WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

What do the earth goes around the sun, homosexuality is a disease, and there’s no such thing as global warming, have in common

Besides the obvious, I’m more interested in what the proponents were thinking and why. It’s a little less provocative to take on the heliocentric Galileo vs. Pope Urban VIII than POTUS and the American Psychoanalytic Association. The APA changed its tune recently and apologized, years after the AMA and the American Psychological Association recanted (withdrew their positions)

Global warming is about making money by selling fossil fuels. You can put a spin on it and paint rainbows on coal but you can’t hide the carbon. My daughter lived in China and saw first hand the mid point of an industrial genocide beyond rationalization. Nothing good happens until coal goes away.

Galileo and Urban and their respective camps had a more benign battle being waged. There was no stock market crash in the wings, the Rockefellers were four hundred years in the future, rate swaps and derivatives didn’t apply and the great unwashed enjoyed seeing star clusters as their favorite stars- Cassiopeia, Hercules, Bill Haley and the Comets

So why the bad vibes about queers? The dictionary isn’t much help odd out of the ordinary, nothing initially about gender preference in the early usage. An insult- yes- but a more general slur until the last hundred years.

It was in the 1950’s that the American Psychoanalytic Association classified homosexuality as an illness. Deserving of a thesis, rather than a blog, what was happening socially that turned queers away from the mainstream and made their lifestyles a disease is grist for a nice dissertation in sociology.

You can start with the premise that people who don’t like certain traits in themselves are terribly threatened by those traits in other people, enough so to want to marginalize or even destroy them to cope with their own discomfort.

The takeaway for a simple man’s blog is simple: if we base some important science on a faulty assumption to begin with, it might take fifty or 500 years to undo the mistake.

Think measles vaccinations, sports fans. There’s a dark cloud of illness out there that the faulty assumptions about harm from vaccinations could blot out the sun and do the world a great disservice.