The Gospel According To Milo

Milo Yiannopoulos is an asshole. He’s an obnoxious shock-jock with no intelligence or even the ability to say anything mildly normal within polite society — and as a shock jock, he’s far from a bad one. From GamerGate until his firing from Brietbart 2017, Milo lived his life as the most hard-core shock-jock the right could get, a role that he loved, and it’s understandable how he got such a role. Unlike someone like Ben Shapiro, who framed himself as the reasonable and inoffensive one spouting basic truths that were only being protested by insane leftists, Milo framed himself as unreasonable and offensive — and proud of it.

However, in recent years Milo has become less and less relevant. His Twitter account, where he did most of his trolling, was banned in 2016 after he harrassed Lessly Jones because of her role in the Ghostbusters remake that came out that year. Then, in 2017, his CPAC speech was canceled and he was fired from his job at the right-wing website Breitbart due to previous comments he made defending pedophilia (specifically, defending a pedophile that had targeted him during his youth). Since then, he hasn’t done much outside of bitch about everyone on whatever platform he’s given, and is seen by many as an irrelevant has-been who was okay at trolling some social justice warriors back in the day.

On 3/9/2021, Milo gave an interview with the right-wing fundamentalist Catholic website LifeSiteNews — a website that openly describes its goal as an end to abortion — where he declared that he was no longer a homosexual. Considering Milo had made his career being a flamboyant homosexual who also supported Donald Trump and hated SJWs, this was certainly an interesting move.

However, it was far from an unexpected one. When Milo appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience on 9/30/2015, he told Joe that he would “be better if I didn’t behave like this,” in reference to his homosexuality. He also bluntly said that “If I could choose, I wouldn’t be a homosexual.” When asked by Rogan if he would take a hypothetical medication for homosexuality, he said he would, because doing so would make him “better.” (Despite this, Milo denied being self-hating, telling Joe “I love all of me” but that, once again, he just wanted to make himself “better.”)

During an appearance on the Drunken Peasants podcast on 1/4/2016 (the same interview where he defended pedophilia), Milio said the following:

I would love to be cured [of my homosexuality]. Who wouldn’t want to be cured? Of course, I want to be cured. I’ve tried to pray the gay away… I think for a variety of reasons, most gay people if they were honest, would not choose to have been born homosexual. I’d love to experiment with some of these therapies, not because I think they’ll work.

For the record, I am sure that there are gay people who would love to be “cured” of their homosexuality. However, Milo is ignoring one important factor when he brings this up — the reason why many homosexuals wish they were heterosexual is because of homophobia, either in the law or in their own families. A Pew Research poll from 2013 found that 39% of LGBT people had experienced rejection from friends or family since they came out of the closest. The answer to that is not to make “cures” for homosexuality, it’s to make it so LGBT people don’t have to worry about rejection because of something they can’t control.

During the same interview, Milo stated:

Gays have been told for 30 years that they were “born this way”. That’s a lie. “Born this way” was invented by the gay lobby as a run-around of the religious right. The religious right was saying that homosexuality was a sinful lifestyle choice, and then the gay lobby invented the “gay gene”. They said “we’re born this way”… it really has no basis in science at all. The most we can say is that it is a mixture of nature and nurture and it may have some epigenetic component. Nobody really knows.

It should be noted that, while the concept of a “gay gene” has no basis in science, that does not make the idea of a homosexual being “born this way” impossible. It’s well known that the more children a mother has, the more likely the next one is to be homosexual, meaning it’s highly likely that conditions in the uterus are involved with making a child homosexual. Some researchers believe it’s connected with modifications to DNA — there’s much more to what makes a person a person than genes specifically.

However, even if the “nature” side doesn’t contain all the answers, the “nurture” side has many basic questions to answer. For example, what form of “nurture” causes homosexuality? If “nurture” is what causes it, then why does it occur in societies with homosexuality is heavily frowned upon, if not punishable by death? For that matter, if “nurture” causes homosexuality, why does any homophobe have a homosexual child? Wouldn’t they “nurture” their child in such a way that would make them heterosexual?

Some “researchers” have tried to answer this. In 2004, with gay-bashing at its highest point in the United States since the AIDS epidemic, the socially conservative Family Research Council put out a pamphlet called Getting it Straight: What the Research Shows about Homosexuality. In the first chapter, it is argued that homosexuality is caused by child abuse. I must say, this is rather damning evidence against former Vice President Dick Cheney, the late conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, Republican Senator Rob Portman, three-time Republican Presidential candidate Alan Keyes, and Kit Gingrich — mother of Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who also has a lesbian sister. (Fun Fact: Did you know the first known LGBT person to serve in Congress was a Republican named Steward McKinney? He died in 1987 of AIDS, and his obituary was what outed him. The death of McKinney was actually what caused Barney Frank to come out as gay that same year.)

It should be noted that since 2003 the Family Research Council has been run by Tony Perkins. (His relation to Binkin Bottom News anchor Perch Perkins remains unknown.) Perkins once declared that “the homosexuals and the Islamists work out of the same playbook,” whatever that means. Perkins has also argued that various natural disasters are divine punishment for homosexuality — making it rather ironic that his own home was flooded in August 2016.

But this leads to another important question, why is homosexuality wrong? Skeptics Annotated Bible could only find 76 Biblical verses that make any mention of homosexuality. For comparison, the Bible contains 31,102 verses, meaning homosexuality is only mentioned in 0.2% of the entire Bible.

However, the one verse cited over and over as evidence God is anti-gay is Leviticus 20:13, which, in the New International Verison, reads the following:

If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.

