Horrible story in today's Dallas Morning News about an East Texas man who survived the home invasion and slaughter of his wife and children, carried out by his and his wife's teenage daughter, Erin, and three of her friends (all of whom pled guilty in the matter). Excerpt:
[Terry and Penny Caffey] were married eight months later.Erin came along the next year, followed three years later by Matthew, who they called Bubba, and Tyler, who was born in 1999.
Penny home-schooled the children soon after the family moved from Celeste, population 800, to Emory, population 1,200, about three years ago.
The transition to a larger school district was bumpy.
"I guess you'd call it culture shock," Caffey said. "Emory has a lot of bisexual kids; it's like it was almost cool to be bisexual. One of the first things that happened was some girl wanted to be Erin's little girlfriend. And I was like, 'That ain't happenin'.' " [Emphasis mine -- RD]
But after three years of home schooling and much discussion, the children re-enrolled in public schools in 2008. The boys seemed to thrive, but Caffey and his wife were concerned about Erin.
A 16-year-old freshman, she was infatuated with Charlie Wilkinson, an 18-year-old senior - who Caffey describes as cocky and disrespectful.
Charlie Wilkinson became one of the murderers, but the killings aren't what shocked me about this story. What got me was this: This is a tiny East Texas town -- and there's a bisexual culture in one of them, among the teenagers? WTF? What do I not get about teenage life these days? What do I not get about the cultural air kids breathe?
I am so not going to give my children over to this culture, if I can help it. So not going to do it.But that's what the Caffeys thought to, I guess.
UPDATE: To clarify: I'm not saying that the teenage culture of bisexuality is worse morally than murder, for heaven's sake. Obviously murder -- and murder of one's own family -- is about the worst thing imaginable.. I'm simply saying that I was more shocked by this tidbit about the decadent teenage culture in a tiny Texas town than I was by the foul crime itself. Big difference.
UPDATE.2: Reading the comments, what on earth is wrong with some of you? I'm not saying bisexuals killed that family.Good grief. It's obvious that the murderers include the daughter and her boyfriend. The bisexuality thing was a mere aside that I found more startling than the murders, given the small-town culture where this crime took place. I freely admit that I am out of touch with teenage culture today. If you're bound and determined to conclude that I think bisexuality is worse than murder, you're completely wrong, and you're willfully misreading my post for whatever reason. At least understand what you're doing, and the bad faith in which you're doing it.
A pastor was shot dead in his pulpit today in Illinois. That appalls me. It doesn't shock me. This kind of thing happens these days. Sad but true. You don't hear every day about a tiny Texas town whose teenagers are engaged in a culture of bisexuality. At least I don't.
UPDATE.3 Ah, so now I get where the unusual traffic has been coming from.
Andrew Sullivan linked to this post, calling my point of view "clinical." So it must be to someone with his values. I think I have said five times here that murder is incomparable to bisexuality in terms of moral meaning, but why let that clarification get in the way of a good snit? The point of my post was not that one thing is worse than the other, but that I personally found one thing more shocking than the other. Shocking, in the sense of being surprised by something.
From my point of view, both are violations of the moral order. Murder is unspeakably worse, but I am not surprised to find that in small towns (alas). I would be, and was, surprised to find the claim that bisexuality was trendy in a tiny Texas town's high school. This post was entirely about how little I know about teenage culture today, and its sexual mores.
One thing I do know about is how Andrew writes about people who disagree with him on sexual matters. So I'm not surprised, but I am grateful for the extra traffic.
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Just to clarify, while I do think Rod's post is in very bad taste, I do not think it is so because Rod is trying deliberately to conflate bisexuality and murder.
I simply think that it is in bad taste to use the report of a murder as the incidental pretext for discussing the topic of teenage bisexual chic.
Doing so is disrespectful to the people who were murdered.
It desecrates their memories in a way, however unintended the offense may have been on Rod's part.
And the notion of bisexual chic -- "even" in a small town in Texas -- is no where near surprising, let alone "shocking" enough to justify the offense, however unintended.
Small towns -- in several of which I have lived and in one of which I grew up -- are characterized in moral terms *less* by the absence of vices pandemic in the culture as a whole and *more* by the presence or persistence of certain virtues that have, unfortunately, waned in the culture as a whole.
If anything, kids in small towns are under unusual pressure to conform to the "vicious" as opposed to the "virtuous" norms of the culture as a whole, subjected as they are to constant shaming by said culture as "backward" hicks, rubes, rednecks, etc. and made to feel that their lives mean less, instead of more, because they live outside the metropolitan-imperial core from which such shaming emanates.
Again, all of this is interesting and merits conversation.
Just not right now.
Instead, let's pray for the souls of those who were killed and for the loved ones they leave behind.
Erin:
sadly, our culture which pushes all sorts of alternative lifestyles at high school age children is thriving even in small towns, so it's not particularly shocking to me that one small town would be known for its "bisexual" culture.
Really? How so?
By telling kids that if they are actually gay, then they are still worthwhile people? Allowing gay/straight alliances on campus?
What a perfectly horrible thought! Closeted, depressed gay kids are so much more comforting for the parents...so long as you keep a close watch on the medicine cabinet and the razor blades.
I'm going to turn the comments off on this thread tonight -- not going to be here to monitor the trolls. Back on tomorrow.
Sir, it is not that those commenting fail to understand you; it's that they do understand you and are horrified by what you are saying. Teenagers have sex with one another, and sometimes they do things with both boys and girls. This is not a shocker; what is shocking is that you are shocked to discover that it might happen anywhere, even in a location you consider insulated from it. That's the point: no place is insulated from it. Wherever people are, whatever religion, location, or culture, they will have bisexual sex.
By contrast, although people do kill each other, it is very unusual--vastly more unusual and therefore more shocking--that a child would kill her own parents and siblings. The fact that you don't see this is what is shocking the rest of us now! Seriously, think about it just from an "odds" perspective for a moment.
I've opened a new post to continue this topic, and want to redirect readers to it. Go here to continue this thread...
Comments on this one closed again.