The Myth of Modern Equality

One morning, one of our dogs accidentally nipped my mother’s finger, drawing a little blood. She shrieked and cried and did a little dance of pain and I know that, instinctively, that is how I would react at the same issue. Except that’s not how I react. I yell and shout and get angry, then am chastised for it.

Why do I react contrary to my nature? Because I have been trained. All through society, and even in my own home, I have been subjected to a form of social brainwashing that tells me I have to be aggressive. If I’m not, I’m shamed and made to feel subhuman, yet when I act on the programming society has given me, I’m chastised for being so angry and aggressive. It’s easier to have someone mad at you than to be made to think that you are less than a person, so men such as myself go along with the training.

This exact training leads to the violence and aggression that feminists insist proves the evil of men – violence and aggression, mind you, that may never have materialized if we, as boys, hadn’t been told that this is how we must behave. In essence, our culture creates us and then condemns us.

This is neither a sob story about the plight of men nor an indictment of the evils of women, however. It is instead a crusade in literary form, an act of dragging demons into the light where they may be seen for what they truly are.

Feminists point to history as the reason for their endless litany of grievances, yet this same history is what is causing the suffering of both men and women.

I will illuminate:

When humanity was still in its primate stage, each gender had its duty and behaved much like the apes of today: the males, being larger and stronger, protected their families from predators while the females nurtured the young.

However, we are no longer primitive apes simply looking for survival. We possess conscience, the ability to feel regret, understand others’ points of view, and form our own moral compass. We claim the greatest asset of all, the power of self-determination.

Self-determination allows us to be the people we want to be. A man can be a nurturer and a caregiver while a woman can be a fighter. Unfortunately, society and culture get in the way of this ability.

While religions such as Judaism, with its codified misogyny, might seem like the starting point of male dominance, historical context says otherwise. Considering that Judaism also has holy writ against bestiality, it seems less like turning women into possessions and more like ensuring that the tribe would continue. Since such rules would not exist if everyone wasn’t humping everything, it can be inferred that the Israelites might have ended up with a single man left to impregnate the entire tribe, resulting in catastrophic inbreeding and rapid extinction.

The alternative provided in the Torah is savage, yes, but remember that at the time humanity was most likely just as savage. As Mike Judge’s Idiocracy shows, if you’re dealing with people far less intelligent than yourself, it’s easier and oftentimes safer to just say that your knowledge is magic or your rules are holy law, rather than try to explain the reasoning.

However, this is not a study in religion. It just so happens that, as religion has a practically immutable place in human culture, religion must be addressed.

The true origin of male dominance in Western society lies with Aristotle. In his scientific observations, based on what information he could gather from investigating flowers, pinecones and other more easily dissected living things, Aristotle determined that the man implanted the baby into a woman, who then served as the incubator. He asserted, based on observations and theories that were at the time irrefutable, that the woman only served as the host to the child, and did not contribute to the child’s creation.

When the world’s smartest person, taught by the world’s smartest person, who was in turn again taught by the world’s smartest person, makes an assertion, it is widely accepted as law. As such, women were relegated to the secondary role in reproduction; however, with the Greek pantheon containing such powerful female figures as Athena and Demeter, this did not cause an immediate change. It did, however, lay the foundations for what was to come.

If Aristotle was the originator of male dominance, Constantine was the codifier. One of the reasons why the Roman Empire expanded so easily and remained stable was the limited intrusion of Roman culture upon the conquered. It was a slow and easy assimilation process that allowed defeated nations to retain much of their history and traditions.

This all changed with the establishment of Constantine’s Holy Roman Empire. Suddenly Christianity was the state religion, rigidly enforced. Anyone who’s played the children’s game “telephone” knows what happens when information gets spread around to those who don’t understand it, particularly when the actual source is jealously guarded. Through repeated partial interpretations, misunderstandings and politicking, women were now officially second-class citizens and possessions according to holy law.

But did Aristotle and Constantine know what would happen and plan for a male-dominated society, or was the result simply caused by the balance of power shifting?

