Book Burning

Ryan T. Anderson
photo from Wikipedia

Three years ago Ryan T. Anderson wrote a book. It was on a controversial topic, but sensitively presented and extremely well documented. It received praise from all sides. Well, not all. But all reasonable sides.

That book was recently removed from the Amazon online marketplace. For violating community standards. The author wasn’t informed or warned. The book had previously topped at least two of Amazon’s bestseller lists. It received high praise from experts in the field, and even from those with opposing views. It would be hard to find any more informative and sensitively written work on the subject. Amazon holds an 80% market share for booksellers.

The book is When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. You can still purchase a copy at this other online site.

image from here

Ryan Anderson is President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He spent time working at the Heritage Foundation and the Wotherspoon Institute before taking this most recent position. As a graduate student, in 2012, he co-wrote “What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense” for the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy along with mentor Robert George and fellow student Sherif Girgis. Besides many journal articles, he has also written Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, in 2015; and Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination (co-written with Sherif Girgis and John Corvino), in 2017.  When Harry Met Sally was his most recent book, from 2018.

I’ve referred to his works numerous times here on this blog. Here are a few:

·         Bigness, April 16, 2015 

·         Path Forward for Us Dissidents, July 20, 2015 

·         Duty to Resist, September 7, 2015 

·         SOGI Laws Discriminate Against Religious People, February 22, 2019 

He is only this year turning 40. All this is to say, he is an extremely impressive young man, and a serious voice that deserves to be heard.

In a piece about his book being banned, Ryan Anderson mentioned the inaptly titled legislation currently before Congress:

It’s an abuse of our civil rights law when we add all these different protected classes and when we treat reasonable disagreements as if they’re discriminatory. We’ve done it on the gay marriage debate; we’re now doing it on the transgender debate. And the Equality Act would just make this worse.

And in a piece he wrote this week, Anderson says, 

[F]irst, a caveat: If you fear what Big Tech can do if you dissent from gender ideology, just wait to see what Big Government will do if the so-called Equality Act becomes law. Second, a lesson: If you fear Big Government, don’t turn a blind eye to Big Tech. Conservatives need to get over the misguided belief that private businesses can do whatever they want. That isn’t true. And it’s never been the American law on the issue. Nor is it what the natural law supports.

In 2019 books by researcher Joseph Nicolosi were removed from Amazon, as his son explains, “not because science dictates their removal, but because LGBT ideology has shouted down sound science.” Joseph Nicolosi, Sr., was a longtime, well-respected researcher. He wasn’t into the undefined and unregulated “conversion therapy” maligned in media depictions. He was a serious psychologist and researcher/ who developed methods that helped resolve issues for those seeking that resolution. I cited his works many times in my writings on the defense of marriage.

Note that Mein Kampf is still available. It does not violate Amazon’s community standards.

What are the false ideas so dangerous that they should not be allowed to be read—in books, in articles—or heard in recordings, speeches, or lectures? It’s SOGI issues (i.e., sexual orientation and gender issues), but also more:

·       There are two sexes of humans: male and female.

·       Permanently disfiguring a child to pretend they are something other than their biological sex is child abuse.

·       Sexual orientation is not immutable; treating with reintegrative therapy can help resolve issues for those who seek that help.

·       Covid-19 can be successfully treated with such inexpensive and widely available therapies as hydroxycholoroquine with zinc and azithromycin.

·       There is significant evidence of election fraud.

·       Race relations don’t get better when you insist on viewing everything in terms of race instead of character and ability.

You can probably think of a few to add to that list. But those are some things that will get you in trouble on social media and many other places—except maybe the HCQ treatment, which suddenly became acceptable news after being labeled dangerously false for most of a year.

There’s this sort of frenzy, among the dictators of what is allowed to be said, that posits there’s too much misinformation and disinformation being spread—and that is a danger to our democracy and must be stopped.

Tucker Carlson did an excellent monologue on February 23^rd, on the mixture of censorship, misinformation/disinformation, and truth. He noted that the MSM use the word “norms” a lot. Supposedly these so-called “norms” are violated when people say things they don’t like. And violating norms, they claim, destroys democracy. His montage was pretty amusing.

