no virtue in deviance. Statistics and ethics have no correspondence. We are talking about utterly different frames of reference.
I’m not normal. I think. I question. I’m nice to people (even people who aren’t always nice to me). Frankly, I think that “normal” is overrated.
Oh, and I’m a redhead, too! The HORROR!
I’m sure he meant “deviant” in the nicest way possible.
Being a currently-studying statistics major, I feel it necessary to point out that Matt Barber’s use of the term “deviant” is inapplicable here. Martin Stennert, above, does a better job than I could attacking Barber’s misuse of mathematics, but I wanted to state clearly that even in a purely mathematical sense, Barber doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
By using the word “deviant” and insisting that it’s not pejorative, Barber seems to be trying to call up the idea of the standard deviation and the mean. But any first-year statistics student knows that those terms have no meaning when dealing with categorical data. Unless Barber goes around asking people “On a scale of one to ten, how gay are you?”, sexual orientation is a categorical variable– you can’t numerically quantify your sexuality. The only sort of data he could have are basic percentages of how many people are gay, straight, or somewhere in-between. That kind of data is not scalar, has no bell curve, has no mean or median; there is no such thing as “deviance” in categorical data. There are data points that fall into categories less densely populated than others, but those points are not considered mathematically strange or less representative of the whole. Variation is normal and expected within data. Without it, statisticians would be out of a job.
Anyway, scary math-talk over. The gist of it is that there is no such thing as a standard deviation for human sexuality. Barber should pay more attention in math class.