Feminists love to paint all men with the wide brush of rapist, potential rapist, rape apologist, misogynist, and all sorts of other lovely words that demonize an entire gender, but is it truly the gender’s fault?

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, “Anyone can handle adversity. If you want to see someone’s true character, give them power.” I use gender-neutral pronouns for a reason: as of today, men are no more naturally aggressive than women. The cause of many crimes is the possession of power, or the perceived possession thereof.

The Japanese were widely known for their politeness, honor and strict code of conduct, yet during WWII the number of atrocities committed by Japanese troops – rape, looting, sexual abuse, degradation – was astonishing. Were these Japanese men always like that, somehow held at bay by the mere presence of Japanese women? A radical feminist might like to think so, but the truth is that when someone is given absolute power and a guarantee (real or perceived) of no consequences, they will often do horrible things.

Likewise, if the oppressed allow themselves to be consumed by hatred and the desire for vengeance, they will become the oppressors and their atrocities will be far worse than those perpetrated on them. My example, also drawing from WWII, is Germany. After being drawn into the first war through alliances and treaties and being forced to hold their own even after their allies fell, Germany was deemed a threat and picked apart. Their economy, their heritage, their homes and their happiness were systematically destroyed. It was in this despair that fascism took root and allowed WWII to commence.

So too is it with the feminist movement, which insists that all men are responsible for the crimes of a few, and that all men carry the crimes of the past with us. We in 2013 are to blame for the Middle Ages. It’s not the fault of the church, or of society as a whole, and of course it’s not the fault of the people of that time period. Men are compressed into a singularity: no matter where or when an atrocity was committed, each and every man shares responsibility.

Take a moment and look down at your fist. How many times have you dealt with someone who made you want to punch them, to beat them to a bloody pulp? How many times have you acted on those impulses? That is not only law at work; it is the human conscience. The brain can override the body, reason can triumph over animal instinct.

Why, then, do feminists claim that they want equality and then immediately insist that men are subhuman, that they cannot control their instincts in a manner in which humans are able?

I often say that, “stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason,” yet most are analyzed, proven false, and forgotten. Why, then, have the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity persisted for thousands of years, and why are we as a society complicit in the perpetuation of these blatant lies?

Male aggression does not come from being a man: it comes from being a man who is then taught that he must be aggressive, that he must be insensitive and refuse to show emotion, that he must never display pain and that any deviation from this list of rules means that he is no longer a person.

From infanthood, boys cry and fuss more than girls but are more often ignored. Even at that young of an age, he is presumed to be an angry and violent sort whose desires should not be indulged, while a girl who cries even a little is immediately attended to. Babies who are forced to cry themselves to sleep and whose pains and needs are ignored or discounted end up displaying symptoms in exact alignment with post-traumatic stress disorder. We are torturing our children – particularly our boys – from birth. Is it any wonder why so many men seem screwed-up?

And why are girls permitted to cry and protected when they do? This has been the state of the genders for centuries. During the Renaissance a woman could start crying at a man’s slightest actions and said man could be ejected from the manor or even challenged to a duel for insulting the woman. Women keep this power, as well as accumulating more, and yet men start at a disadvantage and only lose ground.

How about the illusion of male power? Men are automatically presumed by society, courts and police to be the ones in the position of power, so they are automatically guilty until proven innocent. Male victims of domestic violence are mocked, insulted, told that they are in fact the abusers, and all sorts of horrible things. As bad as female victims of rape suffer, they at least have support groups. Male victims of rape are emotionally abused by their peers and often refused aid on the grounds that a man supposedly can’t be raped. He must always secretly want it, even though it’s a patently obvious fact that involuntary erections can be caused by stimulation.

According to the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, men constitute more than 53% of domestic and sexual violence victims. This doesn’t even include male rape victims, who weren’t even tallied. Of course, the actual numbers only appear buried in the CDC’s full report. The female numbers were the only ones publicized.

In essence, men are told that they are in power but then every facet of society shows them that they are not. The only men truly in power are the ultra-rich, and it is those men that feminism focuses on. They see only the top while attacking only the bottom, those men who have already been abused by the system.