Tucker Carlson, screenshot from his February 23rd show

But then he notes, more seriously, that there are real consequences to people getting the wrong information. An example he uses is the mismatch between public views and the real statistics on police killing unarmed black men. People on the street were wildly overestimating the problem. Who is doing the misinforming? is a legitimate question. He says:

A lot of Americans are completely and utterly misinformed, and that has consequences. Public policy can change dramatically on the basis of things people think they know but don’t actually know. And we have seen that a lot. Entire police departments got defunded.

So it’s worth finding out where the public is getting all this false information, this disinformation, as we’ll call it. So we checked. We spent all day trying to locate the famous QAnon, which in the end we learned is not even a website. If it’s out there, we could not find it. Then we checked Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter feed, because we have heard she traffics in disinformation—CNN told us—but nothing there. Next we called our many friends in the tight-knit intel community. Could Vladimir Putin be putting this stuff out there? The Proud Boys? Alex Jones?

Who is lying to America in ways that are certain to make us hate each other and certain to destroy our core institutions? Well, none of the above, actually. It wasn’t Marjorie Taylor Greene; it was cable news. It was politicians talking on TV. They’re the ones spreading disinformation to America.

By the way, a couple of months ago I also tried to track down Q, or QAnon if you’d rather. Just so I could see actual posts, or drops, rather than what various people said Q had said. I literally couldn’t find a way to sign up to get Q drops. If it’s intended to spread, the spreader sure does make it hard. (I hope I didn’t accidentally get on some government list, just because I was trying to do due diligence.)

The odd thing, then, is that those who are so upset about the spread of wrong ideas are the ones spreading falsehoods.

This might be intentional.

Joshua Philipp of The Epoch Times was giving a talk in Texas earlier this month in which he said this: 

If you go back and read the Communist Manifesto, what does it say? “Communism abolishes eternal truths.” And what is eternal truth, right?

It says, “Communism abolishes all religion and all morality.” We think it’s an economic theory. You go back to the 1930s, it was never an economic theory; it was a metaphysical theory, meaning it is a belief. And it’s a belief of a cult of man. And that you can only create that cult of man by destroying God and everything that God created in man. It is a system to re-create society in the image of man and not in the image of God.

And so everything they do is to make you abandon your faith. Everything they do is to undermine your morals, to destroy your traditions, to destroy your family values, to destroy everything that your country and your culture and your character is based upon. And it is only through that, if they can achieve it, that they can achieve their goals.

And so, at Epoch Times, we of course have our slogan: Truth and Tradition—meant to speak the truth and uphold traditions. This is something we’re going to be doing into the distant, distant future. And we will never be silent.

Truth and tradition are very different from “our truth” and “our norms.” I certainly don’t want someone with a Marxist ideology—or really any other ideology—dictating what I’m allowed to say or read.

Hitler Youth burning books, 1938
Alamy stock photo found here

How do you know, at the beginning of a discussion, before both sides lay out their evidence and persuasive points, which side holds objective truth? Or even which side is most persuasive? You need to be able to express things that might not turn out to be true.

If there’s going to be some rule about what you can say, because it may not be true, then you have to ask, who is the arbiter of truth?

Our founders made this clear in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” and then listed the God-given unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and then declared government’s purpose to defend these rights, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

But, in Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope, he misconstrues that clarity this way:

Implicit in [the Constitution’s] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course.

As I mentioned some years ago,  you can’t get from that point A, the Declaration and Constitution, to that point B, rejection of absolute truth; there is no such path. As Dr. Larry Arnn puts the question, “How did Barack Obama come to believe something so foreign to America’s heritage as the idea that in the name of liberty we must reject absolute truths—which necessarily includes rejecting those truths I just quoted from the Declaration?”

Who, then, gets to be the arbiter of truth, if not God? There are a great many people I would absolutely not want to grant that power to.

Here's the irony: the self-appointed arbiters of truth reject absolute truth. But if there is no objective, perceivable truth, then why is “their truth” so right that any other “truth” must be censored—not only as simply untrue but harmful enough to be considered subversive?   

Book burning is never about protecting the unsuspecting public from false ideas; it is about protecting the power elites from dissent.

Another Study Says No Gay Gene

There’s an ongoing question concerning how to get truth. It’s difficult. Case in point: there’s a new study that confirms old studies; this new study produced these conflicting headlines:

Popular Science: “A massive study confirms no one ‘gay gene’ controls sexual preference” 

Houston Chronicle (Associated Press): “Study finds genetic links to gay sexuality”[i]

They’re talking about the same study, which looked at “the entire human genome scanning, using blood samples from the U.K. Biobank and saliva samples from customers of U.S.-based ancestry and biotech company 23andMe.” Participants from 23andMe had agreed to have their genetic info used, including specifically for this study.

