Meaning and Connotation
"Homosexual recruitment" and similar terms refer to the allegation that LGBTQ people engage in a concerted effort to indoctrinate children into being LGBTQ as well, and becoming, according to social conservatives and Christian right groups, part of a "lifestyle that can kill them." Supporters of recruitment allegations point at "deviant" and "prurient" sex education as evidence. They express concern that anti-bullying efforts teach that "homosexuality is normal, and that students shouldn't harass their classmates because they're gay", suggesting recruitment as the primary motivation.
Supporters of this theory cite the inability for same-sex couples to reproduce offspring as a motivation for recruitment.
Critics of the term describe it as an anti-gay myth, and a fear-inducing bogeyman. Many critics believes the term promotes the myth of homosexuals as pedophiles.
In a 1990 New York Times piece, David Leavitt criticized the term stating, "Of course, to any gay person who, as a frightened and confused teenager, searched desperately for books or films or television shows that offered even a mention of homosexual experience to latch on to, the idea of gay "recruitment" is laughable. It is also profoundly insulting."
Read more about this topic: Homosexual Recruitment
Famous quotes containing the words meaning and, meaning and/or connotation:
“Delusions that shrink to the size of a woman’s glove,
Then sicken inclusively outwards:
. . . the incessant recital
Intoned by reality, larded with technical terms,
Each one double-yolked with meaning and meaning’s rebuttal:
For the skirl of that bulletin unpicks the world like a knot....”
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“The intension of a proposition comprises whatever the proposition entails: and it includes nothing else.... The connotation or intension of a function comprises all that attribution of this predicate to anything entails as also predicable to that thing.”
—Clarence Lewis (1883–1964)