By the way, I just came up with a great drinking game for people in AA. Google the site for “broke-dick dogs” and take a drink every time it’s not said by Clothahump in some variation of “the/you liberals/libtards are/were/will be howling like”. You will be sober all night, I guarantee it.
Sorry but you are just showing that you are totally ignorant of the fairly recent history of this issue. It is not many decades (three or four at most. I’d estimate) since the standard progressivist line, pushed by gay intellectuals, was that sexuality in general is a choice (subject, like all choices, to all sorts of social pressures and constraints), and that the choice to be gay was one that deserved respect, perhaps even more respect than the timid, conformist choice to be straight. Gay people often presented themselves as having proudly chosen to defy society’s norms as a revolutionary act. The idea that gayness might be innate and involuntary was, by contrast, widely thought to be a dangerous, potentially fascistic, idea chiefly promoted by people who wanted to single out homosexuals for persecution in much the same way that Nazis used the notion of race being an innate, immutable aspect of a person as a rationale for persecuting Jews and others. As Graham Chapman said (satirizing this attitude in the very first episode of Monty Python), “Well, these people can’t help the way they are. They are just born that way, its not their fault. So I think we should kill 'em.” (Chapman, as you are probably aware, was himself gay, and often liked to play right-wing bigot characters for satirical ends.)
Quite when and why the conventional wisdom on this, amongst progressives and gay people themselves, went through its 180 degree shift, I am not sure, although what I am pretty sure about is that it was not caused by any discovery of any clear scientific evidence that gayness is innate. It may be largely the result of right-wing, anti-gay thinking moving away from punitive ideas about how homosexuals ought to be dealt with (ranging from extermination through imprisonment to severe legal restrictions on their freedoms) and towards the notion that they might be “cured” by psychological methods.
It sounds a lot like you are confusing the choice to be out, to be pink/lavender, to express “gayness” in an unmistakable way, with a person’s inherent sexual inclination WRT gender. In the end, the only difference “choice” makes pertains to “sin” in the context of “free will”. A person with a strong homosexual inclination can, yes, choose an opposite sex partner, or be celibate, and thus be “good”, miserable and frustrated. But heaven forfend that they should be so bold as to express their preference or their personality in a way that might offend us prudes.
Then, of course, there are the bisexuals, who do get to “choose”. But, even then, does one really choose to whom one is attracted? Ultimately, it sounds like the whole choice thing is a bullshit issue that a bunch of people use to make themselves feel comfortable with their own “choices” and to deprecate others for making the “wrong” ones.
I’ve heard that this idea was common in the UK, but I don’t think it ever had much traction in the US. The switch you perceived might have just been an effect of the increasing international media saturation of US culture in the late 20th century drowning out the native viewpoint.
That idea is profoundly stupid. Its obvious implication is that, because you call people broke-dick dogs, they must be correct in their attacks on you. Perhaps you want to rethink your ideas here?
People have refuted it. But most people aren’t, because c’mon, it’s a totally insane and stupid idea, and you should be able to refute it without anyone’s help. It’s stupidity along the lines of “Jews Control The Media” stupidity. You’re rightly being mocked for taking such a stupid idea seriously, when you should have been able to tell your friends how stupid it was with a half-second’s thought.
Humpy, you don’t really come here for the hunting, do you?
You’ve been whining about gay rights on this board for the past 10 years or so, so spare us the, “gosh, guys, did you hear this new thing that someone else said?” bullshit.
For some reason, Little Nemo still defends this guy, which is perhaps the most baffling thing this side of Kim Jung-Un wearing a feather boa and eating a packet of sixlets.
In the US, at least, it wasn’t until the 1970s that the America Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from it’s list of mental disorders. So it’s really only in the last few decades that “science” stop telling us it was, if not a choice, a disease of the mind. If someone has a mental disorder, then you try and treat it-- you don’t just let it be.
Sounds pretty normal for Kim…
That sounds very gay. Guess he decided to be that way, right Clothy?
In the end (no not THAT end!) what does it matter if it’s a choice/genetic/environmental/whatever cause? I thought conservatives were supposed to be all about choice and freedoms and shit?
