patrick.net

Vaticanus says

Dan,

what is "immoral"?

Your question is a generalization of the question asked by the original post. This is worthy of discussion, but I would start a new thread for that more general subject.

bdrasin says

Dictionary.com

im•mor•al [ih-mawr-uhl, ih-mor-]

adjective

1. violating moral principles; not conforming to the patterns of conduct usually accepted or established as consistent with principles of personal and social ethics.

Sounds like a good definition to me - anyone think they can do better than that?

The first part of that definition, "violating moral principles", is worthless as it says nothing; it merely pushes the question to "what constitutes moral principles".

The second part of the definition is fine, as long as you are willing to accept a few consequences including that morality is not absolute and what is moral and immoral may vary greatly from culture to culture. If you accept that definition, than morality isn't nearly as important as people make it out to be. As such, I would argue that morality is more than arbitrary cultural preferences. In fact, I wouldn't include arbitrary cultural preferences in morality at all. However, this definition does cover b.s. morality like it's wrong to work on Sundays, eat meat on Fridays, for a woman to show her legs above the kneecap.

adarmiento says

Or a better question is Why the hell is this thread on Patrick.net ?

Because Patrick.net has a religion topic.

Vaticanus says

so Dan can execute another self stimulating intellectual masturbation?

It's not masturbation if you are doing it with other people. So, by your analogy, this would be an intellectual orgy.

curious2 says

Dan, the data suggest that most homophobes are in fact secretly homosexual. That's the conclusion of the study that Jody linked to above:

Yeah, but I don't buy that. According to the Williams Institute report gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual persons make up slightly less than 4% of the U.S. population. Even if only half the GLBT were closeted such that they weren't included in the count done by the Williams Institute, that would make the GLBT community a mere 8% of the total population. And even if all of them were self-hating, that would not be sufficient. Clearly more than 8% of the U.S. population is anti-gay.

I would use more conservative figures in estimating. About 30% of the U.S. population is bigoted against gays. With maybe 4% being GLBT, including closeted ones, and about half being self-bigoted (which I think is pretty high), that leaves 2% out of 30% or 6.7% of the bigots are gay. The other 93.3% are straight assholes.

Also, take a look at the Middle East. About 100% of the population is anti-gay. I don't think that means 100% of the population is gay. I mean, really, just look at the lack of a fashion industry. Their clothes haven't changed in 700 years. There's no way they are all gay.

Dan8267 says

look at the Middle East.

That region holds many contradictions, men kiss each other and hold hands in public while also claiming to support anti-gay laws. One of Michael Jackson's fans tried to persuade him to relocate to the middle east, where a rich guy could have young boys living with him and no one would object. If you read the history of the dancing boys of Afghanistan, you can observe that much of that country's homophobia arrived with the British, who demoted them from the equivalent of rock stars to rent boys.

The issue comes down to, among those who are "anti-gay," what are the motives and priority? When Muslim fanatics murder their own daughters for family "honor," it's difficult to say that being anti-gay is their highest priority. When someone who says he isn't even Catholic calls himself "Vaticanus" and turns his avatar into a toilet sign, it seems comparatively important to his identity.

The 2012 Republican platform included two planks that polled at -40%. Yes, negative forty. Both were proposed amendments to the Constitution: one to ban abortion, even in cases of rape; the other, to stop gay couples from getting married. A rational party wanting to win an election would have dropped both. Somebody had to prioritize those planks to put them there despite overwhelming evidence that they would hurt their party's chances.

Dan8267 says

About 30% of the U.S. population is bigoted against gays. With maybe 4% being GLBT, including closeted ones, and about half being self-bigoted (which I think is pretty high), that leaves 2% out of 30% or 6.7% of the bigots are gay. The other 93.3% are straight assholes.

The 30% number is probably correct, and equals approximately the % who wouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton because she's a woman, and who wouldn't vote for Barack Obama because he's black, and who insisted on supporting GW Bush to the end because he's a churchgoing Christian.

The 4% number reflects only those who self-identify as GLBT. It omits the closeted ones. I suspect that actually a larger number are resentful cowards. How many people have you seen who compromised and settled for failure and resented those whose courage and sacrifice and luck enabled them to succeed? It's human nature. The 19 hijackers on 9/11, for example, were all adult males, yet none had any children. What motivated them to sacrifice everything, including their whole lives and any chance of evolutionary success? Religion is part of it, but religion motivates most believers to be fruitful and multiply; only a minority (e.g. nuns and priests) are motivated to die childless. There must be some reason why the same set of beliefs motivates different people in opposite directions.

