Cynthia Nixon states she's "gay by choice". Does this harm the LGBT community?

That’s utter nonsense, as what I’ve highlighted in blue should have made clear to you if you thought about it more carefully. There’s only one possible explanation for such a widespread and strict statistical pattern in biological nature: genetics. A merely congenital explanation would see wildly divergent patterns, or, no real pattern at all. The ultimate cause has to be something deeply fundamental and remarkably consistent across cultural and local-environmental factors, which means genetic rather than congenital.

Sigh – another sad case of math & statistics illiteracy! I have encountered such very sloppy “reasoning” far too often. Engage your brain and see if you can follow me: For the purpose of exposition, say (arbitrarily) that the probability of the first son being a homosexual is 1 percent. Will that boy be a homosexual? The odds are strongly against it, but it happens in once every 100 cases (duh). But science tells us that the next son has a probability of up to 1.44% of being homosexual. And the third up to about 2.1%. But according to you, if the first born son is homosexual, the statistical pattern simply disappears or becomes invalid! That’s just statistical silliness!

Still more self-confident ignorance on display, I see. Too bad you haven’t read, for example, one of many references similar to this:

I’ve got quite a few additional citations that show this has been compellingly demonstrated in the peer-reviewed scientific literature over and over again in human beings, not just animals!

We emphatically are already there, as has been confirmed numerous times all over the world.

That’s a straw man. I’ve never heard anyone ever advocate for equality on genetic grounds. What a nightmarish can of worms such a ridiculous argument would unleash for everyone, not just homosexuals! Instead, the argument is that since homosexuality is genetic, it can’t be a “choice”, and since it’s not a choice, it is morally wrong for others to morally denigrate homosexuality as a “sin” or as being “immoral”.

Ah, the “argument” from X-Men 3: The Last Stand (which, for those who may not be aware, was actually the root topic of the film). Is that you, Magneto?

That argument is profoundly flawed, of course. Lies and cover-ups are no defense from tyranny. Reality cannot be changed by falsehoods, no matter how noble or ignoble the goal (although conservatives apparently refuse to accept that fact).

I don’t know about you, but I, for one, do not live in any utopia. If that were truly all that was necessary, we wouldn’t be in this situation and we wouldn’t be having this debate. Ideals cannot succeed without a vigorous defense, and Nixon’s statement was no help to that cause, and neither are yours, alas.

Words matter. Definitions matter. Factual arguments matter, but I don’t see anything there that matters.

  • Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, July 11, 2006 vol. 103 no. 28 10771-10774

The only “kneejerk” reaction I see from what you call the “gay activist” community is a strong desire for people to speak the truth rather than spouting emotionally-driven gibberish, as Nixon did. If you can’t speak the truth, everyone’s better off if you remain silent.

Well, speaking only for myself, I’m profoundly uncomfortable with the idea that you know the details of Cynthia Nixon’s sexual identity better than she does, even more so with the implication that she’s lying because her experience does not match your expectations, and above all, with the idea that she should shut up rather than share her own experiences.

That’s not the gay rights movement I signed up for.

We actually know quite a lot, considering the difficulty of the subject. We’re not as ignorant as you suggest. See my other posts, especially the first two. There’s no topic in all the universe on which there are no open questions and uncertainties. We shouldn’t expect such ever to occur, let alone concerning such an emotional subject.

Yes, I remember such strident, pseudo-scientific nuttiness, too. Such concepts were never even remotely tenable, let alone credible. Our genes and our genetic environment will have none of it! We can choose to paint our bodies, but we cannot choose what are bodies are or what they “want”. Read or re-read Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, David Barash’s The Whisperings Within, and/or E.O. Wilson’s On Human Nature: The Revised Edition if you want more accessible knowledge on these subjects. You definitely need to brush up on your science in this area.

Again, thoughts and words and lies cannot change reality! It’s babyish crazy-talk to pretend that if ethnic pre-WWII Jews conspired to lie to the world to the effect that they were genetically identical to Nordic Germans they would have been any safer! And the same thing holds for your African slave analogy.

One cannot hold off tyranny with a shield of lies and evasions. We must be boldly truthful and base our arguments on reality, not fantasy, if simple justice is ever to prevail.

So couples who are infertile are just “getting their rocks off”? What about elderly couples?

Tell me he didn’t just say this. BTW, the term “santorum” is not another term for “anal sex”, as you seem to imply.

First, you may wish to try re-phrasing that. To me, your notion that rights are or will be denied to anyone who excersizes choices strikes me as perilously close to incomprehensible, and the way you phrased your sentence “stating or pretending that homosexuality is exclusively biological serves the goal of denying rights to those who choose it” seems to me to be essentially a confused tautology. I cannot respond very meaninfully to something I do not understand. I recommend fleshing those concepts out significantly more fully with far more careful and critical reasoning.

