Religion and sexuality – Page 141

Sexual abuse and the perception of children: Jerome Kagan and The Nature of the Child

In graduate school, I read and thoroughly enjoyed Jerome Kagan’s The Nature of the Child. I have excerpted the beginning of chapter 7 below as a means of continuing the conversation about the relevance of childhood events for sexuality. This chapter is titled, “The Role of the Family” and the excerpt comes from pages 240-242.

I have said little about the influence of experience on the child, especially the consequences of parental behavior. The most important reason for this omission is that the effects of most experiences are not fixed but depend upon the child’s interpretation. And the interpretation will vary with the child’s cognitive maturity, expectations, beliefs, and momentary feeling state. Seven-year-old boys who are part of a small isolated culture in the highlands of New
Guinea perform fellatio regularly on older adolescent males for about a half-dozen years; but this behavior is interpreted as part of a secret, sacred ritual that is necessary if the boy is to assume the adult male role and successfully impregnate a wife (Herdt, 1981). If an American boy performed fellatio on several older boys for a half-dozen years, he would regard himself as homosexual and possess a fragile, rather than a substantial, sense of his maleness.
Children growing up in Brahmin families in the temple town of Bhubaneswar in India hear their mothers exclaim each month, “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, I’m polluted.” These children do not feel rejected or unloved, because they know this command is a regular event that occurs during the mother’s menstrual period (Shweder, in press). And a small proportion of American children, whose affluent parents shower them with affection and gifts out of a desire to create in them feelings of confidence and self-worth, become apathetic, depressed adolescents because they do not believe they deserve such continuous privilege.
As these examples make clear, the child’s personal interpretation of experience, not the event recorded by camera or observer, is the essential basis for the formation of and change in beliefs, wishes, and actions. However, the psychologist can only guess at these interpretations, and the preoccupations and values of the culture in which the scholar works influence these guesses in a major way. For example, Erasmus (1530), who believed the child’s appearance reflected his character, told parents to train the child to hold his body in a controlled composure – no furrowing of brows, sagging of cheek, or biting of the lip, and especially no laughter without a very good cause.
Educated citizens in early sixteenth-century London, who were disturbed by the high rate of crime, begging, and vagrancy among children of the poor, blamed the loss of a parent, living with lazy parents, being one of many children, or a mental or physical handicap. These diagnoses ignored the possible influence of genetics, parental love, or social conditions existing outside the home. Two centuries later, a comparable group of English citizens concerned with identical social problems, but still without any sound facts, emphasized the influence of the love relation between mother and child (Pinchbeck and Hewitt, 1969 and 1973).
Many contemporary essays on the influence of family experience also originate in hunches, few of which are firmly supported by evidence. This is not surprising; the first empirical study to appear in a major American journal that attempted to relate family factors to a characteristic in the child was published less than sixty years ago in The Pedagogical Seminary (Sutherland, 1930). The fact that a hunch about the role of family originates in a society’s folk premises about human nature does not mean that it is incorrect. Eighteenth-century French physicians believed that a nursing mother should bathe the baby regularly and not drink too much wine – suggestions that have been validated by modern medicine. But those same doctors also believed – mistakenly, I suppose – that cold baths will ensure a tough character in the older child. The absence of conclusive evidence means that each theorist must be continually sensitive to the danger of trusting his or her hunches too completely, for at different times during the last few centuries of European and American history, the child has been seen as inherently evil, or as a blank tablet with no special predispositions, or, currently, as a reservoir of genetically determined psychological qualities. Modern Western society follows Rousseau in assuming that the infant is prepared to attach herself to her caregiver and to prefer love to hate, mastery to cooperation, autonomy to interdependence, personal freedom to bonds of obligation, and trust to suspicion. It is assumed that if the child develops the qualities implied by the undesirable members of those pairs, the practices of the family during the early years – especially parental neglect, indifference, restriction, and absence of joyful and playful interaction – are major culprits.
I cannot escape these beliefs which are so thoroughly threaded through the culture in which I was raised and trained. But having made that declaration, I believe it is useful to rely on selected elements in popular theory, on the few trustworthy facts, and on intuition in considering the family experiences that create different types of children, even if my suggestions are more valid for American youngsters than for those growing up in other cultures.