Sorry about how long the reply has taken. Real life and all.
The difference may yet be explained by genetics. But we can’t conclude that just from twin studies.
Congenital factors can be very strong yet hard to suss out.
Fetal alcohol syndrome is a big one. That’s another one where the correlation could easily be stronger between twins (fraternal or identical) vs non-twin siblings. It is congenital, but it’s not genetic.
Likewise, we know intelligence and personality have large genetic components and that identical twins show more similarity in these respects than fraternal twins. But we also know genetics only explain part and not all of the ultimate expression of intelligence and personality.
Based on the finding that having successive children increases the probability of homosexuality among the later children (particularly among males), we can reasonably presume that something about the neo-natal environment can influence sexuality in children. And that’s not certainly not genetic.
So just based on twin studies, we can’t conclude genetic right off the bat but we can conclude some kind of congenital link - which may end up being genetic but may have other potentially stronger factors, too.
Also, any genetic explanation would mean the parents are carriers of some homosexuality-linked gene (which, again, may exist but we have no solid proof for yet). That means you’d expect the probability a given homosexual person has a homosexual sibling to be higher than otherwise. No strong numbers out on this yet. It’s possible that even if there were a sexuality-linked gene, it can get swamped by other factors.
Except when it comes to butt secks!
And marrige.
Oh, and reproductive rights.
And religion, there’s that; Can’t have any non-Christians or atheists can we, after all this is a Christian country and Christianity is UNDER FIRE!
Um, there’s that whole Terri Schiavo thing where we absolutely can’t allow anyone a peaceful death, they must suffer till the end.
Oh and of course none of this applies non-whites, we gotta keep those dirty brown people out because Jesus was White damnit.
I think the last one is science, no science that contradicts the bible regardless of the facts.
So let’s see…there’s marrige, reproductive rights, the right to worship differently, euthanasia rights, minority rights, bilbical literacy…did I miss anything?
But you know, other than that they’re all about SMALL government and INDIVIDUAL choice!
OK, there may be a bit of hyperbole in there somewhere.
Okay, but I think that’s all in agreement with what I said, which was that “There are good reasons to believe that homosexuality has a genetic component. As just one example, identical twins are much likelier to both be gay than fraternal twins.” Congenital effects cannot, I think, explain the differences between identical and fraternal twins. And I didn’t say it was solely genetic, I said there was most likely a genetic component.
I tend to think otherwise. AFAIK, homosexuality tends to express as a global constant, somewhere in the range of ~6% everywhere (hard to tell for sure in places like Iran and SA where it can lead to your death). If that is the case, the genetic components must be so diverse, complex and delicate as to appear totally random.
Sex and handedness also express as a global constant. Do you therefore think that the genetic components of sex and handedness are so diverse, complex and delicate as to appear totally random?
Hey fellas, I was hanging around the break room at work today and I caught wind of something that I’d never heard before. It seems that one of the reasons that grown men like to do Tae Kwon Do is to make up for the fact that they all have tiny little balls.
Is there any truth to that? I mean, golly, I’d never heard it ever put like that and now I’m just interested in your opinions.
Thanks in advance guys.
Nitpicking again: I think you mean ‘non-genetic’ congenital conditions. Genetics are congenital but not vice-versa.
It’s possible but it’s not possible to rule them out at this point, either. It’s a stronger statement than scientifically supported to say it’s “most likely” there is a genetic component. Though confined in roughly the same space, identical twins share a lot more common environmental elements than even fraternal twins. It’s a stretch to state genetics is as important as you claim here without additional information.
You bring up handedness - for which there are genetic correlations, but only up to a point and it appears the heritability of handedness from parents isn’t even 50% (i.e. it’s not the most important factor). Likewise, even if sexuality has a genetic component, it’s not possible at the moment to claim it’s as important a factor as you make out.
The genetic component of gender is well-established (apart from the issue of gender identification). Handedness, by contrast, expresses in a manner similar to sexuality and, again AFAIK, cannot be shown to be inherited (lefties largely seem to pop up randomly).