WASHINGTON, D.C.—Michael Schwartz, chief of staff for Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), told a group of attendees at the Value Voters Summit on Saturday that all pornography is gay pornography because it “turns your sexual drive inwards.”
There was a purported point to Schwartz’ inane comments, which came during a morning session called “the new masculinity,” during which he also illuminated the crowd with a somewhat tortuous insight into teenage sexuality and homosexuality, cementing perhaps for all time his role as one of Washington’s most strident bigots and a man who clearly will never let a fact (or common sense) overcome his own ideology.
The Value Voters Summit is sponsored by the Family Research Council, which was “founded in 1983 as an organization dedicated to the promotion of marriage and family and the sanctity of human life in national policy.”
“Pornography is a blight,” Schwartz told the standing-room-only crowd at the Omni Shoreham hotel, expressing a view of adult entertainment that many in the crowd no doubt share. “It is a disaster. It is one of those silent diseases in our society that we haven’t been able to overcome very well. Now, I may be getting politically incorrect here. And it’s been a few years, but not that many, since I was closely associated with pre-adolescent boys, boys around 10 years of age. But it is my observation that boys of that age have less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people. They speak badly about homosexuality. And that’s because they don’t want to be that way. They don’t want to fall into it.”
Not content to conflate his own discomfort with homosexuality as a 10-year-old with the presumed intolerance of all other 10-year-olds (even gay ones!), Schwartz then told the story of a friend of his, Jim Johnson, who he said “was in the homosexual lifestyle for a long time” and would talk to him about the malady.
“One of the things he said to me,” Schwartz said, “that I think is an astonishingly insightful remark … ‘All pornography is homosexual pornography, because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards.’
“Now, think about that,” he added. “And if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s going to want to get a copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants! You know, that’s a good comment, it’s a good point, and it’s a good thing to teach young people.”
One would be hard-pressed to find so many fallacies shoved into so brief a comment, but such is the state of the culture in America that the chief of staff of a United States senator has no trouble uttering them at a highly publicized event that included conservatives such as Mitt Romney, Mike Pence, Rick Perry, Ed Meese, Bill O’Reilly, Mike Huckabee, Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Newt Gingrich, Roy Blunt and Bill Bennett—a group that contains the names of a few people who will be running for the office of president in the next election.
Suffice to say, remarks such as the ones Schwartz made are red meat intended to whip up a nice froth of outrage among the true believers even if they do not make a whit of sense. It clearly matters not to the man or his boss the serious disservice and possible damage he is doing to all adolescents, male and female, who might think that his comments have any merit at all.
The “astonishingly insightful remark” by his gay friend that “all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards” will probably get the most attention, and already has elicited some comments from the blogosphere, not least from Queerty (of course).
“Inwards? Well, sure, porn helps you find out, inwardly, what you're into,” they write, in a post labeled Idiot Logic. “It arouses you, inwardly, if only because there's probably no willing sexual partner around an 11-year-old. But what's any of that got to do with homosexuality? A boy playing with his own penis is going to make him crave more penis? The only way that could happen is if, uh, he's already gay.”
“An all time low. Even for the Christian Jihadists,” reads one of the comments on Queerty.
A full transcript and video of Schwartz' remarks can be found at Think Progress.
A 2005 Nation profile of Schwartz can be found here.
