Would you like to actually participate or only commentate?
As to the OP, I agree that homosexuality shows up in nature, so therefore it is natural. And if we go extinct? Well, we won’t be around to lament our loss, yanno?
Says who? And in what sense?
Once you’ve read up on your biology, as the other Posters have suggested, about how common homosexuality is among animals, the next step is to read up on your history (hint: history didn’t start with 1776, a lot of stuff happened before in other places).
Most obviously, the Greek city-states like Sparta and Athens had a whole system of raising their male children into a gay society - the boys had a teen as mentor who not only taught them fighting and culture, but also sex; the twens had lovers; the elder statesmen had young and attractive lovers.
In between, 20-30 years, the young men left the male-only barracks, took a wife, fathered some children for the good of the state, and then left and returned to the barracks.
Being gay wasn’t the reason that Ancient Greece fell, more the constant fighting among themselves together with general decline and other empires joining the fight. (General decline and constant fighting also collapsed the Romans later, who did not have a gay-oriented society).
Also look up the sacred band of Theben to see why gay lovers were considered superior fighting forces.
If you can fit your cock into that dude’s ass, then you’re not going against natural laws.
If everybody masturbated exclusively, we’d all go extinct too. I guess masturbation is against nature.
But only using natural lube.
I have a friend who had a vasectomy. If every man had a vasectomy the human race would go extinct.
But, it turns out that not everyone has a vasectomy, or turns out gay, or prefers oral, or becomes a catholic priest.
Therefore, the future of the human race remains unthreatened.
I have lesbian friends that adopted 3 kids, who were taken away from their drug addict mother. Without my friends those kids could easily be dead now. So which is worse for the future of humanity, homosexuality, or drug addiction?
When large fractions of humanity become gay and refuse to have children, bump this thread and we can hash out what to do next. Otherwise, it isn’t much of an issue.
Given the incidence in nature, and if you’ve ever known gay people, it’s hard to question that homosexuality is not 100% natural. As has been pointed out, for some, heterosexuality is the unnatural act. The only way I can see that it might be unnatural is if you begin with the premise that the goal of any organism is to reproduce. and I think there’s a good argument in that vein.
I think that the concept of “naturalness” gets conflated with “normal”. Homosexuality certainly isn’t behavior that is “of the norm”, and I think that’s what people sometimes mean. But it is natural. AND normal for those who are homosexuals.
However, just because something is possible in nature, or exists, does not mean it is a good thing. I can walk around on my hands. Some people can eat with their feet. Leprosy occurs in nature. Some people are pedophiles and are sexually attracted to children. Albinoism is naturally occurring. As is malaria. What do we do with that information?
There’s no such thing as going against nature, and there really aren’t natural laws in terms of “nature wants us to do this.” And you appear to be suggesting gay people are somehow violating their own instincts when they get busy. You may have noticed at some point that people and animals will hump anything, which contravenes that theory. 
As for why the genetic proclivity for homosexuality remains in humans, despite being apparently counter to passing on one’s genes, it’s possible that there is some nonzero proportion of non-breeders that’s optimal for society as a whole (including those parts of society that are very closely related to you), and it’s also possible that the genes related to homosexuality are also related to other traits which are more directly beneficial. It’s also possible that our gene pool is just “fragile” in that area, and that it’s very easy for mutations to accidentally lead to homosexuality, and the new mutations are cropping up as fast as the old ones are being selected against. Of course, biology and psychology are both incredibly complicated, so it’s likely that it’s a mixture of many such phenomena that leads to homosexuality.
It also could have to do with the fact that having homosexual orientation had little or nothing to do with whether males or females actually bred in the past…even the very recent past. It’s not even a bar today, especially on the female side of things.
Humans scrump like rabbits given the chance (actually, more than rabbits, since we are always ‘in season’), especially men, so even if a female wasn’t exactly what a given man wanted, well, it’s still sex. Same with the women, with the additional caveat that they may not have been given much choice in the past as to refraining from sex with their spouse if they weren’t keen.
Even without the above there was always social and cultural pressure to produce offspring, especially from the ruling or leadership classes, regardless of sexual preference. ETA: Plus, I just think that human sexuality is not an on or off switch, more a spectrum, with very few who are all one thing or the other (i.e. heterosexuals who have zero interest in homosexuality regardless of circumstance, and vice versa).
-XT
It’s also not the goal of an individual organism to reproduce. 99% of a species (like bees) can lack any desire to reproduce with no danger to the species. As Chronos points out, it could be detrimental to have every member of a communal species like humans be constantly occupied with reproduction.
