Michael Schwartz, the chief of staff for Republican senator Tom Coburn
of Oklahoma, announced what he called a surefire way for social
conservatives to turn their preadolescent sons off pornography on
Friday. He said parents should teach their sons that all
pornography is “homosexual,” because “boys at that age have less
tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people.”
Schwartz
presented his pornography-as-kryptonite theory at the Values Voter
Summit in Washington, D.C., where he joined colleagues from the Family
Research Council and the Heritage Foundation for a panel called “The
New Masculinity.”
According to the blog Think Progress,
“A few minutes into his speech, Schwartz moved to the topic of
pornography, calling it a ‘blight’ and a ‘disease’ that parents’ ‘sons’
would encounter. Noting that he was about to get ‘politically
incorrect,’ Schwartz said that it is his ‘observation that boys at that
age have less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other
class of people.’”
Schwartz connected this observation to a
comment made by his “ex-gay” friend Jim Johnson, founder of Beyond
Rejection ministries, as he wove the ideas into a broader strategy to
help parents eradicate pornography from their sons’ lives.
“And
one of the things that he said to me,” continued Schwartz, according to
Think Progress, “that I think is an astonishingly insightful remark. He
said, ‘all pornography is homosexual pornography because all
pornography turns your sexual drive inwards.’ Now think about that. And
if you, if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s
going to want to go out and get a copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants.”
“That’s a good comment. That’s a good point. And it’s a good thing to teach young people,” said Schwartz.
Schwartz is no stranger to extreme rhetoric about the gay community. In 2005, he denounced the Supreme Court for giving Americans “the right to commit buggery.” Later, he told Max Blumenthal, “”I’m a radical! I’m a real extremist. I don’t want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!” In 1987, Schwartz co-wrote Gays, AIDS, and You, which according to Blumenthal, alleged that the gay community was “using the AIDS crisis to pursue [their] political agenda.”