What makes someone gay? Science is trying to get it straight - Evolutionarily speaking, being gay is still something of an enigma

•Heterosexual people have been less interesting to scientists than gay people, in terms of where they come from, because, evolutionarily speaking, being gay doesn't lead to a higher "higher reproductive fitness" — meaning, it doesn't lead to more babies.

•Across cultures, gay boys tend to be more interested in spending time with their mothers.

•We still don't really know why gay people are attracted to each other.

We don't actually know the extent to which gender is socially constructed because you can't do an experiment where you remove culture and see what happens. So we don't know to what extent what we see as gendered patterns are the result of sex, biological sex, males and females. We know that gender differs according to culture, but we also know that there are patterns that appear to be fairly universal in terms of gender norms. And the ones that are more universal are more likely to probably have a sex bases to it, an evolved-to-sex basis, that is to say biological basis for males and females. So, for example, which gender serves a very important meal may be different by different cultures. So in some cultures a man will serve a very important meal versus a woman. So for example, think about it in the United States that historically speaking the father carves the turkey on Thanksgiving, but in general women prepare food historically speaking. So what we know is that these kinds of things can differ by culture, but that there are some "universals". And one of the universals we find, for example, is in childhood play that we find that children who are girls tend to do more social play, they tend to do more social role-play. Children who are boys tend to do more competitive play, they tend to do more play that mimics aggression or that mimics sport and mimics sometimes building, and so there are these kinds of patterns. But that doesn't mean everybody fits them.

And it's really interesting actually too if you look cross-culturally scientists find evidence that this may have – it's not just gender, that there's a sexuality component to it too. So boys who are going to grow up and be gay, and we know who they are because of retrospectively they grow up to be gay, they're what's called androphilic, that is to say they're attracted to males. And the majority of females are also attracted to males, so most females are androphilic and a small percentage of boys will grow up to be androphilic. We know that historically speaking, cross-culturally they tend to be more feminine in terms of their interests, they're more interested in social role-play, for example, they're more interested in helping their mothers, they're more interested in associating with girls as young children and more interested in dressing as girls, for example. That doesn't mean that they are girls, but it does suggest to us that sexuality and gender have interplayed components in them, that gender isn't just about social role but it has something to do with sexuality and that there's a reason females end up with these kind of patterns and males end up with these kinds of patterns and when you have a male who's attracted to males he ends up with a little bit more of the female pattern and in some circumstances if you have a girl and she's attracted to girls she'll end up with a little bit more of the male pattern in childhood.

So gender and sexual orientation seem to have sort of some connection to each other, but it's not a perfect connection in terms of absolute correlation and so we can't say that we can easily predict what would be somebody's gender role or sexual orientation simply by looking at some of the components.

Evolution would naturally favor heterosexuality because that's how you get babies. And so if we're thinking about genes trying to produce genes it would make no sense to have genes that would lead to people who don't reproduce, because those genes would not be reproduced. That said, we know cross-culturally gay people exist. So we know that that's a natural variation in the population. And so then scientists ask the really interesting question, why is that there? Why does that not disappear over time? Because at least in theory that should lead to lower reproductive fitness, which means it should lead to fewer babies, and so it should fade out evolutionarily speaking. One possibility is that it's a side effect, that human variation is good for the species and so evolution is responding to the situation not by reducing necessarily everything that doesn't work, but saying "Let's keep throwing up variation, and some of it will work in some environments and some of it will work in other environments." Being a varied species makes a species more resilient.

So it may be the case that being gay if you're born that way is just a variation on a theme and it will show up every now and then just because variations show up. But some scientists find some evidence that there may actually be advantages to a family of having a certain percentage of the children be gay. And this is work done, for example, by Paul Vasey at the University of Lethbridge. And he's been looking at the population in Samoa as well as other places, but Samoa as a cultural system that actually recognizes that a certain percentage of the boys are going to grow up to be androphilic, they're going to be interested in men sexually. And they actually have a whole cultural system for it. They have a third gender category called the fa'afafine and when a boy it becomes evident is that kind of boy the child is raised as a girl and becomes a woman culturally speaking but that doesn't change her body at all but partners with men. So in our culture that would be called transgenderism, but in this culture it's a third gender category that absorbs what in our culture might just turn out to be gay men. And what Paul has found is that when he looks at the families that have fa'afafine within them the fa'afafine are not using up a lot of resources, because they're not themselves having children—these are big-family cultures—but they do take their own earnings and they direct it at their nieces and nephews. And that means you have more adults producing more resources for a smaller number of children. So biologically there may be an advantage for families to have a certain number of gay children, because those people will not reproduce but they will take care of the nieces and nephews. And so overall the population, the genetics of a family will be continued on because that family has a genetic advantage.