Kagan refers to Gilbert Herdt’s book, Guardians of the Flutes, published in 1981 which describes the masculinity rituals of the Sambian tribe (not the actual tribal name) in Papua New Guinea. Essentially the tribe “believes” boys become men by ingesting the semen (“male milk”) of older boys. And of course, by the teen years, it “works” and the boys attain manhood. At that point, the vast majority of males choose a female partner.
Kagan’s reference to this practice reminds us that these experiences are embedded in a culture. In our own, such experiences would not be normalized and contextualized as a contributing to masculinity but rather detracting from it.
I cannot improve on Kagan’s description of his thesis. He is a gifted writer. However, I will elaborate for sake of discussion. He proposes that perception drives the psychological impact of a given experience. How differing perceptions effect the development of sexuality seems to me to be highly individualistic. Thus, for some, sexual maltreatment might push an essentially heterosexual person toward same-sex preoccupations. For others, abuse might strengthen the budding heterosexual impulses toward heterosexual preoccupations. For others, the abusive events may have no effect on attractions but rather influence attachment security. My point here is not to describe all possible trajectories, but rather to illustrate the potential of many variations.
A related point made by Kagan is that our culture looks at parenting as causative of adult personality. I believe many people do not question this assumption. In the last several years, I have looked for data to support or contradict it. I find little support that individual personality traits or conditions are strongly related to particular family dynamics. However, some broad trends can be observed. Fatherlessness is associated with a variety of problems in children and society. However, not having a father around may be interpreted in different ways by different children. For some, having the wrong kind of father around might lead to anti-social behavior. Thus, simply isolating childhood variables and relating them to adult outcomes is insufficient. These points are often lost on reparative therapists and other advocates who want to reduce homosexuality to a set of family dynamics or childhood experiences. On the other hand, biological determinists err on the side of discounting these social experiences as potentially influential for some people.
A satisfying position to me is to consider homosexual behavior to be determined by different factors in different ways for different people. For some, there is a very early awareness of romantic and sexual attraction for the same-sex independent of any trauma or parenting actions. For others, trauma and poor parenting occur but the same-sex attractions appeared prior to these unhappy events. For yet others people, the unhappy experiences may serve to create a disconnect between impulse to same-sex behavior and internal desire and attraction which may be toward the opposite sex. While these complexities create PR problems for culture warriors on both sides, I believe we must recognize the existence of multiple pathways to adult sexuality if we are to be true to the data and experience.

Researchers question use of sexual abuse data

Today, researchers Ron Stall and Ron Valdiserri released a statement regarding use of their book, Unequal Opportunities: Health Disparities Affecting Gay and Bisexual Men in the United States by Focus on the Family writer Jeff Johnston.

The report they question was released recently by Focus and is titled: “Childhood Sexual Abuse and Male Homosexuality: Is there a link?” In that report, Johnston cites statistics from the book, along with quotes from other studies and an interview with Narth past-president Dean Byrd. Here are the relevant portions of the book edited by Stall, Valdiserri and colleague Richard Wolitski (all footnotes in this section are to the Unequal Opportunities book).

Many pro-gay researchers, activists and theorists deny that there could be a connection between child sexual abuse and adult homosexuality. Some possible reasons for denying this link are the stigma that surrounds sexual abuse; the fear of associating homosexuality with “recruitment” or pedophilia; and because so many gays continue to believe that homosexuality is inborn and immutable. In 2008, however, a group of researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a book that documented the high rates of sexual abuse among “men who have sex with men (MSM).”[6]

In a chapter titled, “Childhood Sexual Abuse Experienced by Gay and Bisexual Men: Understanding the Disparities and Interventions to Help Eliminate Them,” from the book Unequal Opportunity, researchers analyze and report on data from 17 different studies from the past 15 years.[7] They find the rates of childhood sexual abuse (which they abbreviate as CSA) for men who have sex with men range from 11.8% to 37.0%, and note that “the best-designed studies tend to converge on CSA prevalence of 15% to 25%.”[8]

While most of those who perpetrate sexual abuse are men, abusers are not necessarily homosexual or gay-identified,[9] and the authors note that “in studies focusing on MSM, the perpetrators are always at least 90% male.”[10] The range of abuse varies in the different studies depending on the definition of abuse and the sample method.[11]

