Homosexuality is 'unnatural'

Great Debates
241

What is “amiss” with homosexuality? That doesn’t just mean atypical or “not normal”, it means flawed or wrong. Is that where this “not normal” argument of yours has been headed, towards the conclusion that homosexuality is flawed or wrong?

No one really knows for sure what causes homosexuality, but this analogy doesn’t seem consistent with what I know about the research on the subject. Also, your use of “meant for” is again suggesting that nature has the intent of creating heterosexuals and that homosexuals are due to some sort of mistake in the execution of nature’s plan. Gay men aren’t gay because something happened during their development that was meant to happen to women, because nature doesn’t mean for things to happen one way or another.

242

Oh, ok. I guess I can change out of my tux, then.

243

I didn’t say we were savages.

ETA: I really want a monocle smiley.

244

This is not true; this is yet another way to say it is “intended,” “designed for,” “meant to,” “supposed to,” and so on and so forth.

The “sex act”, or more specifically penile-vaginal intercourse, is more likely to result in the intergenerational perpetuation of human genes. Individuals with such features outcompeted individuals with alternate or less optimal characteristics related to perpetuating their particular genetic characteristics. That’s it. Nobody designed this, it wasn’t meant to be, it isn’t “supposed” to be this way, there was no larger plan, it isn’t “for” this. The “sex act” happens to correlate with more frequent passing on of genetic information.

Exactly. Tying the term “natural” to the specific circumstances in which genetic information is passed on is so limited as to be non-functional. That is, you could define it that way, but as you point out, so many other instances of things that otherwise fall into the category of “natural” would be excluded that most people are going to reject the definition.

For example, many people find sitting still to watch the sun set to be pleasurable. This has nothing to do with passing on of genetic information, so it is therefore not natural to sit still and watch the sun set.

245

I don’t know about all that, but I kissed a girl and I liked it.

246

Not just out to lunch, but also breakfast, brunch, elevensies, second breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, supper, dinner, and brandy in the drawing room.

If you want to use “normal” in the purely statistical sense, yeah, homosexuality isn’t “normal.” Somehow, the only time non-statisticians ever use that particular definition of the word is in discussions about homosexuality, but whatever - that’s irrelevant, because that’s not the definition you’re using here. You’re going for something that is pretty clearly pejorative: you’re defining homosexuality as a disability, comparing it to dwarfism and deafness. The problem with that, aside from being insulting to both gays and the disabled, is that it fails on the simplest, most literary level: gays are not “disabled” in any sense of the word. There is nothing that a straight person can do that a gay person cannot. We can see, hear, think, walk, run, talk, and fuck just as well as straight people. The only difference, from a purely functional perspective, is that gay people have more control over their reproductive choices. This is not a defect, even when viewed from a purely evolutionary viewpoint. Nature does not always select for unlimited offspring. Apex predators, in particular, tend to have relatively low numbers of offspring, to prevent their population from exploding and over-predating the region. The mechanisms for keeping populations down varies from exceedingly narrow fertility windows, to rampant in utero cannibalization. A proclivity for same-gender pairbonding, matched with a sufficiently advanced intelligence to understand your own reproductive cycle, could be a viable, natural brake on human populations. It is certainly not a disability in our current environment.

247

I’ve never much objected to the looser, informal language of “meant to” or “made for” or such. Stephen Jay Gould defended such loose language, and engaged in it himself. A thick coat of fur is “for protection.” Sharp teeth are “for predation.”

So, yeah, fine: penile/vaginal copulation is “for procreation.”

…And my big fists and hairy face and height and testosterone and deep loud voice are “for competitive displays of intimidation” to improve my chance of mating and to decrease my rivals’ chance of mating. Our “natural” behavior is something between the practice of chimpanzees and bonobos. It’s “natural” for Popeye to have a big roiling nasty thumbs-in-the-eyes fight with Bluto for the privilege of mating with (ick!) Olive.