And when you think about it we have this sort of stereotype of the gay uncle who takes care of the nieces and nephews in terms of providing for them and providing extra resources, and they're not spending it on their own kids, they're spending it on their sister's and brother's children, that might be a possible evolutionary explanation for why it is that we see homosexuality persist in the human system. It's also the case, we know from work done by Ray Blanchard in Canada, that a certain number of men who will grow up to be gay get that way not through genetics per se, but they get that way in the womb. So it's inborn but not genetic. And what happens is apparently—well we know statistically from huge studies now—if a mother has lots of pregnancies of males every successive male will be a little bit more likely to be gay. So the father down you go in that sibling chain the more likely it is that the later-born males will be gay. This has been studied in many populations in the world, large numbers, and it's rigorous. We know that this is true. So why would that be? Well, it looks like it's a kind of side effect: the mother's immune system appears to be reacting to male hormones and maybe dampening them down a little bit, and this results in something called the fraternal birth order effect, which is that later born males are more likely to be gay. It's a surprising finding because it suggests to us that some men are absolutely born gay but not because of genetics, they're born gay because of the birth order in terms of some sort of effect having on a woman's system, which is reacting to her children's system, and it only occurs in males, it doesn't occur in females. And that's part of the reason why the theory is it's an immune response because it doesn't occur with females it only occurs with males born out of the same womb. So that's something I've colloquially called womb-gay, but it's called the fraternal birth order effect. And I think the evidence is very strong that a certain percentage of gay people are born that way. We do not have good evidence that straight people are born that way. We don't bother to look for that evidence. Straight people have been less interesting to scientists than gay people in terms of where they come from. And that's because there's a heterosexist assumption that straight people "require no explanation" and gay people "require explanation."

I mean in terms of evolution gay people do require an explanation. Logically speaking we should say "Well that's not a very 'successful strategy,'" as it's called in science, it doesn't lead to a higher reproductive fitness meaning it doesn't lead to more babies. So logically you would want to explain gay people. But it's also a political issue that basically straight people have required no explanation and gay people have required explanation. And some of the explanations historically have been rather unpleasant, like blaming mothers who are frigid or overly clingy in the case of being gay—"over clingy mothers make gay boys." What we know from cross-cultural studies is that gay boys are more interested in being with their mothers than straight boys, and so it's not that the mothers are more clingy it's that the boys are more tolerant of time with their mothers.

So we've studied much more about gay people that we have studied about straight people, and straight people remain largely a mystery as to how they operate. What makes them straight? We don't really know. We also don't know why gay people are attracted to each other anymore than we know why straight people are attracted to each other. We have hints about smells and about genetic interactions and about facial symmetry, but we really know very little about why straight people are straight and why gay people are gay.

https://bigthink.com/videos/what-makes-someone-gay-science-is-trying-to-get-it-straight

Gay sex is inherently sterile and solely for pleasure. This is not a wrong against another. However it is a wrong against nature/God/Cosmos.

In many religions, heretosexual sex for a reason other than procreating is also a wrong, as it is sterile and solely for pleasure.

If a person must have sex for pleasure then they have missed a huge pleasure that comes from experiencing love and joy and are attempting to fill this void with a lesser love and quick fading joy of sex.

As for comparisons with animals to justify, we are humans, we have a higher conscious than all animals and as such have greater responsibilities and consequences.

Gay sex is inherently sterile and therefore is only done for pleasure.

This is not a wrong against another person but a wrong against God/Nature/Cosmos. It is a misuse of the procreation power inside humans to satisfy desires.

In many religions, heterosexual sex performed without the purpose of procreation is wrong because it is also inherently sterile and only done for pleasure.

People who must satisfy their desires with sex often have not yet experienced a greater love and a greater joy and are misusing sex to fill the void until they discover what the greater pleasure is.

...when you have never eaten steak, pork tastes great.

Gay sex is inherently sterile and therefore is only done for pleasure.

This is not a wrong against another person but a wrong against God/Nature/Cosmos. It is a misuse of the procreation power inside humans to satisfy desires.

In many religions, heterosexual sex performed without the purpose of procreation is wrong because it is also inherently sterile and only done for pleasure.

People who must satisfy their desires with sex often have not yet experienced a greater love and a greater joy and are misusing sex to fill the void until they discover what the greater pleasure is.

...when you have never eaten steak, pork tastes great.

How did this ancient thread get bumped?

Anyhow, historical evidence points to how homosexuality when promoted leads to destruction of society. How diseases spread, how families fall apart and society with it. It's not just a moral sin, it's a crime against humanity.

Gay people wouldn't have so many people against them if they stopped throwing it in peoples faces. Its not even much a problem with gay women its the gay men that have to dramatize every single thing and be such a vector for spreading disease.