Leviticus is a rather odd book of the Bible. The fifth of the Torah (or the five books of Moses), Leviticus is infamous for its seventy-six prohibitions, many of which are ignored today. Here are just some of the many things banned in Leviticus:

• Eating Fat (“This is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come, wherever you live: You must not eat any fat or any blood.” 3:17)
• Touching the corpse of an animal, or touching an unclean animal in general (“If anyone becomes aware that they are guilty — if they unwittingly touch anything ceremonially unclean (whether the carcass of an unclean animal, wild or domestic, or of any unclean creature that moves along the ground) and they are unaware that they have become unclean, but then they come to realize their guilt;” 5:2)
• Having unkempt hair, or tearing your clothes (“Then Moses said to Aaron and his sons Eleazar and Ithamar, ‘Do not let your hair become unkempt and do not tear your clothes, or you will die and the Lord will be angry with the whole community. But your relatives, all the Israelites, may mourn for those the Lord has destroyed by fire.’” 10:6)
• Going to church thirty-three days and one week after giving birth to a boy (“Then the woman must wait thirty-three days to be purified from her bleeding. She must not touch anything sacred or go to the sanctuary until the days of her purification are over.” 12:4)
• Going to church sixty-six days and two weeks after giving birth to a girl (“If she gives birth to a daughter, for two weeks the woman will be unclean, as during her period. Then she must wait sixty-six days to be purified from her bleeding.” 12:5)

And I could go on and on. With that said, this is not to say that everything prohibited in Leviticus is nonsensical. For example, the prohibition on sacrificing your child to Molek (18:21) is one that I strongly agree with.

For the sake of argument, let’s ignore the fact that Leviticus was originally a contemporary manual for sanitary living in early Israel (hence many of its outdated prohibitions, including the infamous prohibition on seafood found in Leviticus 11:9–12, because it was dangerous to eat until rather recently in human history). For that matter, let’s ignore the fact that, continuing with the contemporary nature of Leviticus, many Christians believe this is specifically condemning prostitution done at Pagan worship ceremonies. Let’s assume this verse specifically, despite almost nothing else in Leviticus being this, is intended by God to be an eternal commandment.

Instead, let’s ask the literalists what “as one does with a woman” means. The atheist YouTube channel The Bible Reloaded joked that this verse only prohibits vaginal sex with men — as that is having sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman — while anal sex between gay men is fine. (The use of the phrase “lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman” in the King James Verison can also be humorously interpreted as homosexual sex being fine as long as one person is standing up.)

However, the rest of Leviticus 20 contains a few other commandments Milo should be aware of. For example, Leviticus 20:6 reads:

I will set my face against anyone who turns to mediums and spiritists to prostitute themselves by following them, and I will cut them off from their people.

Leviticus 20:27 expands on this, by stating:

A man or woman who is a medium or spiritist among you must be put to death. You are to stone them; their blood will be on their own heads.

So those who give spiritual practices must be put to death, and those receiving them must be isolated from wider society. And yet, what does Milo advocate for in his interview with LifeSiteNews?

Secular attempts at recovery from sin are either temporary or completely ineffective. Salvation can only be achieved through devotion to Christ and the works of the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. . . Over the next decade, I would like to help rehabilitate what the media calls “conversion therapy.”

It should also be noted that conversion therapy is rather spiritual in nature. Actions like an exorcism, “de-feminizing” children, or even good-old-fashion praying the gay away — all of which are popular among modern ex-gay quacks — are all based on spiritualism and not materialism.

Or how about Leviticus 20:9, which reads the following:

Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death. Because they have cursed their father or mother, their blood will be on their own head.

And yet, what does Milo say in this interview?

When I used to kid that I only became gay to torment my mother, I wasn’t entirely joking.

What Milo is saying is that his mother engaged in the sin of scandal or stumble, or the sin of leading others to sin. Luke 17:1–2 says the following about this action:

Jesus said to his disciples: “Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come. It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.”

So what Milo is saying is that, according to Jesus, it would have been better for her to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around her neck than for her to have raised him as she did. That sounds an awful lot like cursing your mother, meaning Milo is to be put to death.

Now, some might say I’m stretching the words “spiritual” and “curse” rather far in my assessments of those verses — a charge which I plead guilty to. One thing that many have to remember about the Bible, something which many Biblical Scholars admit, is that due to its age and various translations, it’s rather difficult — some argue impossible — to truly understand the original meaning. The famous Lost Jewish Texts — documents mentioned in the Bible that have since become lost — are good examples of this. As is the rumored Q Gospel, a lost testament of Jesus Christ used as a source for Matthew and John. Combine this with the fact that the most recent book of the Bible — the Book Of Revelation — was finished at the end of the first century, and the idea of attempting to practically apply The Bible to the modern world becomes more and more impossible. Especially considering that, while the Bible was finished in the first century, the oldest copy of the Bible that is still around is the Codex Vaticanus, which dates to the early fourth century.

In truth, the modern Christian literalist takes a rather odd view of The Bible. The phrase “sodomy” itself is a rather good example of this. The term comes from Sodom, a town God destroyed in Genesis for, according to homophobic Christians, its rampant homosexuality. However, the actual chapter of Genesis in which Sodom appears (Genesis 18 and 19) make no mention of homosexuality. In fact, Ezekia 16:49 states:

Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.

This means that any idea of homosexuality being the cause of the destruction of Sodom is ahistorical. In fact, the worst sexual crime Sodom is shown to have committed was rape (specifically, rape of angles God sent down, who are described as neither looking male nor female). And yet, rape is not considered an act of “sodomy” while homosexuality is.

Look, I’m not here to criticize Milo for no longer being gay — it’s his life, and if he wants to live in denial that’s his choice. However, it is worth reminding people that the most common Biblical argument against homosexuality is utter nonsense. Or at least, if Milo wants to live according to that argument, there are a few more things he needs to do.