Sure there is! There are thousands, in fact. If you had only the genes of, say, a dried stalk of wheat, you would not be entitled to any of those rights, and your straw man argument wouldn’t stand up against a low breeze. Otherwise, your point hardly seems salient or even trivially relevant, since I never argued that rights descend from genes or choices or the lack thereof.

Is that from one of the “Rutabaga Enchiladas for the Soul” books? I missed that one. Well, if that’s the case, let’s purge all the schools of biology students, professors and researchers! Burn their books! Damn their discrimanatory prejudices anyway!

And spam has nothing to do with bicycles (I hope not, anyway). When come next, try reasoning instead of eccentric platitudes…

I understand your point, but please keep in mind the following: First, I wrote “Much more is confidently known about male homosexuality than is the case with females”, which does not imply science knows little or nothing about lesbians, which definitely is not the case. It’s just a basic relative comparison.

But more importantly, I didn’t come to a “conclusion” about Ms. Nixon, someone I’d never even heard of before yesterday. I simply put forth a scientifically informed argument based on well-known facts, in particular that women change their self-reports of their sexuality fairly often and that these reports are not based on anything reasonably objective (such as changes in brain physiology). Thus, such statements should be understood psychologically as mere behavior rather than as any kind of a statement of fact or of factual relevance. I can say I’m the Archangel Fagle-Bagle from the Sixth Dispensation of the Nineteenth Galaxy of Lazy Satire sent to free the world from reality, but it doesn’t change who or what I am. So it is with Ms. Nixon.

Again, not really. I’m sure you see my dilemma, which I’ll have to explain to other posters that have made similar comments. If I’d lied and pretended to a level of certainty that no one actually possesses, I wouldn’t be open to criticism for contradicting myself. However, just as lies are no defense against bigotry and hatred, five minutes of Googling by others doing fact-checking would end me in ruins. The hallmarks of science are its candor and tentativeness, but this necessarily opens me up to charges of inconsistency and self-contradiction. All I can do is strive to qualify my words adequately and hope for the reasonableness of the reader. That’s a forlorn hope in some cases, but it’s all we’ve got.

My compliments to your thoughtful phrasing there, RaftPerson.

But the semantic difficulties there are near-enough hopeless; the diversity of personal opinions regarding that term are far too large and sloppy for any kind of large-scale consensus definition to arise.

But I still contend that Hamer nailed it, even for women. I hold that the word “bisexual” only applies to sexual behavior, not to sexual orientation. Consider: Lots and lots of self-identified heterosexual men in prison engage in homosexual behavior, but that hardly means they have a bisexual orientation! The CDC and others have cut through the whole messy tangle and have adopted strictly behavioral terms such as “Men who have sex with men (MSM)” rather than “homosexual”. Clarity of language is worth far more than unavoidably mushy and ambiguous definitions that would describe every possible permutation, don’t you agree?

I quite agree (well, with everything but the “choice” aspect, which threatens to bring us into “free will” debates), but I didn’t argue otherwise. Recall these words from my first post:

Thanks for your interesting post.

It might also stop when sloppy-thinking boasters quit trying to make something special of their ability to drown the world in needless babies. Homosexual couples tend not to reproduce, which is considerably more crucial to the survival of the human race and the planet at large now and going into the future! Married couples who reproduce brazenly receive tax breaks, of all things, for bearing children who will add yet more damage to the infrastructure and the world around us and create more competition for jobs we’ve nearly run out of, thus adding to the over-abundance of disconsolate, impoverished, and unemployable people who cannot afford a quality higher education, spiraling the country and the world ever more deeply into a pit of rapidly increasing over-crowding and despair.

Those tax breaks should instead be given to people who promise not to reproduce, not those who cannot even resist their reckless desire to inflict ever more damage to the world.

But that’s just this “whiner’s” opinion…

The fact of the matter is that facts matter!. Claiming that homosexuality is a choice is a lie, and lies are no protection against tyranny and provide no path to justice or wise social policy. Facts, as Ronald Reagan failed to correctly say, are stubborn things. Hand-waving them away is precisely what the Right keeps doing, and the ruins of this approach lie everywhere around us.

That’s pure fairy dust. We are a minority, and there’s no value in denying reality.

As others have pointed out, just because that homosexuality may not be a choice for some, doesn’t mean it isn’t for others. Ate you of the belief that gender identity, or sexual identity, and the sexual attraction that goes along with them is binary?

Such pointless, misplaced, and unwarranted bravado!

