Scared Straight?
I understand his point. Like a fine cigar, pornography is often enjoyed alone. And so, by Mr. Weigel's logic, if you're the only person in the room, and you aren't a different sex than yourself, then by definition you're in a same-sex relationship, which makes you queer.
Basically, he seems to be twisting the old Woody Allen line "don't knock masturbation; it's sex with someone you love," into the less-clever "go ahead and knock masturbation, because it's sex with a dude."
That's stupid, but if he just left it there, I might be able to let it go.
But he didn't.
Weigel suggested that if an 11-year-old boy was told that looking at porn would make him gay, he would be less likely to pick up a copy of Playboy.
Really?
When I was 11, it was hard to get your hands on a Playboy magazine. I wouldn't put one down if it was actually on fire. Second degree burns fade, but memories live forever.
It was a different time.
But even we if ignore the troubling dual assumptions in this scenario, first, that your child will actually believe that seeing pictures of naked women will somehow change him into a person who will never be interested in seeing them again, and second, that his hatred for homosexuals has already developed to such an extent that the fear of becoming one would be enough to reverse the course of these basic urges, his examples are fatally flawed as well.
In this day and age, if you approach an 11-year-old boy and tell him that reading Playboy magazine would make him gay, I suspect he'd look up at you and ask "what's a magazine?"