The researchers report that the rates of child sexual abuse for gay- or bisexual-identified men are significantly higher than those found among heterosexually-identified men. They write that the rates for heterosexual men are usually “less than 10%,” and state that in five studies that compared the two groups, the men who have sex with men are “at least three times more likely to report CSA, however defined, than heterosexual men.”[12] This finding is reiterated in their conclusion: “Rates for MSM are 15% to 25% in the best designed studies, which is at least triple the rates reported among heterosexual men.”[13]

Consequences of Sexual abuse

Children are not equipped emotionally, physically, spiritually or psychologically to handle adult sexuality. Individual boys will handle sexual abuse in different ways: what leads to shame and guilt in one child might lead to self-questioning and gender confusion in another or to anger and acting out in a third. Each child is unique, grows up in a unique environment and will respond in an individual way to sexual abuse or early sexual encounters with the same sex.

There are, however, common themes and outcomes that consistently emerge in studies of men who were sexually abused as children. Two common outcomes of sexual abuse – out of the many possible – are that boys may question their identity and be confused about their sexuality.

The followin quotes may have generated the most concern by Stall and Valdiserri:

The authors in Unequal Opportunity are reluctant to say that childhood sexual abuse is one of the factors that leads to or contributes to the development of homosexuality, but they do speculate,

The fact that most childhood abusers of MSM were males suggests either an etiological link between CSA and adult sexual orientation, or the existence of childhood characteristics that are related to adult sexual orientation in men that increase vulnerability, or both.”[23]

And later, they say that these early sexual experiences “can be considered a form of sexual learning, even if that learning is involuntary and the results dysfunctional.”[24] They continue, “Sexual orientation and gender identity can be particularly confusing for men who experienced arousal during the abuse, and MSM who experienced abuse may continue to be aroused by circumstances that mirror the abusive situation.[25]

Drs. Stall and Valdeserri’s statement is as follows:

We want to respond to a recent Focus on the Family characterization of scientific findings reported in our book, Unequal Opportunities: Health Disparities Affecting Gay and Bisexual Men in the United States (Oxford University Press) that misrepresented findings in the book to suggest that childhood sexual abuse causes male homosexuality. The Focus on the Family description of the findings reported in Unequal Opportunities is inaccurate and, in our opinion, a distortion of the scientific literature.

Most basically, the Focus on the Family characterization of the literature on childhood sexual abuse among gay men represents a misunderstanding of scientific approaches to distinguishing between correlation and causation. The book chapter in question reports that gay men are more likely to report childhood sexual abuse by men than are heterosexual men. This correlation does not mean that the reported abuse caused the adult sexual orientation. If that were the case, then the fact that some heterosexual men report sexual abuse by women means that sexual abuse by women “causes” heterosexuality in men. It is also worth noting that the argument that childhood sexual abuse causes homosexuality in gay men is undermined by the fact that the vast majority of gay men are not sexually abused as children.

One potential partial explanation for this correlation, and one that makes the most sense when you consider people of all orientations, is that some youth, particularly post-pubertal youth (who still cannot legally consent to sexual activity) have sexual experiences with males or females, depending on their pre-existing orientation. Let’s be very clear that this does not mean that these experiences are appropriate or healthy. However, it also does not mean that these experiences

caused the sexual orientation of the youth. The development of a person’s sexual orientation is a complex and multifaceted process. The research into these processes has barely begun, and the development of sexuality is very difficult to study. Mischaracterizations of the scientific literature on the development of sexual orientation is not helpful to science.

Rather than mischaracterize these findings, we would like to point out the harm to health that can be caused by childhood sexual abuse among boys and girls of all sexual orientations. Childhood sexual abuse occurs to far too many young Americans and a large and growing literature supports that this abuse can cause lifelong damage to the physical and mental health and wellbeing of men and women of all sexual orientations. We suggest that Focus on the Family and

other concerned organizations focus on how to work to ensure that all of our children remain safe from unwanted sexual experiences– whether heterosexual or homosexual.

That said, we want to state clearly that the published research does not support the claim that the development of a homosexual orientation is caused by childhood sexual abuse. Furthermore, adult homosexual orientation is no longer considered a pathology or a maladjustment. We urge those who are interested in trying to better understand some of these complex issues from a scientific perspective to read the discussions in our book, as well as the scientific literature on childhood sexual abuse, and not rely on second-hand interpretations.

Ron Stall

Ron Valdiserri

A major study of child abuse and homosexuality revisited

American Nazi movement and homosexuality: How pink is their swastika?