Health/Science section, Houston Chronicle,
Sunday, September 1, 2019, page A23

What did previous studies say? There isn’t a “gay gene.” But there are various genetic influences on behavior, none of which determine behavior, but when combined with culture and behavior can be said to possibly contribute. I would describe this as similar to a predisposition to alcoholism, which might be partly genetic but does not determine behavior.

Even the article that claims genetic links were found said the study “echoes research that says there are no specific genes that make people gay.” And, quoting the Science commentary notes, “the five identified variants had such a weak effect on behavior that using the results ‘for prediction, intervention or a supposed “cure” is wholly and unreservedly impossible.’”

The Popular Science piece reads, “Genetics can’t predict whether a person will engage in same-sex sexual behavior, according to new research published in the journal Science. The study, which tested nearly half a million people, found that while there are some genes that contribute to sexual behavior, they each only play a tiny role—social and environmental factors make up the rest.”

Among the findings of this new study are some overlap with schizophrenia and depression. And, among men, two of the genes thought to be minute contributors to same-sex sexuality are “located near genes involved in male-pattern baldness and sense of smell.” Relevant? Who knows?

But there’s a puzzling question being asked: why is research like this being done when the data it produces goes against the LGBTQ narrative?

Professor Darren Whitfield, of the University of Pittsburgh, not involved in the study, admits “This study puts to rest the notion that there is a ‘gay gene.’” But he adds, “It seemed that the scientists were mindful of the message it might send. In the past, researchers working in genetics in this area really did not think about the consequences work like that might have.”

In other words, he’s glad the scientists involved in the study presented the information in a way that would soften the blow of disagreeing with the LGBTQ lobby. Whitfield says, “These things do have the potential to reinforce homophobia. It can reinforce the idea of any abnormality [connected] to same-sex attraction.”

He’s worried that truth leads to homophobia. Also, he believes a genetic anomaly would not have reinforced the idea of the abnormality of same-sex attraction, but lack of a genetic anomaly does.

Research associate at the Broad Institute, Meagan Olive, didn’t think the authors of the study were careful enough. She is quoted in the Popular Science piece: “I am not satisfied with the authors’ justification for performing this study; they are ultimately jeopardizing the perception and safety of the LGBTQIA+ community.” I don’t know what all those letters, let alone the + sign, mean. But she’s revealing a bias that truth should not be sought if it has the potential to contradict a “perception” that this group of people prefer.

This information has been out for decades[ii] without increasing homophobia. On the other hand, the lie that a person is “born that way” and their behavior must therefore be normalized has led to changes in law and religious persecution of anyone who doesn’t tow that line—to the point of shutting down businesses, suing grandmothers for even their life savings, and removing research from availability online. 

The persecution isn’t aimed at gays; it’s aimed at anyone who doesn’t celebrate their gay-ness.

Family is the basic unit of civilization. That’s how we pass along the necessities of civilization, parents to children. When a family functions as it should, the foundation is love stronger than we experience it anywhere beyond love of God for us.

A standard family, the kind that produces offspring to pass along civilization to, is a married mother and father raising their own children. Civilization requires a critical mass of such families.

The parents want their children to grow up, become contributing members of society, and become parents who will pass along thriving civilization to yet another generation.

Look at this not particularly rare scenario (around 2% of the population). A child comes home and has the talk with his parents, telling them he’s gay. What happens? If the family is functioning, they still love that child and express that clearly—even if (maybe especially if) they are religious and are sorrowful that he may choose to live a lifestyle they don’t approve of.

The big kick-in-the-gut feeling those parents are experiencing is grief—at the loss of the future they had hoped for this child they deeply love. Their genetic line dead ends with him. The hope for a happy family life, like the one they have and have raised him in, is dashed.

It ought to be obvious that LGBTQ issues are reason to mourn, to sorrow for the person whose future happiness won’t include procreation. There must be ways of expressing ongoing love for such a child without rejoicing or celebrating something that reasonably causes sorrow.

A parent might want to help their child find a solution. There are some. But they’re hard to find, and there’s been such prejudice against even the idea of seeking them that people who sorrow about having same-sex attraction feel unhelped and hopeless. And parents feel at a loss.

