What you think doesn’t really matter. Right now, legally, gay couples who live in certain states don’t have the same rights as heterosexual couples do. That is, if a gay couple has a commitment ceremony or civil union, one of them might very well be excluded from visiting the other one in a hospital.
Actually, the boards are having issues again. We aren’t getting reports, and members aren’t getting email notifications. We’ve notified the techs. I’ll send an email through the mod loop, though, so EVERYONE can get in on the action.
Buffalo Bilious, these posts are completely inappropriate for General Questions. You’ve received a previous warning for this kind of post in GQ. This is an official warning for being a jerk and trolling. Furthermore, I’m instructing you to stop posting in this thread. One more post of this kind in this forum and you will find your posting privileges under discussion.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Sorry, we’re not getting thread reports at the moment. If we were, I probably would have caught this nonsense sooner.
I think the very first answer was correct; given the country’s official and unofficial hostility to people who aren’t straight, you’re not likely to get correct answers to survey questions.
After discussion among the moderators (once we became aware of the situation), he’s been banned for being a jerk and trolling. As I mentioned, he had a previous warning for such posts and had been instructed not to do it again.
Perhaps you could point out to your friend that it is unlikely that Russia has fewer LGBT people. Rather, there are fewer people who want to report themselves as LGBT in surveys.
I understand that homosexual behaviour is also found in animals. It’s often difficult to compare to humans, because their sexual behaviour is different anyway and their pair-bonding is different as well.
For example, about 10% of rams are exclusively homosexual and there are also high numbers of homosexual swans who mate for life.
That it occurs across species makes it seem unlikely to me that among humans, there would be significantly less homosexuality in Russia. Why would that be? Does it just stop at the border? Of course there might be variation for all sorts of reasons, but I rather doubt there will be huge differences.
As I said before, I read one theory that the biology that results in occasionaly misconnection of gender identity vs. physical gender is a result of a sex drive mechanism that probably produces a better rate of reproduction for straight people.
(I.e. you get a lot more home runs when you swing hard than if you bunt, even if you get more strike-outs too. )
If the mechanism that causes gay is related to the basic sex drive, there’s no reason to believe there is any variation between races. High sex drive probably wins over low sex drive in evolutionary time frame, and I’ve seen no evidence that males especially, or females, of any race are lacking in sex drive.
This is an argument from ignorance. You don’t know of a reason and therefore there probably isn’t one.
There are probably a lot of things that you don’t know.
There is almost certainly some inborn basis for homosexuality, but that doesn’t mean there is not also some other bases, whether cultural or other.
Basically the real answer is that we really don’t know the answer.
It should also be noted that there is broad range of estimate of the number of people who are gay even in places where it has relatively little stigma, so it’s pretty hard to measure when comparing one place to another.