Scott Lively’s book The Pink Swastika purports to demonstrate a link between Nazi aggression and homosexuality. He also discusses other atrocities which he blames on homosexuality in that book as well as another titled, The Poisoned Stream. In that book, he says in the introduction that he has found gay fingerprints on

the Spanish Inquisition, the French “Reign of Terror,” the era of South African apartheid, and the two centuries of American slavery. My thoughts have increasingly turned toward writing a larger, more comprehensive analysis of homosexuality in history. I have come to believe, with Samuel Igra, that homosexuality has truly been a “poisoned stream” in human history.

He does not elaborate but says another book is coming where he reveals his evidence. Just one more: Recently, in a speech before the Temecula Republican Party, he linked the Columbine school massacre to imagined homosexuality of the shooters. I examined that proposed link here.

If homosexuality was so associated with National Socialist ideals and aims, then shouldn’t the current Nazis be dominated by homosexuals? Lively believes that the German Nazis were animated by homosexuality while publicly opposing it. So if the American Nazis are anti-gay that perhaps means that they really are gay rights activists after all. So expressing the opposite of what you really believe is what they do with gay stuff but not other things. Like really, they love the Jewish people…

Anyway, for the record, here is what the American Nazi movement (NSM = National Socialist Movement) says about homosexuality:

What is the NSM’s view on homosexuality and child pornography?

Homosexuality is not a genetic defect. It is a chosen lifestyle and a mental sickness. Homosexuality is a social degeneracy that must be expunged from our society.

We as a civilized people cannot fall trap to the political correctness and turn a blind eye to this perverted lifestyle. It is not normal nor is it acceptable, and it goes against the laws of nature.

Homosexuals serve no greater purpose other than that of their own selfish greed. They contribute nothing to the further survival of our race. Our children are being inundated with the false ideas that homosexuality is normal and acceptable. They see it out in the public, in their schools, and on the TV programs they watch.

With homosexuality comes the threat of our children being at increased risk of sexual pedophiles, kidnappings, rapes, and murders. Most crimes involving the kidnapping, violation, and/or murder of children, were acts committed by homosexual prone monsters.

We can see the evil effects of social liberal acceptance of homosexuality by the increased number of pedophiles, child pornography cases, and kidnapping of children (in which most cases once this perverted animal has had its way with these poor innocent and helpless children, the child is murdered).

In a National Socialist Society, these individuals would receive an instant death penalty.

Now if you are viewing Nazi beliefs and homosexuality as related in some vital way, this might be a bit hard to explain. Maybe, in a Spongebob Squarepants opposite day kind of way, it could make sense, but otherwise, I am not getting it.

On the front of the website, readers are invited to sign up, but not all are welcome.

The NSM, America’s National Socialist Party, is the largest and most active National Socialist political party in America.

The NSM’s core beliefs include: defending the rights of white people everywhere, preservation of our European culture and heritage, strengthening family values, economic self-sufficiency, and reform of illegal immigration policies, immediate withdrawal of our national military from an illegal Middle Eastern occupation and promotion of white separation.

Party Membership is open to non-Semitic heterosexuals’ of European Descent. If you really care for your heritage and for the future of your family, race and nation, fill out a Membership Application today.

If you are under the age of 18 please have your parents read about the Party Viking Youth Movement.

Gays need not apply. So disappointing. And then there is this article on the website of the California branch:

Better fascist than gay – Mussolini’s granddaughter

Thu Mar 9, 2006 8:05 PM GMT

ROME (Reuters) – The granddaughter of Italy’s wartime dictator Benito Mussolini has defended being a fascist by saying it was better than being a “faggot”.

Alessandra Mussolini’s televised derogatory remarks came less than a month after Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi welcomed her far-right political party into his coalition before a general election in April.

Mussolini, proud of her ancestral ties to “Il Duce”, had been criticised by a drag queen-turned-politician about being a fascist on Italian TV talk show Porta a Porta.

“I’m proud of it,” she snapped in comments due to be aired later on Thursday.

Vladimir Luxuria, who hopes to be Europe’s first “transgender” MP and is running with the Communist Refoundation party, then asked if Mussolini wanted to lock up homosexuals.

“Better to be a fascist than a faggot,” Mussolini said, using the highly offensive Italian word “frocio”, according to Porta a Porta’s press office.