Well, the exact reasons are probably debatable and most likely a combination of lots of factors. The point, though, is there is nothing ‘unnatural’ about homosexuality in human sexuality. There are no ‘natural laws’ which homosexuality is ‘against’.
-XT
Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee.
– Edward Abbey
A planetary epidemic of homosexuality might be just the thing. If we think of the children, we might make the argument that (fewer) kids will be raised better when every act of procreation is extremely deliberate. And gay uncles aplenty!
And this is completely false.
The notion that homosexuality is some sort of natural response to overpopulation is simply ridiculous. How could such a natural mechanism become established?
Because if there were a gene that caused homosexuality in overcrowded conditions, that gene wouldn’t get passed on to future generations, would it? In that overcrowded empire, some people turn to homosexuality and don’t reproduce. And the people who do reproduce are those that don’t turn to homosexuality. And so which genes are going to be overrepresented in the surviving population?
A gene that, for the health of the overall population, causes the carrier to not reproduce, can’t persist. It will be selected out.
Well, if homosexuality gets selected out, why do we still have it? It can’t be because it provides benefits for the rest of us, while causing the carrier to commit evolutionary suicide.
It seems to me that humans have certain sexual desires. I take a look at a woman’s body, and it turns me on. A woman takes a look at a man’s body, and it turns her on. Except, how does that work, really? Fact is, men and women are pretty much identical, except for a very small number of genes on the Y chromosome. Except, if you take a genetically XY zygote, and give it a mutation that causes androgen insensitivity, so that the fetus’s growing body can’t process testosterone, that baby will grow into a phenotypical female, one that has typical female sexual response.
So that means that both males and females have the recipe to respond sexually to either males or females, it’s just that in most males sexual response to males is switched off and response to females is switched on, and in most females response to males is switched on and response to females is switched on. Except when they aren’t. Some people really seem asexual, they aren’t sexually attracted to either males or females. Some people are attracted to both. Some males are attracted only to males, some females are attracted only to females. And it has something to do with the various levels of hormones in the baby’s body (including the brain part of the body) as the baby develops.
And the reason this sort of thing persists is because there isn’t a “gene” that causes sexual response. Even among identical twins, if one twin is gay the other twin is only 50% likely to be gay. You could clone RuPaul, Richard Simmons and Nathan Lane, and the resulting babies wouldn’t always turn out gay.
And it also turns out that homosexuality isn’t as large of a reproductive hit as one might think. Plenty of gays have biological children, or assist in the raising of related children. Ironically, trying to shove gays back into the closet and make them pretend to be straight means a lot more kids conceived by gay parents. After all, straight sex can make a life, gay sex can only make a mess. So if you want fewer gays, encourage the gays to gay it up and stop having sex with opposite sex partners, because that’s icky.
How have lemmings retained the impulse to commit mass suicide when the population reaches a tipping point? By your reasoning suicidal lemmings should have disappeared from the population long ago. And on the other side of the coin, certain other animal groups, notably some of the canids have been shown to breed more prolifically when populations are stressed. For that matter people tend to breed more when a population is threatened…witness the upticks in birth rates nine months after natural disasters in a given area. I see no reason to believe that the opposite might not also be true.
There is a body of evidence that a majority of people are bisexual to some degree, i.e., absent a learned societal counterincentive they could swing either way. It seems reasonable to suppose that when a person, or a population, is subjected to an obvious overabundance of bodies and competition for resources, some kind of…what?.. instinct…racial memory? could kick in, supressing the desire to reproduce. The elemental sex drive remains, that urge to share space with another person in the most intimate way possible, but it becomes less urgent to have sex for strictly reproductive purposes. I don’t know whether there is any solid evidence to indicate that homosexual behavior is more prevalent during periods of overpopulation, but it does tend to become more obvious. At any rate, I am convinced that homosexual behavior is entirely natural, even normal, and those that seek to supress it in a society are seriously misguided.
I don’t know if this is actually the case…I merely offer it as a possibility (as did Edward Abbey). But we are animals, after all, subject to natural forces and urges that we don’t fully understand. Nature has its own way of evening things out.
SS
AIYYY!! :eek: The dreaded convoluted double negative strikes again!
Edited after the fact to read: “It is reasonable to believe the opposite might also be true”
Thank you I think. [sigh]…another cherished illusion shot to hell.
SS