(I think I may have just defined an extinction event…)

To me, the key is that we’ve developed the artificial technology of civilization, with codes of laws, rules of behavior, and systems of refinements on what is natural. If a man insults me, I can’t simply pound his head in with a rock, which is very much the “natural” riposte.

Gay sex isn’t natural? So what! Damn near all of the things I have spent my day doing have been unnatural. I shaved, washed, dressed, drove a car, ate a balanced lunch (ha! I had a humongous big plate of taquitos!) and proceded to discuss abstract philosophy with strangers on an internet interface! Talk about yer unnatural!

248

A man can take a vow of chastity and never consciously use his penis to ejaculate semen. But can you choose not to use your penis to pee for more than a few hours? Certainly not for a whole day! So the primary purpose of the penis is to pee, right? Magellan’s comment:

is beside the point.

Let me put it this way. If an evil magician were to make you choose between a penis that can’t pee for a week and a penis that can’t ejeculate for a month, which would you choose? It’s a no brainer. Luckily, “primary purpose” is not to be confused with “natural” purpose. Something can have a series of natural purposes. If it turns you on to have your penis, whose primary purpose is to pee, in your girlfriend or in your boyfriend’s mouth, how is that unnatural?

249

Some of us can pee with an erection. I suppose that’s “unnatural.”

250

He’s also quite wrong: an erect penis can piss quite handily. (Or, hey, no hands, if you don’t care where it all goes.)

That said, I would have to (genteely) disagree. Peeing is a sidestream benefit (haw haw) of the true primary function of the penis. It’s an unintended benefit. It’s an example of nature being parsimonious, assigning extra duties to our parts. It’s wonderfully convenient, but not necessary (as female anatomy demonstrates.)

I use my thumb more in pressing the space bar on my keyboard than for any other purpose. But that isn’t really my thumb’s “primary purpose.” The thumb’s true primary purpose is grasping branches to keep from falling out of the tree. But when was the last time you used yours for that?

251

Is it more natural for a grain of wheat to fall to the ground and germinate than be ground up and made into bread? Where are the people campaigning against the unnatural use of wheat?

Also, is it just me, or do folks concerned about homosexuality seem to have an unnatural fixation on other people’s genitals? Is irony natural?

252

The most laughable thing about all this, from my perspective, is the same folks preaching about “unnatural” this or that pray to the “supernatural”.

There’s **natural **and artificial, in terms of one is found in nature and one has to be constructed. This doesn’t really apply here, because homosexuals are found naturally occurring in the world, just like heterosexuals. You want to talk about homosexual feelings, that boils down to chemistry, biology, and physical attraction, which are naturally occurring processes. So naturally occurring, in fact, that attempts to suppress them artificially end in failure.

There’s natural, meaning “How God intended”, *but that’s not actually natural, now is it? *That’s supernatural. And there’s not a shred of evidence supporting such a hypothesis. If it were truly “unnatural” then this supposed God figure wouldn’t have had to step in and go “No, no, don’t do this”. It means some people are naturally inclined to partake in such behaviors and experience those feelings. It wouldn’t require a hidden deity figure telling people to stop doing it if it weren’t something people did all on their own, with no outside help.

Then we talk about natural as in “how I want things to be”, which isn’t what natural means. In fact, it means the opposite. This kind of “natural” is the kind of natural which says men and women are required to suppress their natural instincts to mate until they get married, only marry the opposite sex, and only have vaginal penetrative sex, and only with their chosen mate, until they die. In other words, deny your natural impulses, deny your natural impulses again, deny your natural impulses a third time, and deny those same natural impulses for the rest of your life. Furthermore, impose these denials on others, not just yourself, because it’s not bad enough you’re a chastity fetishist, you demand that everyone else be as well. You establish this tradition through the imposition of artificial laws, artificial punishments, and shunning those who are different from you, in order to achieve a decidedly artificial level of homogeneity throughout human society.

Completely unnatural, as evolution simply cannot happen in a homogenous environment. The entire process of natural selection breaks down when the species is precisely the same. Culture is much the same way- there is no advancement of culture, or music, or art, or language, if everyone behaves entirely the same way. In fact, this entire phenomenon of religion wouldn’t exist at all if everyone thought the same way. Every modern religion began with someone having a different and new idea that went against traditional values and the opinions of the majority.

