This Week in Quotes: May 15 – May 21

21 May, 2015 by John Hawkins

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A woman is a woman no matter what, but manhood can be lost. — Professor Roy Baumeister

Hacky garbage getting defended on political grounds is a contagion for today’s progressives. Some of the most cynical people in the world right now are pumping out ostensibly progressive cultural writing. They know there’s no standards; the defense of everything they write is baked into their self-identification with their political movement. — Fredrik DeBoer

Criticism of today’s progressives tends to use words like toxic, aggressive, sanctimonious, and hypocritical. I would not choose any of those. I would choose lazy. We are lazy as political thinkers and we are lazy as culture writers and we are lazy as movement builders. We ward off criticism of our own bad work by acting like that criticism is inherently anti-feminist or anti-progressive. We seem spoiled, which seems insane because everything is messed up and so many things are getting worse. I guess having a Democratic president just makes people feel complacent. Well, look: as a political movement we are in pathetic shape right now. We not only have no capacity to move people who don’t already share our worldview, we seem to have no interest in doing so. Our stock arguments are lazy stacks of cliches. We seem to want to confirm everything conservatives say about our inability to argue without calling other people racist. We can’t articulate why our vision of the future is better than the other side’s, and in fact many of us will tell you that it’s offensive to think that we have an obligation to educate others on that vision at all. — Fredrik DeBoer

One-liners don’t build a movement. Being clever doesn’t fix the world. Scoring points on Twitter doesn’t create justice. Jokes make nothing happen. — Fredrik DeBoer

However, science would not bear that out. No fewer than eight major studies from around the world have found homosexuality is not a genetic condition.

Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council says that these numerous, rigorous studies of identical twins have now made it impossible to argue that there is a “gay gene.” If homosexuality were inborn and predetermined, then when one identical twin is homosexual, the other should be, as well.

Yet one study from Yale and Columbia Universities found homosexuality common to only 6.7 percent of male identical twins and 5.3 percent of female identical twins.

The low rate of common homosexuality in identical twins – around six percent – is easily explained by nurture, not nature.

Researchers Peter Bearman and Hannah Brueckner concluded that environment was the determining factor. They rejected outright that “genetic influence independent of social context” as the reason for homosexuality. “(O)ur results support the hypothesis that less gendered socialization in early childhood and preadolescence shapes subsequent same-sex romantic preferences.”

“Less gendered socialization” means, a boy was without a positive father figure, or a girl was without a positive mother figure.

In light of the evidence, Sprigg said simply, “No one is born gay.” — Mark Hodges

Conservatives say “you can be somebody.” Liberals say “you should hate somebody.” The latter mentality is exactly what we’ve seen play out in Ferguson and Baltimore. — Carl Jackson

The left is always dabbling in fictional dystopias where there is a yawning chasm between rich and poor, where the country is riven by racial conflict, and where the whole nation has to be impoverished to serve the power and vanity of the Capitol—and yet somehow this is the system they always create when they’re in power, in places like Baltimore and Chicago. — Robert Tracinski