I've just recently become aware of this issue, and have investigated both sides of it.

http://www.solohq.org/Forum/SOLOAnnouncements/0003.shtml

http://theautonomist.com/autonomist/articles2/solo_pervert_a.html

http://theautonomist.com/autonomist/articles2/solo_pervert_b.html

http://theautonomist.com/autonomist/articles2/solo_pervert_c.html

Regardless of who is right about the issue of homosexuality, Perigo will eventually be outted as the dishonest coward that he is unless he provides an adequate (read: rational, mature, and serious) response to Firehammer's criticisms, rather than evading them, as it is so obvious that he and his lackeys are doing.

"Then there's another way. Kill by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. It's simple... Men have a weapon against you. Reason. So you must be very sure to take it away from them. Cut the props from under it. But be careful. Don't deny outright. Never deny anything outright, you give your hand away. Don't say reason is evil--though some have gone that far and with astonishing success. Just say that reason is limited. That there's something above it. What? You don't have to be too clear about it either. The field's inexhaustible. 'Instinct'--'Feeling'--'Revelation'--'Divine Intuition'--'Dialectic Materialism.' If you get caught at some crucial point and somebody tells you that your doctrine doesn't make sense--you're ready for him. You tell him that there's something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel. He must believe. Suspend reason and you play it deuces wild. Anything goes in any manner you wish whenever you need it. You've got him. Can you rule a thinking man? We don't want any thinking men."

- Ellsworth Toohey to Peter Keating in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead

I'm quickly losing respect for Perigo's SOLOHQ, as will others who value rationality, if anti-intellectual trends such as this continue there. Eventually SOLHQ will become little more than what it is already evidencing itself to be - a "feel-good" "chat room" for "cookie thieves" in "Objectivist" clothing.

"An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.

"Whenever you committed the evil of refusing to think and to see, of exempting from the absolute of reality some one small wish of yours, whenever you chose to say: Let me withdraw from the judgment of reason the cookies I stole, or the existence of God, let me have my one irrational whim and I will be a man of reason about all else-that was the act of subverting your consciousness, the act of corrupting your mind. Your mind then became a fixed jury who takes orders from a secret underworld, whose verdict distorts the evidence to fit an absolute it dares not touch-and a censored reality is the result, a splintered reality where the bits you chose to see are floating among the chasms of those you didn't, held together by that embalming fluid of the mind which is an emotion exempted from thought."

- from "Galt's Speech" in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

I'd really like to be wrong about this, but nothing less than a rational argument is going to convince me, and those are an increasingly rare commodity at Perigo's SOLOHQ these days.

Jim Faber is a musician and computer programmer with an interest in Objectivist filosofy. He is a contributor to The Autonomist's Forum (http://usabig.com/wowbbforums) and The Rational Argumentator.