It was not the first time one of Berlusconi’s allies publicly insulted homosexuals. Mirko Tremaglia, an outspoken right-wing minister for Italians living abroad, said in 2004 that Europe was ruled by “culattoni”.

The word derives from the Italian colloquial for bottom (culo) and refers to sodomists.

And then finally, there is this lovefest

planned for Springfield, MO on June 14.

NSM Springfield will hold a Protest Against Homosexuals

– ANNOUNCEMENT –

On June 14, 2009 Springfield, MO Unit will hold a Protest Against Homosexuals . This event is held every year on Commercial Street in downtown Springfield. The Glo Center sponsors this event and calls it family friendly, this means that there will be children attending. The Springfield Unit will be there along with other white nationalist and members of the community to let the homosexuals know that they are not welcome in our town and that we will not tolerate their “celebration”.

If you are interested in attending please contact [email protected] for more information.

No pink swastikas here.

Prior posts in this series:

May 28 – Scott Lively wants off SPLC hate group list

May 31 – Eliminating homosexuality: Modern Uganda and Nazi Germany

June 3 – Before The Pink Swastika

June 4 – Kevin Abrams: The side of The Pink Swastika

June 8 – A historian’s analysis of The Pink Swastika, part 1

June 9 – A historian’s analysis of The Pink Swastika, part 2

June 11 – American Nazi movement and homosexuality: How pink is their swastika?

June 15 – Nazi movement rallies against gays in Springfield, MO

June 17 – Does homosexuality lead to fascism?

June 23 – The Pink Swastika and Friedrich Nietzsche

List of posts on Uganda and the Pink Swastika

A historian’s analysis of The Pink Swastika, part 2

(Editor’s note: Yesterday, historian Dr. Jon David Wyneken began a series regarding the book, The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams. I asked Wyneken for his assessment of the book. Part one was posted yesterday and part two is posted today.)

Stein then reviews and analyzes The Pink Swastika. Now for her sections on Lively and Abrams and the elements of the Christian Right who embrace their arguments:

By the late 1980s and into the 1990s, a new Christian right cultural genre-books, videos, special reports, was specifically dedicated to identifying the gay threat and calling Christian believers to arms; dozens of conservative Christian organizations devoted themselves solely to antigay activities (Herman 1997), and anti-gay discourse came to encompass an attack on the status of homosexuals as a “minority” group deserving equal rights under the law. This marked a shift on the right from a focus on the immorality of homosexuality, to an attribution of superior power to gays. Gays were viewed as undeserving “special interest groups” which have won “special rights” by manipulating government corruption, gerrymandering elections, and appealing to a judicial system dominated by liberals, a powerful, morally corrupt school system, and a Congress that promotes the destruction of the family (Johnston 1994:7; Herman 1997) (Stein, 528-529).

During these initiative campaigns, the Christian right at times deployed rhetoric and imagery that echoed European anti-Semitism. The Oregon Citizens Alliance film, The Gay Agenda, closely resembled the 1940 Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew. Echoing traditional anti-Semitic propaganda which deliberately inflated the power of Jewish bankers, international Jewish conspiracies, and so forth, conservatives suggested that lesbians and gay men have higher incomes than others. A cartoon published by the Oregon Citizens Alliance showed a gay man manipulating the strings of the government and the economy. It was, one gay writer pointed out, ‘a virtual copy of a Nazi cartoon,’ one that replaced ‘the stooped, hooknosed puppeteer with a fresh-faced gym boy (Solomon 1997:7).’ At the same time, the OCA challenged the right of lesbians and gay men to align themselves with the victims of the Holocaust. In the 1994 campaign for ballot measure 13, which sought to deny civil rights to lesbians and gays, a rightwing group calling itself ‘Jews and Friends of Holocaust Victims’ purchased space in the Official Oregon Voters Pamphlet (1994:79) arguing in favor of the ballot measure:

Who’s a Nazi? Americans are watching history repeat as homosexuals promote the BIG LIE that everyone who opposes them is harmful to society. It’s nothing new. They used this tactic in Germany against the Jews…Don’t buy the BIG LIE. Opponents of minority status for homosexuals are not “Nazis” or “bigots”. And homosexuals aren’t “victims” of your common sense morality. Protect our children! (Stein, p. 529).

In the following passage, Stein correctly argues that Lively and his supporters attempt to flip the victimhood metaphor from gays to themselves. The Pink Swastika has been a key aspect of that effort.