We’ve gone through about 45 years since studies were curtailed, because same-sex attraction was taken off the list of mental issues—not based on research, but because of political lobbying.

One of the longtime researchers, even after the ban, was Joseph Nicolosi. He helped people by dealing with childhood trauma and other issues, which was called reparative therapy, not conversion therapy. He also wrote books to help parents. But his books have now been banned on Amazon, which doesn’t ban books such as Hitler’s Mein Kampf or even a topic such as glorifying pedophilia. 

His son, Joseph Nicolosi, Jr., has continued in the psychological field in similar research. As most psychologists are aware, there are multiple mental (and often also physical) issues common among people with LGBT issues, depression among them, even in countries that have long embraced homosexuality and removed social stigma.

Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, Jr. (left) and Michael Knowles
screen shot from the Michael Knowles Show, September 21, 2018

Dr. Nicolosi, Jr., and others have found that a therapy called reintegrative therapy can help. Even if clients/patients are satisfied with their orientation, they may want to deal with issues from their childhood, to alleviate depression and other issues. [I wrote about this here.] One possible effect—not the purpose—is sometimes a lessening of same-sex attraction, or even what appears to be choosing to leave the gay lifestyle and maybe even beginning to feel heterosexual attraction.

This is not something that parents or anyone can force someone into. It’s a type of talk therapy that can only work for a person who chooses to engage in it. And the purpose is for the person to gain peace and greater happiness, not orientation change. So far his work is still available here.

There’s fear of truth among proponents of LGBT issues.

Wouldn’t it be kinder to seek even more truth, and make it available?

All the while, we must treat each other with respect. Everyone must have the right to life, liberty, and property. Mixed in there is likely a right to make a living, to run a business as one sees fit, and to seek safe and comfortable living conditions.

I haven’t in my lifetime and places I’ve lived seen where depriving homosexuals of these rights was in any way acceptable. I have, however, witnessed many instances in which pro-LGBT forces deprive proponents of traditional marriage of those rights.

Wouldn’t we all be better off seeking and speaking the truth? This effort is made more difficult when writers about the issue can’t even write a headline that coincides with the story they put beneath it.

---

[i] Houston Chronicle, Sunday, September 1, 2019, p. 23.

[ii] See, for example, “’Homosexuality Is Not Hardwired,’ Concludes Head of The Human Genome Project,” LifeSiteNews, March 20, 2007. Also, the United Families International blog February 28, 2011, “Myth Buster Monday: Is homosexuality genetic, immutable and unchangeable?” says this: “It is necessary for homosexual advocates to equate homosexual behavior to an immutable and unchangeable trait (like race or sex) in order to claim the “gay rights” movement is a Civil Rights issue.  But can those who deal with homosexual tendencies and behavior change?  Yes, thousands of former-homosexuals are testimony to the fact that change is possible.  Gay advocates and psychological associations are particularly eager and aggressive in their efforts to discredit reparative/reorientation therapy groups who work to aid individuals who wish to escape homosexual behavior and lifestyle.

“The success of the gay movement seems to hinge upon their ability to convince the public that change is impossible.”

Books Worth Reading

This past week was Banned Book Week. Often an interesting list—often with the specific purpose of ridiculing the very idea of limiting books for children. I agree that banning Huckleberry Finn is pretty ridiculous (because it contains the “N” word, along with a whole lot of anti-racist perspective, beautifully told). But that doesn’t mean that every book should therefore be available and recommended.

One of the well used shelves in the home library

I’ve been thinking about youth literature again. Some weeks ago I read Hillsdale College’s Imprimis newsletter, which featured a piece by Meghan Cox Gurdon, the children’s book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. The piece was called “The Case for Good Taste in Children’s Books,” which was adapted from a speech given at Hillsdale in March. Here is some of her introduction:

[There’s an] increasingly dark current that runs through books classified as YA, for Young Adult—books aimed at readers between 12 and 18 years of age—a subset that has, in the four decades since Young Adult became a distinct category in fiction, become increasingly lurid, grotesque, profane, sexual, and ugly.

