#1058: Robert R. Reilly

Robert R. Reilly is a writer and senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, most famous for his book The Closing of the Muslim Mind, where he tries to explain how Islamic civilization degenerated into a “dysfunctional culture based on a deformed theology locked in determinism, occasionalism and ultimately fatalism” (reviewed here). Well, if he ever wished to be taken seriously by reasonable people, his efforts were promptly undermined by his next book, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything, where he for instance argues that murderers are better than gay people because at least they feel bad about it. Gays and lesbians, according to Reilly, “use a stealth approach under the cover of issues such as school safety, diversity, and bullying” to “enforce” homosexuality in the classroom. “It is a measure of the depravity of the homosexual movement that it will not spare the innocence of children,” says Reilly, arguing that the drive “to make the abnormative normative before the children have developed their critical faculties of thought” will promote “evil teaching” that “scandalizes the children.” Deciding to double down on the lunacy, he later explained that HIV is nature’s way of warning gay people about their misuses of their own bodies.

Diagnosis: At least he shows that his reasoning skills are nothing to write home about; a marvelous way of marginalizing oneself, methinks.