Oh dear. An immovable object and an unstoppable force.
(This thread, given the starting point, is absolutely f*cking delicious).
(The arguments against don't change, so the part below the line is a slight modification of something I wrote ages ago).
IndySkyz said:
Stilgar, Nachimir, or Frostbyte, why do you need so many different identities, can't you just speak your mind as one persona, or are your thoughts so wacked you need to be 5 different personallities?
Don't be silly. We aren't aliases of one person, we're different people. Only Demacore/Reign/Haloscan etc is using alts, but he always makes it obvious through his avatars. Anyone who has spent an appreciable amount of time here knows this.
... wait, could it possibly be that the majority here is both hetrosexual and not homophobic? Heresy!
IndySkyz said:
being gay IMO is wrong
[...]
Think about it this way, If everyone was gay from the dawn of time, would we exsist? 2 wrongs don't make a right, and 2 gays can't make a child, I hope you appreciate the fact your parents were not homos.
Gayness, continued.
Not to put to fine a point on it: you are utterly wrong, in the most complete sense imaginable.
It is normal for a certain percentage of a human population to be homosexual (estimates I've seen average 10% and range between 2 - 30%).
For the record, I was raised a chronic religious homophobe. Since leaving that, I've made some gay friends who've let me ask a lot of questions about their lives. Throughout, I have remained heterosexual. I now know that every argument against homosexuality is factually and morally wrong.
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To address your arguments against homosexuality, along with every other I've heard:
"Homosexuality isn't natural" - Yes it is.
"If everyone were homosexual, we would die out" - No we wouldn't.
"Homosexual people are statistically more likely to die young" - That's often because of the cultural fallout created by prejudice.
"Homosexual relationships don't/can't last" - Yes they can, and often longer than heterosexual ones.
"Homosexuality is a mental illness" - No it isn't.
"THere's no love in what they do" - Yes there is.
"The majority is heterosexual, so homosexual people must be wrong". - Majority does not equal right, by extrapolation from this argument individuality itself would become wrong.
To expand on all that:
Sexuality is a lot more complex than most people know, let alone care to admit. Studies of sexuality have shown that most people are somewhere inbetween homosexual/heterosexual, with a bias (often strong) toward one or the other. Cultural values, such as the stigmatisation of homosexuality and assumption the a person is one or the other, bias the majority toward heterosexuality.
Homosexuality is natural, as it takes place in a great many species. A lot of individual heterosexual animals, for instance among geese and chimpanzees, also engage in homosexual behaviour in addition to heterosexual courtship/breeding.
If all of humanity eventually became homosexual, which is overwhelmingly unlikely anyway, we would not die out, because homosexual urges do not quash the urge to have children. The only difference it would make is that pregnancies would be planned, not accidental.
There's plenty of love "in what they do". In fact it has exactly the same potential to be loving or unloving as heterosexual activity. Additionally, heterosexual people obsess over butt sex, when in fact it's often a mere fraction in the sex life of a gay man.
Homosexual relationships can and do last. I personally know a couple who have lived together for twenty years. Also, nowadays a great many heterosexual relationships don't last. That is never, ever, seized on as evidence for heterosexuality being "wrong", because it would be just as fallacious as applying it to homosexuality.
The reasons for the arguments against homosexuality are basically that, for centuries now, Westerners have lived in cultures that tacitly or actively condemn homosexuality, when in fact it is simply intolerance that should be condemned.
Children who learn about homosexuality sometimes think it is strange because it's different to the heterosexual imagery they're overwhelmingly bombarded with up to this point. Big deal. Once upon a time, the entire world seemed strange to all of us, and we all asked questions as soon as we'd learned how to.
"Majority" does not mean "right" or "wrong". If that were the case, owning a Mac, which comprise about 15% of the market for computers, would be wrong, and having a PC would be right. Of all the ways to moralise, counting majorities is truly ridiculous, simply serving to circumvent evidence such as that above (Note: I am not disparaging democracy. Governance is not the same thing as morality, though they sometimes overlap in ways they really shouldn't).
"Natural" and "normal" are two very different but sometimes overlapping things. Culture has given us a multitude of idols to replace or augment human nature with, and homophobia is one of them. Your own discomfort comes from your culture, your family, your history, but not your human nature nor your genes. If the right pressures and ideas are applied to a person as they develop, they can be made uncomfortable or outright phobic about absolutely anything. Ideas that homosexuality is somehow wrong are still a strong current in Western culture.
Running the other way, absolutely anything can be made into a sexual preference. For instance, black hair with loose curls is intensely attractive to me, because it reminds me of a waitress who flirted with me when I was only 13. Like negative values, positive ones are likewise constructed as we develop. At the utmost extreme, negative values take the form of phobias, and positive values take the form of fetishes (philias).
Sexuality itself though is not merely a value, and homosexuality is as biologically rooted as heterosexuality. Individuals tend to lean stably towards one or another, but both are natural states for a human being.
Almost all homophobic arguments reduce to "I'm not comfortable with it, so it mustn't be right". I'm not a big fan of courgettes, so they must be wrong. Seafood, orange clothes, brass bands, lace curtains, PCs based on the VIA chipset, action films... I'm not comfortable with them, so they are all wrong. Does that sound ridiculous? That's because it is.
Furthermore, the reflection in someone else of a value you hold is absolutely not proof of its correctness. To think so is simply to confuse subjective opinions with objective facts.
On the idea that homosexuality is a dysfunction in the brain: It isn't. It was classified as a mental illness until the seventies. You can read about that
here. The upshot is that we now know there is no causal relation between mental illnesses and homosexual urges.
Furthermore, it is possible for a set of related phenomena within a species to become somewhat unrelated after many generations (Konrad Lorenz wrote about this as "Functional Autonomy"). Sexual pleasure and loving interaction are needs apart from any urges we might have to be parents. Whether it's derived homosexually, heterosexually, or by masturbation, there is absolutely nothing dysfunctional about sexual pleasure. The only time it can be wrong is when it hurts oneself or another. Likewise, no form of love is wrong when it does no harm.
So in short: homosexuality is natural, and does not harm individuals or society. All the anti-gay arguments I've encountered are absolute hogwash, utterly lacking factual support.
