I don’t get why it matters if it’s natural. (Especially since different people have conflicting interpretations of what they even mean by that)
Hell, wearing clothes isn’t natural and we have plenty of laws requiring it.
It’s not. It’s only important when someone comes along and, erroneously. claims that it’s unnatural.
Also, “the norm of nature” is not the same thing as “natural”. The norm of nature, for humans, is not to be right handed. That doesn’t mean that it’s unnatural to be left handed.
Yes, I do take the point made in the replies. I just think its pointless trying to defend homosexuality against homophobes. Nothing is going to convince them anyway. I’d be inclined to tell them that natural or not natural is irrelevant: it’s none of their damn business what I do with my sexual organ.
Ugh, emphasis added. The norm for humans is to be right handed.
It is not pointless, because for the large part the goal isn’t to say “Well, thanks for finally admitting I’m right. I’m going home now.” It’s “I’m right, and I’m going to spread the word that you admit I’m right, and finally we can get enough people together to do something about this problem.”
I agree. The thing is, we don’t usually use “normal” in the sense that those who would consider homosexuality to be not “normal” seem to use it. The proportion of those people who work in fast food, or are lawyers, or are janitors, are (I would guess) lower percentage-wise as a distribution of all jobs than the percentage of gay people. Yet I don’t think anyone would describe those as “not normal” jobs. An “abnormal” job would be something like astronaut, or race car driver, or athlete, or brain surgeon, maybe; tiny infinitesimal percentages. Something like left-handedness, or homosexuality, isn’t abnormal (or unnatural) simply because there’s a bigger group that’s different. That isn’t the standard that we generally apply to everything else.
But arguing with homophobes does, in fact, work. Look at any poll on the subject of gay rights in 1994, and a poll on the subject in 2014, and you’ll find an enormous swing on the subject. How did that happen, if nobody can be convinced to change their mind on this subject?
What else would “normal” mean if not “of the norm”? I don’t understand people’s insistence that everything they don’t oppose be described as such, as if not being normal in one respect or another is inherently a bad thing. Why do we have to assign “good” or “bad” values to everything? The same goes for “unnatural”, although the idea that we can call anything humans do natural or unnatural, except to mean “normal”, is a mistaken one, in my opinion, anyway.
It seems to me that a few people in this thread are basically saying they don’t really agree with what they’re arguing, but fighting a battle they don’t believe in is important to win the war. I’m not sure how I feel about that in general, but on these boards, I’d think we could manage something more sophisticated. If idiots can’t even learn the meanings of words, and if other idiots insist on finding the most offensive meanings they can in what others say, why do we have to sink to their level?
You can’t say homosexuality is natural, because it just makes no sense to do so. Pretending you can is just intellectually dishonest, and I think using erroneous arguments to support a conclusion undermines it.
How so?
One can argue humans are animals, and therefore anything we do is natural.
One can argue that “natural” excludes what humans do, and therefore nothing we do is natural.
I don’t think either of these arguments are wrong. We can use “natural” either way.
Another way is to argue some things humans do are natural, and some things aren’t, then try to find other animals that behave in a certain way to show what is and isn’t natural. That’s just wrong in so many ways, but I’ll try to be brief:
Homosexuality in other animals is so completely different from homosexuality in humans that comparisons don’t tell us much. The fact that an animal tried to have sex with another animal of the same sex doesn’t even prove it’s gay in a way that remotely resembles the complexity of homosexuality in humans, just as a dog that tries to have sex with a sheep doesn’t tell us anything about how natural or otherwise it is for humans to have sex with sheep, and a cat jumping out a window doesn’t tell us anything about suicidal behaviour in humans. Even if animals have full homosexual relationships (as opposed to cases of mistaken identity, or what we might call meaningless sex), it says nothing about human behaviour. To say it does is just cherry picking, because we can undoubtedly find other behaviours in whichever species we look at that we would not want to call “natural” in humans.
So you take back your statement “You can’t say homosexuality is natural, because it just makes no sense to do so”?
Using the first definition above, homosexuality is obviously “natural”.
Maybe it would have been more correct to say “It’s meaningless to describe homosexuality as ‘natural’.” Either everything we do is natural, or none of it is, but in both cases the word has no value as a descriptor of human behaviour.
It makes no sense to say that it is not natural. In contrast, I tend to question the intellectual honesty of declaring with no evidence that it is not natural.
As to your attempts at examples in which various members of one species attempt to impose sex on members of other species, that has nothing to do with the fact that members of all primate species and several other species display homosexual behavior. Homosexual (not trans-species) behavior involves pairing or pseudo-mating between members of the same sex of the same species, frequently engaged in pair bonding. Trying to equate a “dog that tries to have sex with a sheep” with homosexual behavior is misleading because it appears to be an attempt to avoid the actual facts under discussion by throwing up an example of something utterly different.
Then, perhaps, you will expend the energy to persuade opponents of gay rights to stop invoking the claim that it is against nature and we can all move on to discuss something else.
How is that different from heterosexuality? I mean, what could possibly be more unnatural than a marriage ceremony announced in advance and attended by relatives and selected other members of the two animals’ species?
I agree with you that by a strict reading, it’s pointless to talk about whether homosexuality is unnatural. You seem to be carving out some space to say that for a sloppy meaning of the word, it can be considered unnatural–but I don’t see how that makes any more sense for homosexuality than for heterosexuality.
My point is that you don’t need evidence - at least, not empirical evidence - to see that the word “natural” is meaningless with regard to human behaviour.
The dog and sheep example was, as I said, an example of inter-species sex, and the point was that is says nothing about how natural it is for a human to engage in inter-species sex.
I’m not fully aware of the extent of homosexual behaviour in animals, but many of the examples I’ve read about (that have been used as examples to show homosexuality in humans is natural) look more like cases of mistaken identity. There are some examples that are more than that, but I mentioned those too - any species that exhibits such behaviour will do many other things that we don’t consider evidence for the naturalness or otherwise of similar human behaviours.
Of course that’s completely unnatural too.
That’s not the idea. One might argue that the most natural thing for sexual species to do is mate and procreate, but procreation is just a tiny part of heterosexual behaviour. I don’t see anything wrong with saying “homosexuality is unnatural, but so is marriage, art and charity”, but I think it’s wrong to say “homosexuality is natural (with the implication that some other human behaviour is unnatural) and I can prove it”.
I certainly will, if it ever comes up. Although how much energy I expend on any particular cause doesn’t seem very relevant to the debate.
Yes, of course that’s your point…now that this recent point of yours
has been blasted out of the water.
No it hasn’t.
Although I should add that I did concede I should have said it’s meaningless, rather than “it makes no sense”, to describe homosexuality as natural.
Riiight.