Sorry MrVisible, I guess that’s just how all us breeders act; we were born that way. 
I apologize if my earlier post could have been taken as a jab at heterosexuals in general. It was certainly not intended that way. My point was that, among people who want to debate the origins of homosexuality, the testimony of homosexuals is rarely if ever considered to be valid or relevant information.
I hear ya. Noone listens to pot-heads in legalization debates either. 
Esprix said. . .
Hell, you can find similar statements from straight people too, which can be used to torpedo the whole “You’re just saying that because you’re. . . .” argument.
The crush I developed at the age of six or seven isn’t notably different from any of the initial emotional experiences I had later that developed into adult relationships – a strong sense of companionship/kinship, touch desire, an urge to have this person in my life long-term, and mild sexual overtones.
Of course, being a kid and all, this manifested mostly with beating him in a wrestling match at a friend’s eighth birthday party. 
{sigh} Fine. Let’s look at a few cites:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_fixe.htm#when:
Granted, this cite does relate socialized gender behavior with homosexuality, but obviously there is some kind of relevance. But a litmus test for homosexuality? Not hardly, but, again, the conclusion is that it’s something that cements very early in life.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_caus3.htm also lists some research that suggests sexual orientation is determined “before they reach school age.”
Those are just two. I could find more (and I’ll grant you religioustolerance.org isn’t a scientific site, but they’ve obviously done their homework).
Of course, we could also just be quibbling - we’re in agreement that, regardless of what age it happens, sexual orientation is, as I said before, something that happens that is beyond one’s control and cannot be changed. Yes?
Esprix
if you have a twin brother who is gay, you are more likely to be gay, because, again, power of suggestion. this has absolutely nothing to do with genetics. that is the 50% correlation, esprix.
no agenda here, there is nothing morally wrong with being gay, unless you believe in some sort of religion. nothing wrong with being gay in any way shape or form. i just think it is a psychological anomally.
i am an advocate of human nature and science and any practice that, if followed 100% by a society, would be the end of humanity is not natural. it is an anomally born by random suggestions and experiences in a human life, or by a chemical/biological anomally, which will no doubt occur from time to time on a small scale.
Mr Visible: sexual orientation is not determined during adolescence but is shaped and influenced to a high degree. FOR THE MOST PART are the key words here.
Homebrew: those two studies say “52% of identical (monozygotic) twins of homosexual men were likewise homosexual”. maybe i misinterpreted this, but doesn’t that say that twins who’s fathers were gay were likewise gay???
HERE’S WHERE WE MIGHT BE MISSING EACH OTHERS’ POINT: the word choice. i am not saying it’s a choice or it isn’t. (maybe i did say that on accident somewhere). i am saying homosexuality is born from experiences, some of which can be battled and some of which can’t or aren’t. these experiences are subtle and unquantifiable/immeasurable. these experiences might in a sense create a situation where the person technically has a choice but essentially doesn’t have a choice, for social reasons, for instance.
WHAT IT ALL BOILS DOWN TO: basically i am saying that any given homosexual had an experience or series or experiences which happened to them and, at those crucial points, were affected by the people around them at those points. things that were said, actions that were taken, thoughts that were expressed occurred in such a way as to yield a homosexual out of the particular individual.
don’t focus on me but rather my arguments. my personal motivation for starting this post is irrelevant, right?
whoa, didn’t see the second page replies… i’ll look at them later, sorry.
Fuel, I really don’t think you understand the nature of genetics and other effects here. Look over your stats again:
According to those, the non-genetically related brother of a homosexual person, 11% of the time, is gay. But if the brothers are genetically identical, then that number is over 52%! That seems to be highly suggestive of a genetic and/or other prior-to-birth causes (In fact, using those stats, you could argue that genetics and other pre-birth effects seem to have 5 times the effect, though that would be a somewhat awkward approximation). If upbringing were much more important than genetics and the like, then one would expect the numbers to be very similar. But they’re not, indicating that upbringing alone is not a very deciding factor.
