Here’s an easy question: Looking at humans as a whole, is it normal and natural for a man and woman to have intercourse; are the genitals of a male and a female complementary components?
Next, let’s try a bot of a Miller’s analogy (no, the other Miller, Miller):
penis is to vagina as:
a) electricity is to plug prongs
b) blender is to fruit
c) fruit is to electrical socket
d) plug prongs are to electrical socket
You seem to be missing the common theme: the natural elegance of nature. See my previous post.
[QUOTE=magellan01]
Here’s an easy question: Looking at humans as a whole, is it normal and natural for a man and woman to have intercourse; are the genitals of a male and a female complementary components?
[/QUOTE]
Of course it’s ‘natural’. However, considering that many of our primate cousins ALSO have instances of homosexual activity, and that humans are a sexually (as in sexual overdrive) oriented species, ALL sex is ‘natural’ for us. Or do you think that only vaginal sex is ‘natural’ for humans? Oral sex not ‘natural’? You can’t procreate if you cum in your wife’s mouth, despite the fact she’s a woman and you are a man. What about anal sex between a man and woman? Can’t get her with child if you cum in her ass, right? What about, say, mammary intercourse (:p…no idea if there is a scientific name for this, sorry)? Same goes here. Yet all of these are things (and this is hardly an exhaustive list here…if a pair of humans CAN do something sexual, they WILL) that ‘normal’, ‘natural’ heterosexuals do, despite the fact that they don’t lead to babies. Homosexual intercourse is just as ‘natural’, though it represents a smaller percentage of the overall population.
-XT
I was going to ask what you’re talking about, but I realized I don’t care. Saying gays are abnormal and wired wrong is judgmental and irrelevant to the discussion, and Miller was right to call you on it.
I agree that “you’re wired wrong” is a big improvement over beatings and anti-sodomy laws. But IntelliQ’s post implied that asking for anything less than insult and judgment is special treatment - not that different from the some of the themes David42 sounded. That’s wrong. It’s progress, but that doesn’t mean people have to smile and applaud insults toward gays just because they’re not accompanied by legal discrimination.
You’re typing your questions on a computer. Is that natural? I think everybody understands that the male and female components are required for reproduction. That doesn’t mean anything else is unnatural or not-as-good (or less beautiful) because it isn’t what nature intended. Nature’s not that judgmental and there’s a lot of weird stuff in nature in any event. This gets us back to that question again: “Who cares?”
A negative difference, let’s be clear, is your point here. If your claim is that one has a natural elegance to it, and the other does not, and natural elegance is something of value (as seems reasonable to assume you believe), then it’s a definite, obvious negative difference, correct? It’s lacking, in comparison.
I’ll confess that I my first memories of life aren’t waking up on a cold slab table, a storm ringing about my head, as a strange fellow in a lab coat yells excitedly, but possibly I just can’t remember back that far.
Nature (or God) created my body, too. And i’m afraid I still disagree on your notion of objective natural elegance - and that not only does it exist objectively, but that it is inherently valuable. Round peg goes in round hole; round peg is, in fact, developed by evolution so as to fit into round hole, for the sake of procreation. That’s nice, but if you want to get any more poetic than that you’re relying upon your opinion, not fact. As i’ve said; i’ve heard people speak about maths as being naturally elegant, an idea that entirely bamboozles me. I mean, to attempt to phrase it in terms of your argument, a calculator was designed for solving maths problems - even more definetly designed, specifically designed, for that purpose than genitalia for procreation. But I confess I don’t see anything naturally elegant, or artificially elegant, or elegant at all, about using that calculator to solve a tricky equation.
[QUOTE=Marley23]
I agree that “you’re wired wrong” is a big improvement over beatings and anti-sodomy laws. But IntelliQ’s post implied that asking for anything less than insult and judgment is special treatment - not that different from the some of the themes David42 sounded. That’s wrong. It’s progress, but that doesn’t mean people have to smile and applaud insults toward gays just because they’re not accompanied by legal discrimination.
[/QUOTE]
Oh, I fully agree with you there. Just saying that some small progress is better than no progress at all, and it’s like that first pebble falling down the unstable slope…eventually there will be an avalanche, and the folks on the wrong side of this issue are going to be the ones buried by history. As the incredibly stupid folks who turned water hoses and guard dogs on black teens look today to the majority of Americans. A smacking is coming for folks standing in the way of allowing gay people the same rights as everyone else gets, and I can’t wait to bring the pain. IntelliQ isn’t one of those, so I say take what you can get and be happy…s/he will change since s/he is capable of change to the point of at least being able to concede the major point, if not feel comfortable with all of this change stuff. The folks who are really going to get smacked are the ones actively standing in the way of the landslide and trying to hold it back…and for them I predict lots and lots of pain.
-XT
Ummm, c) fruit is to electrical socket!
Electrical banana
Is gonna be a sudden craze
Electrical banana
Is bound to be the very next phase
They call it mellow yellow
(Quite rightly)
They call me mellow yellow
(Quite rightly)
They call me mellow yellow
What do I win?
CMC fnord!
Of course, it is. Do you really doubt this? It interferes with the use of the body as it was designed to be used. Yes, it’s just as “natural” for a gay person to be attracted to someone of the same sex as it is for a heterosexual to be attracted to a person of the opposite sex, but it is not the being at its ideal state. Homosexuality is not the default position for the species. As you stated, evolution designed round peg to fit in round hole in order to procreate—so we agree on that, nature designed the penis to fit into the vagina. That is the “natural” state of affairs. Now penis and vaginas can have all sorts of other fun, with same-sex, opposite-sex, or inanimate objects, but none off those things erase the FACT (as you seem to grant) that penises and vaginas were designed to come together. (No pun intended, but I’ll take it.)
