I was out of the office yesterday for most of the day. I came back to about a hundred or so homosexuality emails. I’m not going to spend the day posting/responding to them. But I did get a bunch of angry emails responding to the email I posted comparing homosexuality to adultery. Here’s one from a normally friendly reader:

You feature an email from a reader:
’So, the question “Where Do Homosexuals Come From?” is irrelevant to the question “Should I behave in accordance with my homosexual impulses?”’If we transported you through time to 40 years ago, would you be
running emails comparing interracial relationships to adultery?
Those diversity nuts on the left do have a point sometimes, if
conservatives like you and the emailer had any real-life contact with
people who happen to be gay – if those people were part of their
normal daily experience, circle or friends, etc, maybe we wouldn’t see
asinine comments like this.
I’m sure you think you’re courageously giving a hearing to the other,
underrepresented point of view. I’m waiting attentively for the other
points of view on womens’ sufferage and interracial marriage (for
instance, “critics say” if women get the vote, what’s to stop us from
giving it to dogs?).
You’re welcome back on the reservation anytime.

Me: Ah yes, if I knew “any” gays (I know quite a few, for what it’s worth), I wouldn’t have found that email interesting (the only adjective I used for it, by the way). I suppose the status of homosexuality is sufficiently settled that even discussing it as a behavior rather than an “identity” (vide Derb) is now akin to supporting or indulging miscegeny laws. And, merely having “real-life contact” with actual gays makes intellectually valid disagreement impossible, for the numinous luminosity of homosexuals is such that mere contact with them lifts the veils of ignorance from our eyes. Why we should just airlift a couple B-52s full of gay dudes to Iraq and let them parachute around the country, bringing peace and harmony wherever they go.

This is all pious nonsense. I find the blacks = gays formulation so tiresome, so fraudulent and so intellectually lazy it exhausts me to even argue with it. Gays aren’t blacks, blacks aren’t gays. The histories, contexts and phenomena involved are completely different. This doesn’t mean intellectually and morally serious people can’t be outraged by what they believe to be bigoted discrimination against gays. But, please, spare me the ahistorical and sanctimonious leeching off of one historical offense to give moral authority to another grievance. It just doesn’t fly with me.