No. The “homosexual men” reffered to there is the other brother. The father doesn’t have a twin, one of the offspring does (This is why the stats are reffering to the brothers of homosexual men and sisters of homosexual women). Neither stat refers to the parents at all.
In fact, the only thorough study I can recall (No cite, but I’m sure another doper will know of it) studied children raised by homosexual partners and those raised by heterosexual partners, and found negligible difference in the percent that were heterosexual or homosexual.
The evidence seems against your hypothesis…
If you’re an advocate of human nature than what are you arguing against? Homosexuality exists naturally amongst humans, all humans across the globe, thus it’s a part of human nature. And despite your made-up definition of “natural”, universal practice of homosexuality would not end human life, as there are many “practicing homosexuals” with biological children.
In fact, if everyone were same-sex oriented, it would mean a world where every child was purposely concieved, rather than a byproduct of lust, as the only heterosexual sex would be for procreative reasons. So there.
No. It says that given a gay man who has a twin, chances are 52% that the other twin is also gay.
Agreed 100%! I have read posts from straight men who had “crushes” on other men. Perhaps one could question how straight those men really are. Perhaps they are not quite 1 on the Kinsey scale. I don’t know.
Be that as it may, as a gay man, I have liked girls, but never ever felt anything like a crush for a girl, let alone fallen in love with one. But I first fell in love at around age 7 or 8, and the object of my affection was most certainly male. And since then, it has always only been males I have had such strong feelings for. (Sure, I can say that I have loved women, but as friends - in contrast to being in love with someone.)
There is one thing that is being overlooked here by some, it seems to me: being gay isn’t just about sex. It includes sex, but there’s more to it than that. There’s love too. For some, like myself, sex is an expression of emotional feeling.
I sense that far too often, the straight/gay issue is examined purely from the sexual perspective, while ignoring the emotional one. And I think that the emotional side is of far greater importance.
If applied to any other aspect of life (IE, that you can only do this one action out of a set of related actions), I can not think of any single action a person could do that would count as “natural” by your definition. And yes, that does mean taking it to absurd lengths, but so does your idea there, too. The only way exclusively-homosexual sex could eliminate the human race is if you also mean no use of alternative methods of breeding. A gay man can donate sperm that a lesbian woman could then use to produce offspring, so obviously, that has to go. Cloning would have to go (I have the feeling that, now, cloning would definatly be viable in time to save the human race, especially considering how much research would be put into it if it were life-or-death). So the criteria is, if 100% of people were to only do this action to the exclusion of all other related possible actions, then it’s unnatural.
By the same reasoning, I can say breathing out is unnatural. If we only breathed out, we’d eventually die from lack of oxygen. Same for breathing in. Are breathing in and out unnatural?
Some plants are poisonous. Is it unnatural to eat them? No. Stupid, yes, but not unnatural. And yet, if the entire human race were to eat only those plants, the species would be extinct in an amazingly short time.
Your example is beyond simply absurd.
Esprix,
I tried to read through your link (religioustolerance.org) but it is very confusing - it keeps referring to studies it intends to explain and doesn’t eventually make clear what those studies are. So I was unable to get any sense of just how they established that sexual identity is established so early in life.
From fishing around the net a bit, it would seem that this may have been based on interviews with gays about their childhood, and studies of children who exhibited gender role reversal tendencies - a large portion turned out to be gay. The former method is unscientific, and the latter merely shows that there are some people who manifest as children characteristics that predispose them to being gay. It does not show that for all or most people their orientation is fixed. But this is all speculation - if you happen across the actual basis for your source it would be worth a look.
Clearly, they have. But they are also advocating for a specific position. Doesn’t make them wrong, but room for suspicion.
I would asume so, in most cases. I think the baseline assumption would be to treat sexual orientation just like any other aspect of a person’s personality - influenced by many factors, but very difficult to conciously change.