The ultimate irony is that in order for some to impose their artificial and unnatural standards upon others, and spread their artificial abstinence and artificial chastity and artificial monogamy, is that they end up arguing about how “unnatural” a natural process is. A process that exists whether there is an imposition of artificial religious values upon a person or not. Whether that person is gay or straight, their natural desires exist regardless of the artificial boundaries imposed on them by their adherence to these cultural mores. They don’t shut off. This is why people continue “sinning” even after converting and wanting to follow the path provided for them by these artificial superstitions, because in spite of societal pressure, in spite of repeated conditioning, in spite of being taught that natural things are unnatural, and in spite of the square pegs of the world sincerely trying to fit neatly in the round holes provided for them by religion, they continue to behave in their natural manner, or they continue to desire those things which they are told are wrong. Even if they tell themselves it is wrong, and even if they believe it, they still do it, or still think about it, and still want to do it.

That is the “natural” desire within oneself asserting itself over the completely baseless and artificial limitations imposed on us by people who want to remake the natural world in their supernatural image.

If **anyone **around here is “unnatural”, it’s those people who cannot seem to fathom what the word natural actually means, and go completely out of their way to denounce, deny, and demonize everything that is natural and try to replace it with their artificial values, from their man-made book of fabricated fairy tales about a supernatural God crafting the world by artificial means in ways that defy the laws of the natural world.

Scientists, on the other hand, have been able to explain the universe as a series of processes which are natural, and neither artificial or supernatural. And that natural explanation requires a lot fewer miraculous and supernatural interventions by an invisible God of the gaps, constantly intruding into the universe and fixing that which was designed correctly the first time yet still needed fixing for some reason.

The whole natural argument is so entirely backwards coming from people who believe in the supernatural. Their world is one that doesn’t keep on spinning unless there’s a man in the clouds making it happen. It is a universe of intercessory prayer and miracles and revelations and prophets and covenants, a universe which if represented by a clock, was missing all the gears, and required a hidden magical man in order to keep the hands pointed at the correct time.

The actual universe requires no hidden mover, and the gears function entirely without intervention. Otherwise, the natural processes that have been happening for the past several billion years would have stopped and we wouldn’t be here at all.

What baffles me is that people believe in a hidden magical man who created people using flawless magic, but he made them in such a way that they behaved contrary to how he wanted them to behave, and then in his infinite wisdom decided he must punish those creatures he made for behaving exactly as he designed them to do.

Something about that seems decidedly unnatural to me. I just can’t fathom a flawless being somehow finding his perfect creations to be anything less than what he hoped they’d be.

Imagining a God who made people lust for one another in ways he didn’t intend, and then gets upset at them for it, is imagining a toy maker who makes broken toys and then yells at the toys for being broken. It is imagining a psychopath as your designer, and a retarded one at that.

253

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
Also, is it just me, or do folks concerned about homosexuality seem to have an unnatural fixation on other people’s genitals?
[/QUOTE]
In my experience, it’s more specifically a fascination with penises as they relate to buttsex. They rarely fixate on vaginas because in their estimation, “two women having sex is more natural than two men.”

254

So if the hetero couple use birth control, does that make their act unnatural? In that case I assume you agree with the Pope who believes that every act of intercourse must be open to procreation, and that to block that possibility is wrong.

255

That was a very well thought-out and beautifully structured essay that you write. Bravo.

256

. . . but you perform one experiment to create the god Pan, and. . . .

257

stands and applauds yet another AskThePizzaGuy post

You are my hero.

258

Safe, sane & consensual. What else it there?

259

“natural”

260

People think homosexuality is bad because of ignorance, and religious and societal indoctrination. Gradually, that ignorance is being fought. The religious indoctrinaion is another matter. IMO, believers need to be edicated on how beliefs have changed and that changing your beliefs is acceptable rather than blasphemy. That also requires an education about the Bible and it’s real history.