Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Scientists reported this week that on April 13, 2036, an asteroid has a 1 in 45,000 chance of hitting Earth. The good news: No Tax Day, 2036. The bad news: An entire city or region could bite the dust.

"We need a set of general principles to deal with this issue," explains former astronaut Rusty Schweickart. To that end, scientists are calling on the United Nations to take action. The Association of Space Engineers will present a plan to the UN in 2009 involving the construction of a "Gravity Tractor," which would alter the course of potentially threatening asteroids.

You can just imagine what the UN member states will have to say about this idea.

IRAN: "Space is a decadent Western lie. It does not exist. Asteroids are no more real than the Zionist Entity. It is possible, however, that the 12th imam is riding this so-called space rock. In that case, we can only hope that he steers it into a large building in a major American city."

CHINA: "Such use of space simply escalates the global arms race. Who is to say that America will not construct such a 'Gravity Tractor' in an attempt to nullify our missile capabilities? Of course, we were never thinking of using such missiles anyway, but it's the principle of the thing!"

VENEZUELA: "This is a plot by the Bush administration to escape culpability for America's part in the global warming crisis. Satan W. Bush is deflecting attention from the fact that America is heating Earth up like a giant microwave. Bush is hoping that the asteroid hits Venezuela, ending the global warming crisis by blotting out the sun."

On September 21, 1987, President Ronald Reagan spoke before the United Nations. "Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond," he said. "I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?"

It was a nice sentiment, but Reagan was mistaken. The UN would not be able to get together over something as simple and universal as the threat of an asteroid striking our planet. They would quarrel and babble; they might send a slightly perturbed radio message to the asteroid. And, in the end, the asteroid would nail us.

Is it a reasonable for an NBA basketball player (or a soldier in basic training, for that matter) to feel uncomfortable sharing intimate quarters with a homosexual, or does this represent an outrageous, irrational fear? In response to the Hardaway controversy, several sports columnists compared his resistance to the idea of playing alongside gay teammates to the racism of previous years when white players tried to avoid competing with (or against) blacks.

The analogy is ridiculous, of course. There is no rational basis for discomfort at playing with athletes of another race since science and experience show that human racial differences remain insignificant. The much better analogy for discomfort at gay teammates involves the widespread (and generally accepted) idea that women and men shouldn’t share locker rooms. Making gay males unwelcome in the intimate circumstances of an NBA team makes just as much sense as making straight males unwelcome in the showers for a women’s team at the WNBA. Most female athletes would prefer not to shower together with men not because they hate males (though some of them no doubt do), but because they hope to avoid the tension, distraction and complication that prove inevitable when issues of sexual attraction (and even arousal) intrude into the arena of competitive sports.

Tim Hardaway (and most of his former NBA teammates) wouldn’t welcome openly gay players into the locker room any more than they’d welcome profoundly unattractive, morbidly obese women. I specify unattractive females because if a young lady is attractive (or, even better, downright “hot”) most guys, very much including the notorious love machines of the National Basketball Association, would probably welcome her joining their showers. The ill-favored, grossly overweight female is the right counterpart to a gay male because, like the homosexual, she causes discomfort due to the fact that attraction can only operate in one direction. She might well feel drawn to the straight guys with whom she’s grouped, while they feel downright repulsed at the very idea of sex with her.

Many gay activists suggest that this near-universal straight male repulsion at the idea of sex with another man is merely the product of cultural conditioning: a learned prejudice that ought to be unlearned. This represents the core message of gay pride parades and even the drive for same-sex marriage: an effort to persuade all of society that gay sex is as beautiful as straight sex, and to “cure” men of their visceral disgust at the very thought of what two (or more) male homosexuals do with one another.

According to the “enlightened” advocates of gay liberation, this disgust gets to the very essence of “homophobia” – an altogether unjustified fear and distaste for male-on-male physical intimacy. When Hardaway says “I hate gay people” what he suggests at the deepest level is that he feels revolted by the very notion of same-sex eroticism and that he’d prefer not to face the distraction of such thoughts in the locker room or on the court.

Those who suggest that a guy could shower with young female athletes without risk of arousal, or that a gay guy could shower with young male athletes with problems or discomfort, don’t merely defy common sense. They ignore human nature.