(In the thread that I linked to earlier, I postulated that the vast majority of people are really bisexual, but that today’s emphasis on sexual identity tends to make people identify with one extreme or another of the Kinsey scale - mostly the lower. But certainly not by concious decision).
Gender role reversals have nothing to do with being gay. It is not known how many people who identify as the opposite sex are heterosexual or homosexual, but the percentages are probably the same as “normal” people.
**
For westerners. I believe that most people are bisexual and if left to their natural instincts, would be bisexual in practice too.
It seems to me that homosexuals who rabidly defend the idea of genetic predisposition as far as sexual preferance are trying to dodge responsibility for the choice they made. It seems like a kind of self hate.
Why do you think that citing studies and research is “rabidly defending”? Have you dodged the responsibility for choosing to be straight? I won’t comment on the self hate remark, too easy.
Well, it seems to me that drawing that kind of conclusion without any evidence to back it up, and despite enormous quantities of testimony to the contrary from the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and gay people themselves, is downright ignorant.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?postid=2883407#post2883407 
Let me put this in words of one syllable:
What
The
Fuck
Choice
Do
You
Claim
They
Made?
I am not the world’s most outstanding exponent of reading comprehension, but when I see reiterated time after time the statement that “I did not choose to be gay” coupled with regular instances of “I tried to choose not to be gay, and failed” with no contradictory evidence whatsoever, I begin to sense a relevant statistic in the making.
Try working with accurate data and reading what other people have to say sometime; you might be surprised at what you find out.
Fuel, you’ve been speculating up a storm – do you have any evidence for these early childhood choices? I haven’t seen a rush of out gay men racing to support your view, and several of the participants in this thread I happen to know well enough to vouch for the fact that they would be honest about any such occurrence. One might conceivably justify your idea by assuming that such events have become “repressed memory” – but I’ll let our distinguished forum moderator David B address the pitfalls connected with such assumptions, if he so chooses.
And just one comment: the one good thing to come out of the attitudes addressed by a certain poster I have quoted is that I can now say to the resident Wiccans here, “Now you know how I feel about the egregious behavior of Fundaloonies.” :rolleyes:
Izzy, I think I see where you’re going with the bisexuality issue – but may I suggest that a certain portion of what we seem to be discussing here is not so much behavior or orientation as it is self-identification. I suspect that a fair proportion of this board are Kinsey-1 and consider themselves “straight” despite an occasion or two at some point in their past when they may have contemplated trying out sex with another person of the same sex. Contrast this to, say, Homebrew, who considers himself “gay” (not “bi”) by orientation despite having had a relatively successful marriage – his orientation, on a guess, is Kinsey-4 or -5, predominantly homosexual with a small but significant heterosexual component. (Homebrew, pardon my invasion of your personal space, since you have made the facts underlying my thinking public, and please validate or correct my reasoning here.)
Is being straight even a choice? Or we do just assume that’s natural and right because (a) that’s how beings reproduce and (b) that’s how the majority is?
To even the heterosexual dopers–how did you end up with your SO? Sure, we like to say things that we look for in a mate (certain personality, certain physical features), but how do those even come about? I’d say your preference in a mate is wired whether you’re gay or straight.
I wouldn’t put much validity in the study of the twins myself. You would have to repeat the study in a country/culture that doesn’t have such a negative view of homosexuality and get a much bigger sample of the community.
There’s still the Gay Sheep Brains which seem to be as equally true in humans.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2404109.stm
Hey don’t blame me - this is from Esprix’s link (& in support of his position).
Of course, you’re as entitled to make unsupported assertions as the next guy, but until you can come up with something more, this idea is on the table.
I would expand that last sentence a bit, as sexual orientation is dependent on thought, not action.
Still, I think there is little doubt that a person’s perception of themselves can influence their thoughts and feelings. So I think a person’s self-identification has an impact on their orientation.