The ‘true’ victims are the guardians of ‘common sense morality,’ the Christian right. As a leader of the Oregon Citizens Alliance suggests, “‘gay rights’ activists-not pro-family conservatives and OCA supporters-should be wearing the label of Nazi.” Homosexuality was a CENTRAL element of the fascist system, that the Nazi elite was rampant with homosexuality and pederasty, that Adolph Hitler intentionally surrounded himself with homosexuals during his entire adult life, and that the people most responsible for many Nazi atrocities were homosexual.9 This encapsulates the argument of The Pink Swastika (1995), authored by OCA activist Scott Lively, along with Kevin Abrams, who is identified as an Orthodox Jew residing in Israel. The book is a carefully constructed piece of political rhetoric, mixing serious scholarship with lies and outright distortions, truths with half-truths and falsehoods. The authors draw upon a variety of scholarly sources to make the argument that many, if not all, of the major leaders of the Nazi movement in Germany were homosexuals-including Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, and Hess. While they do admit that homosexuals were persecuted by the Nazis, they suggest that homosexuals comprised the core of the Nazi Party. The Pink Swastika explains how homosexuals can be both Nazis and their victims. The authors contend that more masculine, “butch” homosexuals were responsible for building the Nazi party and creating the SA, or Brownshirts. Male homosexual “femmes” were persecuted by the Nazis, but largely escaped death…The Pink Swastika concludes with the claim that the contemporary gay rights movement, far from sharing a historical lineage with Holocaust ‘victims,’ actually has historical links to the Nazi perpetrators of genocide. (Stein, 530).

Stein then comes to a similar conclusion about the claims made by The Pink Swastika as I do when she writes:

Despite the claim of a direct link between Nazi ideology and homosexuality, historical evidence points to the opposite conclusion: that while the Nazis may have aestheticized homoerotism to a point, they identified homosexuality with the emasculation of men, which they saw as a threat to the traditional patriarchal, procreative family which they idealized. (Stein, 531).

Stein asserts that The Pink Swastika seeks to accomplish ends which serve political, not scholarly, purposes. As noted, the line of thinking employed in book seeks to flip the victim status from gays to conservative Christians. Furthermore, as Stein puts it, the book seeks to “pit two traditionally liberal constituencies, gays and Jews, against one another, thereby…drawing parallels between Jews and Christians” (Stein, 531).

Speaking about Christians who advance the rhetoric and argumentation of The Pink Swastika, Stein writes:

Christian conservatives have deliberately distorted Holocaust memories to deflect lesbian/gay victim claims, and to make moral claims of their own. In the process, they have degraded the memory of Holocaust victims and alleviated the burden on the perpetrators. (Stein, 535).

I generally agree with Stein’s conclusions here, and I ask all those reading this site, no matter their political beliefs, orientations, etc., to thoughtfully consider these conclusions, even though some of her criticisms of your various positions may challenge you.

I would go further, though, than Stein does in challenging the validity of Lively’s book as legitimate and responsible history. First, though Lively does use a number of secondary sources in his research (including scholarly books by Grau, Michael Burleigh, and others), he does no original research in primary archival documents; ; meaning, he has not examined the thousands of documents available on these subjects for himself. While certainly effective synthesis histories can be written from strictly secondary sources (and a number of high-quality historians have written such books), the most effective and legitimate ones are usually written by scholars who have done extensive primary archival research on those subjects in the past and have a mastery of the secondary literature as well. In my professional opinion, Lively does not fit either of these categories.

Second, responsible historians tend to cast a skeptical and cautious eye on any historical conclusions that appear reductionist, monocausal, and polemical in their conclusions. In particular, books that use historical topics to score contemporary political points are often dismissed by scholars out of hand as not dealing with the past honestly. Anachronism is not the historian’s goal or friend. While lessons can and should be drawn from history, these are not nearly as easy to arrive at as many (especially Lively, it seems) think.

