Lifestyle news.
Who knew homosexuals objected to the word “lifestyle”?
I found it out on a blog - here is the deal:
“For a start, I know of no LGBT individual who talks about celebrating their “lifestyle.” The gift of their sexuality, maybe. Their orientation. Their relational capacity. But not their “lifestyle.”
As LGBT persons, we’re well aware that “lifestyle,” as Paula Ruddy points out, has become a “pejorative word used to denigrate gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender persons. It’s a propaganda word, meant to segregate a group by its sexual practices and to exclude them from social acceptance.” - Wild Reed
.
Then I read this BRILLIANT piece in an email I received:
. It is with some bemusement that I find a gay activist chastising a Church official for using the term “lifestyle” for a package of immoral attitudes, actions, and relationships which the Church opposes.
The term arose with psychologist Alfred Adler (1870-1937), who used “style of life” to include factors external to one’s “personality”: “The style of life of a tree is the individuality of a tree expressing itself and molding itself in an environment. We recognize a style when we see it against a background of an environment different from what we expect, for then we realize that every tree has a life pattern and is not merely a mechanical reaction to the environment” (source).
Interestingly, he opposed Freud’s mechanistic-deterministic theory and proposed to that personal motivation (free will) toward a goal was at the center of each life style, although apparently he understood most of these future-states to convenient fictions rather than certain realities.
Back to the etymology, the term “lifestyle” broadened in 1961 to mean “the typical way of life of an individual, group, or culture” (Merriam-Webster). I suspect that it came into vogue especially in reference to the “hippie lifestyle”. And hippies certainly used the term freely (pardon the pun), precisely because it was opposed to a state of life (established institutions bad!) and vocation (I’m free to be me!).- Mr. GS (H/T Ray)
Isn’t that interesting? I actually know the man who wrote the email section of this post with the etymology of the word ’lifestyle’ - the man is so brilliant I could weep. (Although why did he feel it necessary to denigrate ‘hippies’? LOL!)
[Photo credit: "Breeder Talk" - Some Have Hats.]
June 26th, 2008 at 6:46 am
Well, the current fashion is to believe that one is “born gay”. If this isn’t deterministic then I don’t know what is. because one is born to a certain sexuality, according to the Ph.D.s in Clinical Psychology out there (a true pseudoscience), these “experts” in human behavior have essentially placed the issue of “choice” which has its foundation in such medieval ideas as “free will” outside in the rubbish heap, along with the aborted foetuses and other victims of “choice”.
One cannot have it both ways: one’s behavior is either a matter of volition - barring illness of course, or we are instinctually driven. A mere sum of the firings of neurons, and those whose neurons fire madly when seeing a male like themselves, well, the poor dears cannot help but give in to the “urge to merge”.
But then really if we are just slaves to biology as the clever Clinical and behavioral Psychologists with Ph.D.s would have us believe, then why all the madness to create democarcay and silly notions like “freedom”?
This intellectual inconsistency lies at the rot of what is “wrong” with modern society, it wants hot and cold in the same bowl of soup.
June 26th, 2008 at 7:15 am
If I may double dip, apologies, Terry - behavioral determinism is somewhat Calvinistic in its outlook. If we look at the sinfulness of the grave sinner as a sign of God’s reprobation then those who “choose” the gay “lifestyle” have done so because of the lack of God’s election. Names not written in the Book of Life from the foundation of he world.
Then why the angst? Is it not that God has determined their reprobation from all eternity and is not Satan the Prince of this World, awaiting his final entrance into the flames made for him and his angels into which the reprobate are also commanded to depart? Do we not allow these things to occur as the will of God? Or Biology?
Then again the Catholic Church does not teach predestined reprobation, so this, like behavioral determinism, the theory does not hold. I was merely illustrating the similarities between the seemingly opposed schools of behavioralist and Calvinist determinism. Both exclude the possibility or necessity of volitional change and fatalistically assign one to an existence determined by outside factors over which one has no control. As it is said in another “faith tradition”- when Allah has determined where a camel should die, He causes its desires to draw it to that place.