Sam Brinton & Moral Foundations TheoryBy Rod Dreher
February 14, 2022
The philosopher Peter Boghossian and I are doing a public event together later this week in Budapest. It will be recorded and put on YouTube; I’ll post a link when it’s done. Peter and I were talking the other night about things we might discuss, and we agreed that it would be interesting to bring up the controversy over Sam Brinton, the LGBT activist and public sadomasochism enthusiast who was recently hired as a senior nuclear waste bureaucrat at the Department of Energy (Brinton has a nuclear engineering degree from MIT). I wrote about his case here and here last week.
(Note: if you are one of those liberals who have your nose out of joint because I am talking again about that Brinton freak, I advise you to look away if it’s going to trigger you. You know good and well that if you were reading a blog praising Brinton’s boldness in confronting bigots, you’d be thrilled. If you have something useful to say in criticism of what I write below, then I’ll publish it. But if all you intend to do is whine about conservatives like me criticizing Brinton, save your words, because I won’t post them.)
Peter’s general view, stated on Twitter, is that if Brinton’s kinky sex life doesn’t interfere with his job performance, people shouldn’t care about it. My view is that this kind of thing is rather a big deal. I talked about it at length in those previous posts, but in brief, I think Brinton should not have been hired in the first place because he is an in-your-face activist.
On his website (see one of my previous posts for the link), he talks about how he likes to wear women’s clothing into the workplace as a way to provoke people into having “conversations” about LGBT matters. To me, that is a classic sign of exhibitionism, and in the woke professional environment we now have to deal with, this amounts to bullying. Brinton is daring people to object, or to show the least discomfort, so he can “educate” them. According to his past testimony, he hates his fundagelical parents because they allegedly forced him to go to conversion therapy. Assuming that’s true — and there are questions about it — he is taking out his anger at his parents on everybody else. A figure like that is toxic in the workplace. If Brinton were a loud, aggressive fundamentalist Christian evangelist who bragged that he enjoyed provoking people into having conversations about their religious beliefs, he wouldn’t get hired by most places because he would constantly be stirring up trouble. I’m a conservative Christian and I wouldn’t hire such a person.
But Brinton happens to be an activist for a cause of which cultural and professional elites approve, so he not only gets a pass, his peacock strutting probably helps him out professionally.
Plus, I believe that Brinton’s sadomasochism is a sign of a sick mind. Remember (see the previous links), he engages in something kinksters call “pup play,” in which he is the sadistic “master” of masochistic men who behave like dogs. In one of the articles to which I linked, Brinton and his then-lover talked about how the lover doesn’t always like to stop pretending he is a dog when Brinton sodomizes him. Pseudo-bestiality, in other words. If they did this behind closed doors, it would be something that we would need to learn how to tolerate, as the cost for living in a free, pluralistic society. But Brinton parades his perversion openly, and demands that we approve. I think he’s a sicko.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/sam-brinton-moral-foundations-theory/