First, let me repeat something I wrote earlier:

A person who doesn’t have any scientifically credible knowledge of what the truth actually is simply cannot speak the truth! Do I need to tutor you on basic epistemology and ontology? Someone certainly needs to instruct Cynthia Nixon on these weighty philosophical and scientific matters before she utters more foolishly unwarranted blither on any significant topic again!

What Nixon did was essentially parallel to Rush Limbaugh or some other random illiterate asserting that he knows that “anthropogenic global warming is a hoax”, or that he knows he has full self-knowledge (including the full nature and etiology of their own sexual orientation). They know no such thing. If you or they were much of a careful and honest thinker, you’d know that self-knowledge is the most unreliable data we possess, and very far indeed from the most confident or certain. Psychological and social science studies others for precisely this reason – you cannot ever reliably know your own mind; it plays tricks on you all the time.

Nixon had neither enough reliable self-knowledge nor enough relevant scientific knowledge to assert that she “chose” to be homosexual. She cannot truthfully report what she does not know! As the insightful logician and evolutionary psychologist Jerry Fodor chose for the title of one of this books, “The mind doesn’t work that way”.

Cynthia Nixon knows least of all whether or not she “chose” to be a homosexual. The scientific evidence is overwhelmingly against such an absurd notion!

As interesting as I find ambushed’s arguments (which is not to say I agree with all of them, only that I find them interesting), I’m starting to wonder whether using colored text is a choice or if it’s a genetic predisposition. Either way, I know it’s a teensy bit annoying.

Rape can produce babies.
Prostitution can produce babies.
Incest can produce babies.
People who are drunk or high, and don’t give a damn about each other, can produce babies.
Teenage girls who have low self-esteem, and will let anyone into their pants, can produce babies.
A woman with some semen and a turkey baster can produce babies.
Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it.

And there are many, many straight marriages that don’t produce babies.

This post has been pinked by the Pinkerton!

You’re following in a fine Board tradition, and I’ll miss you when you’re gone. :stuck_out_tongue:

ambushed, I think we’re talking at cross-purposes here. I do understand the studies and statistics, honestly. I don’t think they’re quite as compelling as you do, although I think they’re very interesting and promising and we should keep going on that.

It’s not that I don’t understand statistics, it’s that I reject your definition of “cause”. I think it’s misleading to say that risk factors are causes. This isn’t limited to sexual orientation, it’s a problem with all non-experimental research. Statistical correlations, even really really strong ones, are not the same as causes. Let’s be honest, we don’t know why people get diabetes, either. We know lots of the things that predispose one to diabetes, and things that indicate you have a higher risk for diabetes, but we still don’t know why one fat African American woman gets diabetes and her fat African American sister doesn’t. “Fat” and “African American” and “woman” are risk factors for diabetes, but since one can be fat, African American and female and NOT have diabetes, then there’s some actual cause there we don’t yet know. That cause is some significant difference between the two that we haven’t identified.

I still maintain that, whether or not homosexuality is caused by genes, or by epigenes, or by hormones released during pregnancy which relate to the mother’s diet, activity level, stress or whether it’s caused by Cynthia Nixon’s choice…I don’t think it’s relevant to a discussion of *legal *rights. I don’t think we should lie, or cover it up, or any of the reprehensible things you accused me of. I simply think the root cause of homosexuality is *irrelevant *to the legal status of gay people in the United States of America.

Speech and religion, as already pointed out, are choices which are protected. Race (as it’s commonly, not scientifically, understood) is a result of genetics, and is protected. Obviously, therefore, harping on the “Born That Way” vs. “Choice” is not necessary for legal protection under our constitution. We can get this done under our current constitution either way.

I’m very, very interested in the science as it comes out, 'cause I think it’s neat to know stuff. But as part of a debate on legal issues, it just shouldn’t be considered either way.

Question for all

While I don’t agree with all of what David42 has put forth, and I certainly don’t ascribe to some of the ways he’s described things, let me ask: can you not see how the physical act of making love can be viewed as quite different between the two types of relationships? Let’s say that the degree of love is the same. But the physical coming together of a man and a woman has a beauty and natural elegance to it that homosexual sex just doesn’t have. It simple has to do with the complementariness of the penis and the vagina. One was made for the other. Yes, straights can have and do have anal sex, but the physical act, even among a man and a woman lacks the natural beauty of traditional intercourse. Can those arguing against David42 see that? Or see how that might be how others see it, and that that is not an unreasonable view?

No, it’s not an unreasonable view, in the sense that some people might think a particular painting has ineffable natural beauty while others do not.

The trouble comes from trying to write definitions of beauty into law.

Many people feel the same way about interracial sex–I’m sure you don’t feel interracial marriage should be outlawed because some people think it is “unnatural” or not pretty enough, though.