Many women complaining about equal pay for equal work are convinced that this is some sort of conspiracy by men to keep women down. Seriously? Men have so little actual power as it is; are they really supposed to have the clout to ensure an international conspiracy?

I put forth this alternative: In the capitalist, corporate world, there are no men or women. There are only numbers: the cost, profit, reliability, et cetera. Women who get pregnant will not be able to work for several months, up to a year. Women suffering from particularly bad PMS or PMDD can be a detriment to workplace productivity. If a man sexually harasses a woman in the workplace, it is cheap and easy to sweep under the rug and costs almost nothing in terms of time or money. If a woman gets pregnant, she can no longer work and may not even return after birth. Is it any wonder that the faceless corporations, for whom there is only profit and human rights are a bad joke, prefer men over women?

And again, through the false perception of male power, the sexual harassment of men in the workplace is something funny or even good, a way of “sticking it” to other men who may have potentially wronged the woman, even if the man she harasses has no association with anything except for the fact that he has a penis.

Of course, this abuse of power is not limited to small gestures that amount to death by mosquito bites. In fact, let’s look back into history again. The next time a feminist tells you that a female government would abolish war, hand her a book on African history and resist the urge to slap her with it. Before European sailors discovered Africa, the vast majority of nations there were matriarchal. Not only did these female-led nations wage war, they took vast amounts of slaves and used them as sex toys, target practice and even currency.

Despite the modern depiction, Europeans never went into Africa to capture slaves. They bought slaves who’d already been captured. Tell me again how good and pure female-run governments are when the largest matriarchal nations in history not only dehumanized other men and women to the point that they were currency, but created enough of a market for their atrocities that they would wage wars exclusively to take more slaves for sale.

The reason that the African tribes changed from matriarchal to patriarchal (or, rather, patriarchal except in subservience to European men and women) was, again, power. The Europeans had guns and flotillas; the Africans had spears. They may have had the numbers and the advantage of home terrain, but when firearms and the economy are both in your opponent’s possession, you’re going to lose the war.

And that is exactly what has happened to the men of today. Only a small percentage of unbelievably wealthy – mostly white – men enjoy the supposedly universal “male privilege.” The rest are exploited by those men in power and persecuted by the subtly powerful feminist movement for the crimes of being how society forced them to be.

Ask a feminist why, if men were supposed to be in power, were African men treated as property and as subhuman chattel right alongside the women. The answer, and not the rhetorical sputum that will come from someone who lacks talking points to regurgitate, is simple: the hierarchy was not based around men; it was based around power. Men were simply lucky that a number of coincidences favored them.

Those coincidences no longer exist. Men are automatically expected to be bad; exploitation of men is discounted because it’s supposed to be a male fantasy and can’t possibly be negative; and whenever feminism makes an advancement it does its damndest to deny the same advancement to men. The canned reasoning is that men must already have such advantages, but the truth is that feminism is no longer about equality: feminism is now about making modern men pay for crimes in which they had no hand, and manufacturing new criminals and victims in order to keep the illusion consistent.

If we strip away all the rhetoric, the history, and the gender warfare, men and women are exactly equal in their propensity to do harm (emotional or physical) to others, to themselves, to both; or to do good for all. In order to truly move forward, we must ensure that both men and women are treated fairly, that they are no longer forced into gender roles and then either punished or rewarded by fiat.

All human beings have the right to self-determine. It’s time we exercised that right. A man shouldn’t be made to feel less than human for crying when he gets hurt. A woman shouldn’t be told that she must have enjoyed being raped since she got pregnant. Men must no longer be automatically assumed to be the bad guys. The sexual and domestic abuse of men cannot be the subject of ridicule; it must be treated just as seriously as if a woman were the victim.

We repeatedly assert that prejudice is an evil; why is prejudice against men portrayed as a virtue?

A Cult

I have no premeditated witticisms for this one. I'm too pissed-off for that, but I'll probably toss some stuff out on the fly just so I don't cry myself to sleep tonight. I can no longer sit idly by and pretend at some facsimile of political correctness or benefit of the doubt. That time has passed, and I must truly speak my mind. I make no apologies to anyone who is offended or thinks that I am too harsh.