Let us digress. I do think that there is an elegance to nature. And when math can accurately express the balances and ratios in nature, I do think it is quite beautiful. Look at the Golden Mean. It’s a recurring theme in nature that is closely expressed by a Fibonacci sequence. Look at the beginnings of calculus as uncovered by Newton and Leibniz and how it allows us to figure out, among many other things, the area defined by a curve. Or some of the intricacies of Pascal’s Triangle. Very beautiful stuff. It’s the workings of the world revealed. And there is a theory that we’re not even using the right/best math…that if we did everything would be clear and we wouldn’t be stuck with pi being so damn irrational. Imagine being able to understand, to “see” the math of waves crashing on the beach, or the leaves of a weeping willow blowing in a storm. I think, “WOW”! Profoundly beautiful.
The thread. Well done, sir(?)!
Interferes? Maybe if you’re trying to have sex and go to the bathroom at the same time, but I don’t think a lot of people are into that. Either way, thanks for making me think about it. And again, your body was not “designed to be used” in any particular way. That connotes intent. Gay or straight, you can do much freakier things than anal sex without causing any kind of serious harm to your body.
Sir or M’Lord.
Mayhap you’d like to wax poetically on the natural beauty of slime molds and hemorrhagic fevers too?
CMC fnord!
But where you and I disagree is that there is some kind of inherent worth to all that. I disagree, simply put. I interfere with my body as it was designed to be used all the time!
Ok, that may have come out wrong. What I mean is, humans are (I seem to recall) persistence hunters by nature. That’s what we’re designed for. But I don’t hunt down my meals over hours or days. I’ve had vaccinations. I wear glasses, and I had an operation around birth to partially fix a birth defect. I shave. Now, to me, there is an worth to these things; both out of the worth that they have to their respective specific effects, but also because I can recognise the cunning in, essentially, fucking about a bit with the natural order of things in order to improve upon them. Now, I make no claim at all that this is an objective worth, it’s purely my personal opinion, my personal sense of value. So it’s pretty much the same thing as your natural elegance.
I disagree. For me, the concept of beauty or otherwise loveliness of numbers and maths just doesn’t work at all for me. The two are so far removed - maths, to my mind, could aptly be described as functional.
But that’s the point. We’re in disagreement on this. We have differing views, differing value judgements. It’s a subjective ideal, even if it is based on an objective fact, because once you start putting any value on that fact that isn’t that fact alone, you’ve created subjective standards. The problem isn’t you saying “A penis is designed to go into a vagina; this is an objective statement”. The problem is you saying “A penis is designed to go into a vagina, and therefore has value. These are objective statements.” No. One is, but it does not lend it’s objectivity to any further statements tagged onto it.
With respect, I am not a less ideal being than a straight person, nor do I have less ideal sex than a straight person, other than in opinion. You draw facts from nature, yes, and I respect and agree with those facts. But opinions on facts are not inherently facts themselves.
Besides, i’m a less ideal being for lots of other reasons. 
You’ve obviously never heard of something called a buttplug, have you?
It is not odd that the other person was a woman. I can’t be the only person familiar with the feminist idea of political lesbianism, right? You know, a theory that suggests that sexual orientation (for women) is a choice…
Given the existence of such a position within the feminist movement, I find it surprising that Nixon’s statement is considered worrisome. There have been lesbians who have said it is a choice for a damn long time.
Mademoiselle, you assume too much.
That is so 1970s second wave. We’ve come a long way, baby.
magellan01, could you please respond to me? If hetero sex is so natural and perfect and beautiful, what do you make of the fact that a woman’s body is designed so that she can rarely orgasm from penetration? Because, as a woman, PIV sex, while nice, mostly seems like clumsy ol’ evolution again. Hardly the pinnacle of beauty and elegance.
Thanks. I’ve done more to open the minds of my conservative peers than any condescending snotty liberal has ever done, I won’t mention any names, ahem. I’m agnostic so I’m not blinded by religion and throughout my life I’ve had time to observe that gays arent any different than anyone else - except the gross stuff they do at home. None of my business, so I say leave them to be happy and/or miserable in marriage/divorce just like the *statistically sexually normal *people. Did I phrase that better for the fanatics? :rolleyes:
Live and let live, but some of the fanatics actively promote an atmosphere that drives people off instead of opening their minds. I’ll continue working to convince my side of the aisle and eventually hopefully in my lifetime this discriminatory shit will end.
I don’t think that’s particularly well-phrased either. But more importantly I don’t think it’s fanatical or cause for sarcasm to object to your comments that gays are sexually abnormal and wired wrong.
There are practices that are more common and less common but even amongst the heterosexual community alone the number and variety of sexual activities that go on are staggering. If you’re assuming that most people have fairly plain “vanilla” intercourse you would probably be very surprised. And certainly anal and oral intercourse is hugely popular (or so I hear) amongst heterosexuals, so they’d fall pretty centrally on the bell curve of sexual practices.
Of course, you’re presumably just arguing that homosexuals are abnormal because they’re attracted to members of the same sex, but it’s begging the question to say that homosexuals are abnormal because they’re homosexual and that’s abnormal.