A person who is bisexual is not necessarily a good or bad person. A person who questions what is a bisexual is not a good or bad person. Bringing up the subject of what is a bisexual is uncomfortable, and I will be blamed for talking about uncomfortable subjects. Long ago it was not considered politic or dignified to talk about sex. Now it is front page news and no one seems to state in open terms why it is important.
The new governor of Oregon, Kate Brown is “openly bisexual”. Open minded people believe such a declaration means she must be a good person and her sex life is none of our business. In the olden days people did not talk about such things and no one openly declared what kind of sex they prefer. Mostly we are grateful she has not provided details of precisely what she means when she declares her sexual preferences in public.
No matter how liberal, conservative, open minded or reasonable we see ourselves we all, in the past and in the present, arrive at a point of shock, shame or silence when we fully examine the implications of publicly declaring details of our sex lives out loud. There are some details we don’t want to hear. What does a bisexual do, exactly?
You are about to be challenged and possibly angered by what I have written. Our prejudices are partisan and only reason may sway an opinion. My personal prejudices are not the issue, nor are the terms I choose to express the striking nature of public sex discussions. With open debate about marriage and family there are many new questions, which are strikingly similar to the old questions. All of us who examine our minds and hearts eventually examine sexual preferences and prejudices, definitions and preconceptions and we all know that someone’s sexual preference should not influence our judgement as to whether or not they are good people.
It may be human nature to make a decision on a topic like tolerance or acceptance of gay, lesbian, bisexual people, and not examine the topic in detail. We avoid talking about details of sex. Perhaps we are very tolerant of all kinds of sexual expression. But we have ideas of what kind of sex we tolerate and what kinds we find distastefully deviant. I do not suggest that there is any relation between, say, homosexuality and rape but we universally condemn rape as we almost universally condemned homosexuality some 50 years ago.
Perhaps we have generalized our racism to cover sexism. Perhaps we know in our minds that people cannot control their race and race is not an indicator of character or intelligence, therefore sex isn’t important either. Do we want to study intelligence and character of homosexuals and bisexuals the way we study racial differences?
Again, in the olden days people publicly named a gay person and called to mind our own worst prejudices, most often with a negative connotation on what we ourselves consider deviant. Often we deal with those prejudices internally and express our support for people who are different from us by virtue of certain catch words: gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual… And with those catch-words we often gloss over what each of those words means. We may think we know what rape means, and we use hyphenated pseudo definitions like date-rape and statutory-rape. But when someone says they are bisexual, what does that mean, exactly?
With media saturation and the faces of gays openly in our lives and in the media we may have thought more than earlier generations about our prejudices. Certainly the vast majority of us have separated gay from universally maligned deviant sexual behavior like pederasty, rape, bestiality, polygamy, prostitution and open marriage. Sexual tourism to countries where prostitution is legal, a long list of options on the internet for porn and/or “hook-ups” and other sexual meetings without regard to legality or gender or specific acts are easily available for all to see. We may be further revising our ideas of deviant sex. We may believe anything short of rape and pederasty should be permitted in the privacy of one’s home. Or perhaps we more conservatively believe that prostitution and adultery also should be condemned.
From time to time one reads headlines about a sex act by a prominent individual, Adam Kuhn, Vance McAllister, Ken Mehlman, Ryan Loskam and Robert Decheine just in recent memory. Perhaps we have thought deeply about our own views and prejudices and know how we stand on each issue, that, for example prostitution is not so bad, and bestiality is okay but not pederasty. The aim of this article is to help you examine what you do and don’t accept when you support LBG rights.
In previous discussions with several people I have pushed the idea that when someone “comes out” as a bisexual that means that person has sex with both sexes. I have met with lots of resistance to such a shocking proposal. Do we really accept a politician and lawyer who has sex with both sexes? Maybe it is not so shocking, that perhaps a bisexual is attracted to both sexes but doesn’t have sex. Perhaps we are willing to accept a bisexual who is attracted to both sexes but does not act on that attraction.
Or perhaps we really think it is okay whatever someone does with other people sexually even outside the bounds of marriage. Perhaps we have arrived at a point in society where marriage is a secular and not sacred institution and those politicians who transgress the bounds of marriage may do so without fear of voter reprisals. We can rationalize or ignore but there is no longer the option of days of yore to condemn without further examination. We may condemn but at your personal peril. You will be called to task on your condemnation. What precisely is the line you will not allow others to cross?
Today we have bisexual politicians, or at least one, in one of the highest political offices of the land. This bisexual might be married heterosexually and then we might say it is okay to be bisexual but if you are married then you shouldn’t have sex outside of the marriage. Someone who truly accepts bisexuality would accept threesomes and open marriages and orgies. Perhaps those of us who support bisexual rights can also support polygamy.
This all began with the contention that homosexuality is natural. I think we can all agree that attraction to the opposite sex is innate, like an instinct. I think there is enough evidence to support a contention that in many cases people are born with a strong predilection toward homosexuality. But who wants to put forth the proposition openly that homosexual attractions are similar to a bisexual attraction, an attraction to young boys, or a sexual attraction to animals?
Such shocking questions need to be addressed eventually. Or perhaps such questions are not at all shocking once we have accepted the LBG premise that such couplings are only natural. Evidence of the use of adolescent boys for sexual pleasure exist in every society in which a historical record exists, as does disgust for such practices. Bestiality is outlawed everywhere in the world if only under animal abuse laws, but no one believes the practice has been wiped out. Kinsey reports 8% of men and nearly 4% of women have had such a cross species encounter. Kinsey reports 40% or more of people who live on farms have had such sex, but those numbers are disputed.
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