The Republican Party is a cult, as sadistic as Charles Manson's family and as fiercely devoted as the residents of Jonestown. They deny science, dehumanize anyone who doesn't conform to their delusions, and call for the deaths of whomever they arbitrarily declare to be the enemy. As I write this all off-the-cuff, I realize that I must give this some structure or I may devolve into the same firebrand death-wishing as those I so despise, so let's do this.

Formation
First off, a cult does not need to be established around a religion; a dogma or philosophy works just as well, as Nazi Germany showed. The National Socialist party was most certainly a cult, and it rejected all religion.

The only true necessity for a cult to form is a dogma strong enough to gather like-minded followers and enough intelligence in the leader to realize that it needs to be kept silent. I cannot point to exactly when the Republican party became wholly infested by their cult, but I know that Conservative dehumanization, death-wishing and regressionist campaigning has existed ever since before the Civil War. My best guess for the firm entrenchment of this cult would be during the McCarthy era, wherein the madmen found that the public was willing to go along with the wildest accusations if driven by fear, and the Other was certainly enough to incite this fear.

The fall of the Soviet Union had to be a crushing blow to this cult, as suddenly there was no looming Other to terrify the proletariat. In the face of this, the cult dug deep and dipped into the collective fears that are nurtured by religious dogma and the willful ignorance that has always been a secondary goal of the Church since its rise to power at the fall of the Roman Empire. Lacking one major Other, they decided to instead sow the seeds of terror and division far and wide, striking at anything they could: homosexuality, women, other races, other religions, other demographics and educational levels; anything that could be painted as Different, Other, and Evil was done so. Fear is the single greatest motivator to make a person act against his or her own best interests.

Dogma
What makes one small group a religion and another group a cult? Well, there are all sorts of reasons, but the number-one thing that separates a religion from a cult is that religion is supposed to be a part of your life, while a cult is intended to BE your life. Nothing can supersede your loyalty to the cult, your subservience and dedication to your leaders. This certainly explains how so many competing Christian religions, who normally despise one another to the point of near-civil war, can work together in the Republican party while still making religion one of their primary stances. The reason, of course, is that their religion is their cult, not whatever denomination they claim. They ally with a church to gain the loyalty of the cattle, following basic talking points while keeping their true intent hidden.

This is another important point in defining a cult: they keep their behavior secret. They do not share their beliefs with others who have not yet been heavily indoctrinated, nor do they share anything about themselves, their lives, friends, activities, or anything else if they can avoid it. Todd Akin's recent verbal atrocity hints at this: we all know that the Republican base believes his words, that the vagina is some magic creature that can slay unwanted sperm, but I don't honestly believe that the cultists in power believe this. This is the dogma they spout to their constituents to get them to fall in lockstep; Akin made the mistake of sharing it with people who would protest, so the rest of the party immediately disavowed him.

In addition, cultists actively reject facts that do not gel with their fantasies. Whether these facts are that their leader is only human and not a god, or that economic deregulation has never worked in the history of modern America, they are ignored and violently shouted down. As with most cults that find their origins in heresy, Republican cultists have no problem with picking apart their holy book - the Bible - and rewriting sections to fit with their own interpretation of the world, to hold up homosexuality as a far greater sin than violating the Ten Commandments or the Two Commandments of Christ's covenant, and to somehow completely negate Jesus' lessons to support the poor and donate their wealth as the rich can never enter Heaven.

Something odd, though, is that most cults don't last very long because they have a single godly figurehead, and with that lost most can no longer cling to their madness, or at least cannot perpetuate it. In this case, scarily enough, I believe that their god-figure is the dollar. Every policy recently offered up that did not strip individuals of their rights was somehow designed to leave more Americans unemployed or stuff even more money in the pockets of the richest Republicans. In this case, the cult's leader will never die as the dollar cannot truly be killed. Instead, we are tasked with the nightmarish challenge of defeating the worshippers rather than executing their leader.

