I’ve recently argued that Milo is not a provocateur. He is a Catholic guilt evangelist (before you disagree, read this — the actual evidence is pretty damning). Several have disagreed with me on my blogs on the subject, but the more I look into the issue, the more clear it seems to be that he is a Catholic evangelist. Although he flaunts being gay for laughs, he is on a mission to show that it is a sin, that it’s wrong, and that being heterosexual is superior — along with a host of other Catholic norms.

You can see this in some of his earlier work, like the time he debated Boy George on gay marriage for ten minutes. He was arguing that it was wrong.

You see, before Milo bleached his hair, wore designer clothing, and began to present his words as comedy routines, he was a writer for the Catholic Herald who was a vocal opponent of gay marriage, and quite serious about his stance. In a 2011 post entitled “Why I’ll Never Be A Parent” (which has since been removed, but is accessible via The Wayback Machine), he made clear that he would never have a child because “it’s wrong to expose an innocent child to the possibility of gay influence.”

He states that gay people, somehow, deep-down know that what they’re doing is wrong. He states that this feeling that they are doing something that is wrong is the reason for several phenomena:

The feelings of alienation and rejection it engenders are responsible for the sorts of repugnant tribal posturing you see on the streets of Soho on a Friday night, as bitterly unhappy queers engage in degrading and repulsive behaviour, simply because they want to feel a part of something after a lifetime of marginalisation. They see themselves as faulty, so they exaggerate their imperfections in the company of others they see as similarly defective. Ironically, it’s precisely that profound feeling of being somehow broken that means a gay man’s sexuality often comes to be the defining characteristic of his personality. Who wouldn’t want to protect a child from a path that leads to such destructive self-loathing?

Some of us in society think that churches and other religious institutions have impeded on the free expression of homosexuality by reinforcing cultural norms through preaching, shaming, and societal backlash. This is extremely common. The church’s attempts in the United States, for example, to successfully ban same-sex marriage in several states before 2015’s Supreme Court decision is one of many examples of the very silencing of homosexual expression that many of us outside the church have been fighting against.

So you have two sides. One side is trying to expand and validate the free expression of homosexuality, and the other is attempting to limit it and invalidate it. And in spite of the fact that he is gay himself, Milo Yiannopoulos is clearly in the second group. That’s why he was opposed to gay marriage.

Before you tell me I’m wrong, remember that he said this in the above debate with Boy George (6:03):

I think that gay marriage is another one of those things that helps to reinforce to people that it is a perfectly acceptable, normal, possibly even desirable lifestyle choice and I don’t believe that. [emphasis added]

That’s why he’s against it. And here, he’s serious. He’s not jovial or joking. Being gay, in his mind here, is wrong, and he is against gay marriage because he wants to protect the concept that it is wrong.

There is a distinct choice we can make here regarding the marginalized individuals in our culture. The side of Milo Yiannopoulos is profoundly pessimistic. It surveys our current situation and postulates that we can’t really change it, so we should enforce it. The discomfort with currently marginalized lifestyles that we have in culture, due to a long history of Christian norms, is something that needs to validated, protected, and strengthened in order to protect children.

For all the talk regarding “free speech,” the goal here is not free speech, but censorship through public ostracization of lesbians, of transgender individuals, and the protection of the status-quo of race relations in this country. You can see this, for example, in serious articles he writes about the need for both a mother and a father to raise a child. For example, in a serious article written in 2015 entitled “Kids need a mum and a dad,” he mentions a study that purportedly says children raised by same-sex couples struggle with emotional problems as evidence that same-sex couples should adopt children. There are two noteworthy items here. First, by saying same-sex couples shouldn’t adopt children he is further stigmatizing these couples and thus reinforcing any damage social prejudice may enact in the lives of their children. Second, and even more troubling, is the fact that the link Milo uses in the article is not to the study itself, but to an article entitled “Kids of gay parents fare worse, study finds, but research draws fire from experts” (emphasis added), and more than half of the article is about the problems with the study — the small sample size, the fact that the study relied mostly on stats from lesbian households with at least one parent who had been divorced from a previous heterosexual marriage, the fact that the study was funded by conservative groups, and the fact that the person who conducted this infamous study himself — Mark Regnerus — admitted to its flaws and unreliability. This was in the article that Milo read to write his article, and he ignored all of that in order to defame same-sex marriage.

This is a person with an agenda. He is actively opposed to progress that legitimates transgressions of the church like same-sex marriage; he wants to further invalidate these things and protect church morality.

It’s like this: instead of reinforcing Christian norms, as Milo seeks to do, we are choosing to escape from the norms of the church — a church that says how you have to act, who you can marry, what gender you have to be. And for awhile, we have been opening the door.

Today, no one is slamming the door shut in “pop culture” more than Milo Yiannopoulos. And that’s why I care about this fight so much. I want to keep that door open. I don’t want homosexual people to be forced back into the closet, as Milo claims is his endgame in a 2015 article. I don’t think people should think, as Milo stated in mid 2016, that homosexuality is evidence that people have original sin and thus need Catholic Christianity. I don’t want transgender people to be even more ostracized and bullied, as one was by Milo late last year, just because the head of Milo’s church calls them an abomination. Unlike Milo, as an atheist I don’t want to hobble people and limit people by using Christian bigotry in culture to shame them. I want them to be free to express themselves without being limited by overmoralizing individuals who intimidate them on the Internet to reinforce Pope-policed morality.

I’m an atheist, and that’s why I believe human beings, and the love we have for each other, should not be restricted or governed by the lies constructed by the Pope’s puppet God. We’re trying to get away from that, not validate it or enforce it — as Milo Yiannopouolos is so strongly attempting to do.

Thanks for reading.

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