A Bad Hour of Leykis

I listen to a lot of talk radio. One of the hosts I listen to often is Tom Leykis. As he tells you at the start of each hour, he’s not a right-winger. I gather from listening to him that he leans mostly towards libertarianism. But I digress, because his show isn’t about party politics. I listen enough that I can probably be categorized as a “fan”, though I’m certainly not a “student” (fans will know what this means). If there are any fans reading this, I think Tom usually does an outstanding job as a radio talk show host and is very entertaining. He makes a lot of good points. His lines of reasoning are usually very logical. I do, however, disagree with him on some important things, because we have some very different starting points in our outlook on life.

Tom is apparently on yet another vacation this week. It seems that some radio hosts get a lot of vacation. Yesterday, I heard a repeated hour on his show in which Tom solicited calls from married persons who had homosexual feelings that their spouse didn’t know about.

One exchange with a caller stood out in my mind. Tom must not have had many callers on the topic, because he kept this woman in the air for a long time, haranguing her for her decisions, in between his characteristic long...


pointless...


pauses...


that someone turning the dial could easily mistake for dead air. Later that same hour, Tom got punked by a Phil Hendrie listener who called in as Doug Danger. Tom kept him on the air for a long time, too. So, my guess is that there weren’t a lot of people calling in to say they were closeted even to their spouse.

But back to the exchange with this woman. She called in claiming to be a 25-year-old Mormon who was married (of course) with two kids. She said her husband was a great husband and father. She claimed that she finds some women hot in a lustful way.

Since Tom is an individualist narcissist atheist, and nothing is more important in life than his orgasms, he insisted that she "must" be "honest" with herself and to truly be intimate with her husband, she had to tell him and, by implication, break up the family and leave it. Yes, every once in a while on the Leykis show you get marriage and relationship advice from a man who has been divorced four times and swears off marriage and encourages people to live alone and only do what they really want to do. Yeah, he knows how to get along with others on a deep level.

His advice to men who are looking for cheap, casual sex? Practical and effective. His advice here? Not so much.

This woman chose to get married. She made vows her and her husband and their families consider sacred. She chose to make two children with her husband. She has certain obligations to keep. Yet Leykis encouraged her to break her vows, break up her family, go against her religious beliefs and church, and hurt her husband and children, because she has lustful thoughts about women.

The assertion that she HAS to act on her feelings is absurd.

First of all, sexual encounters involve another consenting adult, and who is to say the women she is attracted to would reciprocate and act on it with her? People deal with their feelings without acting on them all of the time. There are married people who, at one time or another, feel like leaving their spouses. Later on, they are glad that they didn’t. There are recovering alcoholics who do not act on their feelings of wanting a drink. There are plenty of straight men who want to make passes at every somewhat attractive woman they see, but they don’t because they save sex for marriage or don’t want to get fired from their jobs. Some people are attracted to slightly underage teens… do they have to act on those feelings? There are people who feel like sleeping in all day every day instead of going to work, or punching out talk show hosts, or robbing a bank, or spending money they don’t have, or always eating more food than they need. There are people who decide to go kosher who still feel like eating bacon.

It sounded like she was doing a good job of dealing with her feelings, but Tom insisted that having the thoughts in the first place meant she HAD to act.

I disagree.

She was restricting herself to sex with her husband when she felt more like interacting with women. There are people who want sex to don’t have sex at all, or for long stretches of time. I have yet to see a headline that says “Woman Dies From Lack of Sex.”

As far as urging her to tell her husband – why? How would that help anything? All it would do is bring trouble. There are things you should not tell your spouse. Most of them are completely irrelevant to you relationship. I mean, do you describe every bowel movement you have to your spouse? Do you describe every sexual encounter you ever had with someone else before you met your spouse? Why not, if you really want to be open and honest with them?

The woman kept citing her deeply held Mormon faith as the basis for her decisions. Tom’s response? “You don’t have to be a Mormon.” While true, it is an answer from Tom’s dismissive attitude towards religion in general. It was said by Tom as if she woke up one day and said, "Hmmm, I could go to McDonald's today - or - I could join the LDS church." Some people have carefully and thoughtfully explored and pondered their choices in religion, and have committed to an organized one. I know that is hard for some people - like Leykis - to fathom. Not all religious people are mindless zombies who stick with a religion because they were born to parents who practiced it. She would lose a lot of she left the LDS church - probably including family and friends.

Don’t think I support the LDS church. The church is pseudo-Christian, false, and a cult from both a theological and sociological perspective. But because it is a very large cult, leaving it is very, very difficult. And I know that marriage is everything in the LDS church.

While this woman should have never have gotten married if she was primarily attracted to women and cared more about that than having children, what’s done is done. She apparently functions well with her husband, and she is giving her children both a mother and a father. She made decisions and vows, and should stick to them, and not let some radio entertainer who esteems casual sex over relationships and marriage sway her to do something she and many other people will regret.