Principles
Cults always stand against human decency, acting in manners directly anathema to the survival of the species. In this case, we know the origin of their actions: fear of the Other keeps their followers quietly in check, following along in abject terror of some evil brown person leaping out to slay them, with the occasional carrot being dangled before them to make them move faster - usually something to do with religion or the stripping of human rights from women or minorities.

However, fear has been working less and less. Americans don't have as much to fear. Fewer and fewer people, though still more than is in any way acceptable, fear others for the color of their skin, their religion or orientation. So, faced with this glaring fact, the cult has changed to incite hatred.

This scares me more than ever, even more than when I first learned about Bush-era renditioning. Tea Party rallies cheer when someone dies from lack of medical care, they call for the deaths of their candidates' political rivals, and plot the demise of our President. All the while their cultist puppet-masters continue to drive them forward, stoking the flames of their rage.

Republicans have made more unfounded claims regarding fellow Americans than we have seen since the age of McCarthy, and now the motivation of these accusations are not fear but hate. We have seen a total of eight mass killings in one month, and the month isn't even over yet.

We need to declare this Republican cult to be the religious terrorists they are before they amass and strike against peaceful Americans. Human compassion from the Right is at an all-time law, and they believe murder to be justified in idealistic disagreements. I do not normally stand as an advocate of fear or direct negative action against fellow human beings, but I can no longer sit quietly and watch as the raving masses continue to build power and create a feedback loop of rage amongst themselves. This bubble of hatred is soon to burst, and I fear for all those who believe in self-determination and human moral responsibility. The most outspoken of them will likely be the first casualties.

Pros and conned

The recent Chik-Fil-A controversy has unveiled a disturbing number of gay-haters, many of whom try to disguise their bigotry - even to themselves - with rhetoric and differing arguments. The "pro-" movement has existed for a long time, and is most often utilized by the ignorant in an attempt to positively or negatively charge a debate.

Take some of the most common (and inaccurate) terms: Pro-Life and Pro-Family. Pro-Life is just a blatant lie. If life is sacred, why is it only sacred until birth? After that, Conservatives work to strip healthcare from mothers and children, stating that programs such as welfare and Medicare are only a drain on society, and it's every person's duty to take care of themselves. Of course, this is why Ron Paul, one of the biggest supporters of abolishing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security makes excessive use of all of them for himself and his family. Apparently only those capable of easily supporting themselves deserve handouts, because why should those with the ability to do so actually do so?
People who are Pro-Life also frequently favor the death penalty and leniency in killings with laws like Stand Your Ground, so again life is sacred only until birth, then they don't seem to care if people die or are murdered. Truly, Pro-Life is simply Anti-Abortion trying to make itself appear friendlier.

Pro-Family is another laughable concept, if one actually takes a step back. Those people who claim to be Pro-Family stand behind representatives who are adulterers, who hate their own family members for being different, who divorce their spouses or abandon them to die, and numerous other atrocities against the concept of family.
The entirety of the Pro-Family argument is basically "pro-anything that's not gay." Gay children are shunned, and gay people are hated. Many of homosexuals' detractors say that gays are "anti-family" or "anti-traditional marriage." This implies that they wish to abolish marriage or tear apart families, and where has one advocate for gay rights seriously come out and said that gay marriage should be the only marriage? I'm seriously asking for a single recorded statement, on the record in a press release, saying that this is the goal.

Now for two actual "pros": First is Pro-Choice, which does nothing but acknowledge that it is each woman's, and each family's, choice. If Pro-Life doesn't care that parents torture and violently beat their children, and calls for the deaths of people every day, how can they claim the moral high ground over a movement that just says that a person's body is his or her own?

Next is Pro-Equality, a common term for the gay rights movement. As the name says, the movement is focused on equal rights, not on superiority. Gays only want the same rights as any other Americans, the ability to visit their loved ones in the hospital and to share the precious commodity that is health insurance, among other things.