Books show us the world, and in that sense, too many books for adolescents act like funhouse mirrors, reflecting hideously distorted portrayals of life. Those of us who have grown up understand that the teen years can be fraught and turbulent—and for some kids, very unhappy—but at the same time we know that in the arc of human life, these years are brief. Today, too many novels for teenagers are long on the turbulence and short on a sense of perspective. Nor does it help that the narrative style that dominates Young Adult books is the first person present tense—“I, I, I,” and “now, now, now.” Writers use this device to create a feeling of urgency, to show solidarity with the reader and to make the reader feel that he or she is occupying the persona of the narrator. The trouble is that the first person present tense also erects a kind of verbal prison, keeping young readers in the turmoil of the moment just as their hormones tend to do. This narrative style reinforces the blinkers teenagers often seem to be wearing, rather than drawing them out and into the open.

If there is one thing teenagers do not need, it is encouragement to be more emotional and less cerebral. “Follow your passions” is about the worst advice in the world for someone who doesn’t yet know how to temper that with a wise, considered decision.

I agree with her about the ugliness of youth literature. I like reading a lot of YA fiction. Some of the better things being written are aimed at the YA audience. But she’s right that a lot of it is too intense, and too ugly for young people without a better, clearer world view.

She makes a very good point further into the piece, about decisions of taste:

Books tell children what to expect, what life is, what culture is, how we are expected to behave—what the spectrum is. Books don’t just cater to tastes. They form tastes. They create norms—and as the examples above show, the norms young people take aware are not necessarily the norms adults intend. This is why I am skeptical of the social utility of so-called “problem novels”—books that have a troubled main character, such as a girl with a father who started raping her when she was a toddler and anonymously provides her with knives when she is a teenager hoping that she will cut herself to death. (This scenario is from Cheryl Rainfield’s 2010 Young Adult novel, Scars, which School Library Journal hailed as “one heck of a good book.”) The argument in favor of such books is that they validate the real and terrible experiences of teenagers who have been abused, addicted, or raped—among other things. The problem is that the very act of detailing these pathologies, not just in one book but in many, normalizes them. And teenagers are all about identifying norms and adhering to them.

Suppose you have some young people (and there are many) who grow up in broken homes, with some chaos and ugliness in the home. Not enough expectation of honesty, or hard work. Not enough hope for things to get better. Nothing like an example of good fathering and mothering working in tandem to successfully raise children to fully launched adults.  There is a dearth of literature that tells children what a healthy household looks like. The stereotype now is broken and troubled homes. How do young people get the idea of a healthy norm if they get it neither from their real-life culture nor from their literature?

Mr. Spherical Model thinks I would be using my time well to write such children’s literature. That’s an appealing idea. I have gone so far as to invent some characters, and some of the surrounding milieu and action. I haven’t yet envisioned the story that will take over my life until I get it written. So, we’ll see. But I’d like to see more of that kind of story.

This past Thursday I came across an article that furthers Gurdon’s point, “Common Core-Approved Child Pornography.” Often when I find articles that make important points, I save a copy; however, while I recommend this one, some of the content in it is so graphic that I don’t want it permanently in my home. This PolitiChicks piece provides examples (with warnings about graphic content—these are in italics, if you must skip them) from a recommended youth novel, so you know there’s no exaggeration. It’s from the point of view of a child rapist, without judgment, so the reader can identify with the point of view of the perpetrator—including graphic descriptions of the violent sex acts, using words like “friendly,” “innocent,” and “tender.” If you are not nauseated, then ask yourself what you’ve been numbing yourself with.

The article itself asks the logical question about why anyone would think this was appropriate reading for children.

Using just the smallest amount of common sense we can deduce that if the book cannot be read aloud in the class, could not be viewable if it was a movie and couldn’t be played on the stereo if it was a CD, then why is it okay for it to be read and discussed; in school of all places! In fact, according to one lawyer, if the incidents in this book were a movie or a picture there would be a very clear cut case for prosecution for child pornography.

A library, not to mention the money needed to stock a library, is a scarce resource. Why use scarce resources on things that defile the mind—of anyone? If there are any parents out there that disagree and think this graphic portrayal of sex and violence is necessary to the education of their child, can’t they just buy it themselves and expose their child to it, without requiring the purchase of it by the rest of us taxpayers, and the subsequent exposure of it to our children, against our will?

When we’re talking about school bookshelves, there are plenty of books that ought not to be allotted real estate there. But rather than concentrating on what gets banned, I suggest we spend more energy and resources hunting for the literature that feeds and civilizes a growing mind, something that normalizes and exemplifies civilization. Let the searchers and selectors be parents and maybe trusted teachers—never some distant so-called expert.