Finally, in my opinion (and one that I would hazard a guess many other Christian and secular historians share), in any contemporary debates on ANY political / social subject, the arguments for and against certain positions should be made on the basis of the issues at hand, not on simplistic extrapolations from historical events, figures, and issues that were particular to their own contexts and time periods. Though certainly history can and should elucidate our understanding of the present as well as the past, using the past as a weapon in a contemporary political/social debate is inherently dangerous, for it risks obscuring more measured views of the past with hyperbole, confirmation bias, polemics, and (most importantly for me) historical inaccuracies that, through reductionism, view everything in history and in the present in overly simplistic terms. Doing so, in turn, does nothing to further either better historical inquiry or produce effective academic/political/social dialogue on vital contemporary issues (As an aside, I should also add that for Christians, I dare say, such reductionism is anathema to developing a stronger faith based on humility, prayer, theological study, contemplation, and intellectual honesty). But don’t just take my word for it. A number of excellent scholarly historical works—by both Christians and non-Christians—have been written about the nature of historical inquiry, research and writing, and the historical profession’s purpose(s) in explaining contemporary events and issues. In particular, the works of Richard J. Evans (In Defense of History), John Lewis Gaddis (Landscapes of History), Joyce Abbelby / Lynn Hunt / Margaret Jacob (Telling the Truth About History), and George Marsden (A Christian View of History? and The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship), David Hackett Fisher (Historians’ Fallacies) and Jacques Barzun (The Modern Researcher) all explain and defend various notions of historical inquiry and methodology much more effectively than I can here. All readers of this site, and especially current or aspiring writers, should examine such books in order to learn exactly what historical inquiry is and what it is not. In my mind, Lively’s book is an example of the latter. History is a complex and challenging and often humbling discipline for many reasons, something I ask all readers here to keep in mind as you continue to debate these very important issues.

Prior posts in this series:

May 28 – Scott Lively wants off SPLC hate group list

May 31 – Eliminating homosexuality: Modern Uganda and Nazi Germany

June 3 – Before The Pink Swastika

June 4 – Kevin Abrams: The other side of The Pink Swastika

June 8 – A historian’s analysis of The Pink Swastika, part 1

June 9 – A historian’s analysis of The Pink Swastika, part 2

June 11 – American Nazi movement and homosexuality: How pink is their swastika?

June 15 – Nazi movement rallies against gays in Springfield, MO

June 17 – Does homosexuality lead to fascism?

June 23 – The Pink Swastika and Friedrich Nietzsche

List of posts on Uganda and The Pink Swastika

A historian’s analysis of The Pink Swastika, part 1

(Editor’s note: This guest post is authored by Jon David Wyneken, Associate Professor of History at Grove City College.)

Back in March, Warren asked me (a colleague of his in the Department of History here at Grove City College) if I had any opinion on the validity of arguments made by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams in their book The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party. I told Warren that the book had not been well-received by academic historians for a number of reasons, and at his request I did some research to illustrate this as clearly as I could. In the interest of full disclosure, the reader should know that I have a PhD in Modern German history with a focus on the period 1933-1955, so I have studied the Nazis extensively and am very familiar with their policies against those they considered “undesirables.” I have also done research and worked at seminars at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and have done research on the Nazis in numerous archives in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

However, there are a number of scholars who have done more in-depth work on the issue of homosexuality in Nazi Germany than I have, so I looked into a some articles by such scholars that provide a number of effective and convincing counterarguments to Lively / Abrams. Historians like Geoffrey Giles and Gunter Grau have done a great deal of work on this (Lively does cite Grau a few times in The Pink Swastika, but I encourage readers here to examine Grau’s book of documents entitled The Hidden Holocaust? to see just how wrongly selective Lively was in his use of that text), and the most recent edition of Jeremy Noakes’ four-volume collection, Nazism: A Documentary Reader provides revealing material from Grau that Lively left out of his book. I have given Warren all of this material and I know he will be making use of it on this site. I know he will also provide the titles of complete articles/books that readers should examine, and I will continue to make Warren aware of any other materials I come across that will help him and readers better understand why Lively’s book is simply not good history and is, in fact, not really history at all. Instead, in my view, it is a book that uses history as a weapon in a contemporary political battle, completely outside the historical context of Nazi Germany.