As an addendum, I truly do not understand the hatred of gays. Homosexuality is not condemned by the Ten Commandments, nor by any sacred covenant between God and His people. How do the religious Conservatives justify permitting violators of the Ten Commandments, the very building blocks of Christianity, to hold rights that they would keep stripped from gays?

Obamacare; or, What Happened to our Yam-Head?

It's no big secret that I supported Hillary Clinton in the 2008 bid for Democratic presidential candidate. I thought that her experience in the White House, as well as having her husband's knowledge to draw upon (Bill Clinton was the last president to leave us with a surplus, a staggering surplus at that, which Bush burned through and got America nearly a trillion dollars in debt in his first term) would make for an incredibly capable president. I believed that her no-nonsense attitude would also be beneficial, as her track record included far less BDSM-style submission that Democrats misconstrue as compromise.
However, Obama won the nomination and then the presidency, and I supported him as I view anyone with apparently good intentions as being vastly better than the exploitative vultures in the Republican party who would have all money and resources funneled directly to the rich. Unfortunately, his administration has been one of waffling and surrender to the point where I'm surprised the birthers don't think he's from France instead of Kenya.
Guantanamo, Afghanistan, gay marriage; all of these major issues the president has either simply let lie or, in the case of Afghanistan, actively aggravate the situation by pushing more troops into an area where US presence is a prime cause for terrorist sentiment.

Above all else, however, it is this abomination of Obamacare that will forever blight the president in my eyes. It is his "No Child Left Behind," a presidential mandate that will doubtlessly begin to tear apart those least fortunate. The original proposition reviled by Conservatives as Obamacare was an ingenious concept and a transitory phase to universal healthcare like every other first-world democracy has: it would have the United States government implement its own health insurance plan that citizens could sign onto if they lacked the funds to get healthcare from the private insurers. Obviously, the idea that big business might lose income from the unemployed - those rendered jobless by the Bush housing market collapse and subsequent stock market implosion - switching to a public option sent Republicans into a panic and Congress, now controlled by Republicans because Americans were too goddamn stupid to realize that two years isn't enough time to fix eight years' worth of bullshit, shot down the bill like nobody's business.
Fast-forward two years, to this landmark Supreme Court decision over the newest incarnation of Obamacare, the one that Mitt Romney is vowing to slay even though forcing the public to buy from private insurers or else was his fucking idea back in Massachusetts. This Obamacare is a travesty, an order for all Americans to purchase health insurance or be fined, yet it has no impetus for insurers to lower their prices for those below the poverty line. This is exactly like No Child Left Behind, wherein the least able schools are further penalized because they can't educate their students well enough with what meager funds they have, so Conservatives' solution is to cut their funding further. Only, unlike NCLB, there is no real way to cheat the system and fake test scores to get out of paying for insurance or paying a fine.

I believe that this act will go down in history as one of the worst governmental mandates in history, only helping the rich to get richer while the poor lose what little money they have. I can bet it won't be too long before some rich bastard is offering deals to the poor like a feudal lord, where they can live on his thousand-acre estate in return for endlessly working for him.

However, in this latest presidential election I will still be voting for Obama over Romney. I'd rather have a spineless, idiotic wimp in power than someone actively working for the bad guys and promoting prejudiced, even genocidal, sentiments.

Temptation my white Irish ass

What's the best way to prevent someone from doing something? Obviously this answer will vary and there is no one universal answer, but if you said that a good way to keep someone from undertaking an action is to treat them as intelligent and lay out the negative consequences for them, trusting them to do the right thing, there's a good chance you're right.
If you said that the universally best way is to just shame the person into submission and tell them that they don't know well enough to be trusted with their own lives, please take this moment to apply a stapler to your groin.

In case you haven't yet guessed, this post is riding the coattails of Coattails in reference to policy and rhetoric. In the barest essence, abstinence teaching doesn't fucking work. If you protest, look to the person whom Conservatives hold up as the proof that abstinence does work: Bristol Palin. She got herself knocked up and is still unmarried. And that last part seems to be the real thing about abstinence: its proponents seem to believe that "abstinence" means, "if you fuck you gotta get married," rather than the real origin word, "abstain." Then again, how can one expect Conservative thought to make any goddamn sense? In that vein,

Hypocrisy


Family values. The fuck are "family values," anyway? Nobody in the Romney or Bush or, hell, ANY camp can tell you what family values are. It's just a term they spew over and over like a moron with a word-a-day calendar trying to sound smart. Speaking of family values, how about we look at Newt Gingrich? How many wives has he ABANDONED TO DIE now? I think the tally is four. As soon as one of his wives falls ill he starts banging some other broad and once his wife is terminal he outright leaves her for this new model. This is not a one-time event, either. It's happened, like, three times now. Check it out for yourself.

With family values still firmly in mind, how about Larry Craig or any of the dozens of Republican congressmen and senators who have been caught in the act of performing or soliciting gay sex? Considering that one of the only definitions of family values that Conservatives can agree on is "not homos," that's a pretty fucking big issue, eh? In fact, let's use another heading. I have more to bitch about and it needs a separate section:

"Temptation"


The idea of temptation is easy enough for anyone to understand. You find yourself drawn to perform an act that is either sinful or not-good in some other way. Be it a hot chick when you're married, the opportunity to shoplift, or the urge to stab your fucking seventh-grade English teacher for exploiting your autism to abuse you (or maybe that last one was just me), something tempts the average person almost every day.
Now, straight males, tell me this: when is the last time you looked at another man's ass and had to resist the nigh-overwhelming urge to release a noise like a gorilla whose nipples are aflame before leaping upon said ass and pounding it until it resembled Jennie-O ground turkey? The answer, for most of the world, is "never," followed by, "what the fuck is wrong with you for asking that kind of question?"
That, my friends, is the difference between genuinely straight people and "straight" Conservatives. I bullshit you not, jump to any religious pundit or politician babbling about religion, particularly on Fox News, and just wait for one of them to mention "resisting the temptation of homosexuality" and how difficult such resistance is. In actuality, for those whose brains are wired for heterosexuality, there is no temptation, because we aren't wired to find those of our same sex attractive. I have watched my openly gay dorm-mate in college prance about in naught but his underwear and my only comment was to put on a damn shirt.
Find yourself a Bible. Open up to Leviticus, the book most Conservatives reference when put to task to actually give a point as to where it says not to be gay. This book also says to kill children who talk back and that rape victims must marry their rapists, among other things, but notice the term for lying with a man as with a woman: "it is an abomination." Not a sin, an abomination. Look at what else is an abomination: wearing clothes made of more than one fabric or color. If you've guessed by now that an abomination in the Bible isn't so much a monstrosity as something that's not a good idea to do, you've got it in one. Leviticus was written during the time that the Israelites were still numbering in the double-digits and were, like the rest of Western humanity, barely better than bonobos. If they could fuck something, they would. This would result in low reproduction and they'd all die off. Now look at Idiocracy, the Mike Judge cult classic. It's easier to tell stupid people that you can talk to plants or that, "I'm God so what I say goes" rather than trying to explain the intricate details to your flock while they're trying to bone their camels.
The Old Testament also has God ordering His people to rape the women of a conquered city and mount heads on spikes in His name, so maybe we shouldn't be following that particular half of the Bible so closely these days...
To make a long tangent a bit shorter, it's seeming to me that many decades ago the Conservatives' forefathers made a big damn deal about homosexuality so their children repressed their urges, since it appears that nearly every mainstream Conservative is at least bisexual from their "struggles with homosexual urges" that nobody else in the country really has to deal with.

Think on another section of temptation as seen by Conservatives: have you ever wondered how these groups, in their protests of things, come up with such perverse and insane ideas on their projected "slippery slopes"? To reference homosexuality again, one of the common protests is that if gay marriage is allowed it's only a short trip to people fucking and wanting to marry chickens. To me, this is evidence that Conservative perversion extends deep and they're afraid that if they're given permission to be gay they won't be able to control their actual twisted sexual urges, fucking barn animals or running through the streets violently raping people. In my opinion, we should all be very afraid of what twisted fantasies run through the minds of Republicans in power.