Fortunately, there are other scholars who have made this point much better than I can here. In particular, Arlene Stein’s 1998 article from Sociological Perspectives (Vol. 41, No. 3 [1998], pp. 519-540) entitled “Whose Memories? Whose Victimhood? Contests for the Holocaust Frame in Recent Social Movement Discourse” makes a strong case against Lively and against all groups—whether Christian or secular, from the political Right or Left—who try to revise the historical record of the Holocaust for their own contemporary political (and hence, in my opinion, ahistorical) ends. Stein in my view rightly criticizes a number of groups and individuals in her article, and she is very careful and balanced in her conclusions. While I encourage all readers to read her entire article (those of you with JSTOR access can find a full-text copy there), I have provided below a few selections from her article that illustrate what she thinks (and I agree) is behind Lively’s book/arguments [in part two]. I have presented the quotes below sequentially as they appear in the article in order to give the reader a better sense of the entire piece. The first series of quotes present her arguments about how some gay/lesbian organizations have misused the history of the Holocaust for their own ends—I have done this so as to provide for the reader a more balanced view than is provided by Lively on these issues. First, Stein indicates two levels of appropriation:

Uses of Holocaust memory by those who lack a direct connection to the historical events are, in effect, acts of appropriation. But all acts of appropriation, I will argue, are not equivalent. Against the post-structuralist belief that texts, such as stories, take their meaning relationally within a global universe of interacting texts, an ethical approach to the appropriation of historical memories, particularly atrocity memories such as the Holocaust, distinguishes among claims on the basis of the social contexts within which texts are produced, and the uses to which they are put (Plummer 1995; Lamont 1997). Hence, I distinguish between two different types of appropriation: revisionism (efforts to rewrite the history of the Holocaust which make claims about a historical event) and metaphor creation (efforts to compare present events or experiences to those of the Holocaust). The distinction between these two rhetorical strategies, I will argue, is best understood in relation to the social contexts, such as contemporary social movements, in which Holocaust memories are deployed (Stein, 520-521).

Then she describes the type of appropriation by GLB groups:

The Holocaust frame appeared in lesbian/gay rhetoric at three different moments: the early 1970s, in relation to the rise of the gay liberation movement; the early to mid 1980s, in response to the twin threats of the New Right and the AIDS epidemic; and the 1990s, in response to anti-gay ballot measures sponsored by Christian conservative organizations in several states. Gay activists have sought to revise the historical record to reflect the extent of gay victimhood during the Nazi period; they have also used the Holocaust as metaphor, comparing the plight of homosexuals today to the plight of victimized minorities during the German Reich. Through the use of the Holocaust frame, lesbians and gay men have positioned themselves as victims and situated their opponents-garden variety homophobes, negligent AIDS bureaucrats, and Christian right anti-gay campaigners-as perpetrators. Invoking the history of the Third Reich, contemporary lesbian and gay activists recall that the Nazi Party sought to “cleanse” German society of those groups that violated the tenets of Aryan purity and that were believed to pose a threat to national unity: Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists, and the disabled. Though the “final solution” targeted Jews for annihilation above all else, other marginalized groups were caught in the frenzy of purification. Among them were homosexual men, who were seen as a threat to the patriarchal family idealized by Nazism. A 1928 Nazi Party statement proclaimed: ‘Anyone who thinks of homo-sexual love is our enemy. We therefore reject any form of lewdness, especially homosexuality, because it robs us of our last chance to free our people from the bondage which now enslaves it.’2 Between 1933 and 1945, tens of thousands of homosexual men were sent to concentration camps, and perhaps 10,000 of them perished.3 (Stein, 523)

In summary, the spectre of a Holocaust has been utilized by lesbians and gay men to dramatize their plight as an oppressed group in American society. Lesbians and gay men engaged in a form of revisionism, adjusting the historical record to reflect the historical oppression of homosexuals during the Nazi reign of terror. They also used the frame as metaphor, drawing parallels between contemporary homosexuals and the victims of Nazism fifty years earlier. In relation to the AIDS epidemic, lesbian and gay activists invoked the memory of the Holocaust to suggest that government inaction is tantamount to genocide. In response to the anti-gay campaigns of the Christian right, they suggested that homosexuals, a relatively powerless group, are being used as a convenient scapegoat for widespread social anxieties (Stein, 527).

Stein illustrates how a scholar approaches a topic. She is even handed and fair in her analysis. I encourage readers to carefully consider her points.

(Editor’s note – Due to length, I am dividing Dr. Wyneken’s analysis into two parts. Although readers might come to the conclusion that Drs. Stein and Wyneken have found some agreement with Lively and Abrams, this would not be an accurate perception. Tomorrow’s post will provide Stein’s assessment of The Pink Swastika and Dr. Wyneken’s reasons for agreeing with her significant criticisms of the book. Please look for the conclusion tomorrow.)