Will gays destroy society?

Great Debates
1

It seems to be the position of many on the right that gay marriage will “destroy” the institution of marriage, and since marriage is the bedrock of our society, the destruction of marriage will destroy civilized society. (or something like that)

Even if we give them the claim “gay marriage will destroy the institution of marriage” (which is very questionable, but anyway), I wonder how important marriage is to the functioning of society and what would happen to society if marriage disappeared.

Of course, kids need to be brought up in such a way as to have morals and proper behavior instilled in them, but is living with two married parents of the opposite sex the only way this can be achieved?

For every kid that would be brought up by a single parent living with a series of boyfriends/girlfriends (which may not be around long enough to provide the kid with some stability), today we have a kid brought up in a dysfunctional marriage that does more harm than good to them.

So, it’s not clear to me that the disappearence of marriage spells the end of society.

For those who do believe that marriage is essential, the question is: how exactly will the destruction of marriage lead to the destruction of society?

2

Actually, I was listening to an argument on NPR the other day (not sure of the speaker’s name) from a fellow stating that not to allow gay marriage could be worse for straight marriage. His reasoning:

Gay marriage advocates are not going to go away. Eventually, the result could well be a compromise that allows most of the benefits of marriage without the title, something along the lines of a common-law domestic partnership doohickey.

When this occurs it will probably be available to straights as well. Many may opt for this “lesser marriage” than for the real thing.

Made some sense.

3

Well, if gayness is genetic, then now that there is no stigma for being gay and support systems other than family to care for old people, the issue will disappear within a few generations as there will be fewer and fewer gays.

Cite?

I’m not saying you’re wrong - it’s not clear to me either.

4

I’m not sure I followed your point Quartz. Can you expand a little?

5

Maybe he’s referring to the sort of idea expressed in the thread “Will tolerance towards gays reduce their numbers in the long term?”

6

Here are a few quotes from the book Sexual Secrets by Nik Douglas and Penny Slinger, ©1979, Destiny Books. This is a compilation of many Eastern phillosophies on sexuality, including Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist.

“It is the view of Eastern Masters that when male homosexuality dominates a society, it signals the end of real civilization.“

“The elevation of male homosexuality almost to the status of a new religion is a potential threat to society and to humanity’s spiritual evolution.”

“An excessively homosexual society will quickly annihilate itself. No amount of theorizing can alter this fact, which has been demonstrated throughout history…Surely it is time for homosexuals themselves to wake up to the reality of their situation and seek solutions to their problems, rather than campaigning for more acceptance of homosexuaility.“

The basic idea is that male homosexuality an attempt to transmute Kundalini energy in a perverted and ultimately inefficient manner. The perversion degrades the body over time. The more degraded bodies in a civilization, the more degraded the civilization eventually becomes. Male homosexuality is not condemned, but it is certainly not encouraged.

The Eastern thinkers are considerably more accepting of Lesbian sexuality, but not as an exclusive alternative to heterosexual love. In either case, we are talking about a kind of sexual interaction that certainly exists as an option in human life, but one that will result in degradation and ultimate destruction of human life if engaged in excessively/exclusively.

So, as to the topic of same-sex marriages, who the hell cares? Marriage itself is designed to thwart healthy human sexuality, presumably in the name of preserving a society that we assume would be destroyed if we all just accepted and gave in to our natural inclinations: to fuck (heterosexually) like rabbits as much as possible and repeatedly enjoy the most pleasurable experience that a man and a woman can have, very much to the glory of “God”. We don’t like this idea, for some reason, and have contrived marriage and other structures to guard us against it.

When homosexual marriage was first accepted in a few states, I thought, “Wait until they start getting divorced.” Sure enough, there has already been a petition of divorce in the state of Massachusetts. Probably others elsewhere. Stupid goddamned suckers, the homosexuals (no pun intended). They consider themselves so incredibly important and in need of acceptance by “the norm” that they opt to gain acceptance by demanding to be allowed to engage in an idiotic, ritualistic practice that has ruined healthy human heterosexuality throughout the ages.

The whole situation is so sickening…

7

Homosexuality is nothing new. It’s been around since time immemorial.
Society is still with us is it not?

8

Just let me know when society officially ends, and where to send my resume - I understand the position of Warlord pays well :smiley:

9

I’d say that we ALREADY have a society run by homosexuals. While many of the men running things may not be fucking each other the constant congratulations of one another and the treatment of women by all societies is a male homosexual dominated society.

I’m going to say something very controversial, but I believe that homosexuality is mysogyny taken to it’s extreme. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I think that males pleasuring one another is amoral, only that homosexuality as it manifests in modern society is a denial, and I agree completely about it being a perversion of Kundalini energy. I had sex with a man once and I definitely felt like it was as Drmark2000s post described the flow of the Kundalini energy. It’s two Yang energies trying to mix, in a perverted and inefficient matter. In these terms, the effect on society wouldn’t necessarily be immediate, could even take 10,000 years. However, I think that with the increasing treatment of women as equals, this trend has been reversing, and that the homosexuals running society are losing power steadily.

HOWEVER, I believe that gay men should have the right to marry. I don’t think that they should be denied the right to do whatever they want to do, even if I do believe that the behavior is ultimately destructive.

Bush in a campaign speech said that he believed in gay civil unions. Marriage is just a very simple form of incorporation as far as I am concerned. I can design my own corporation based around my romantic relationship if I so choose, and then I could bring in as many people into the corporation as I want to.

So yes, I do think that a society dominated by homosexuals is ultimately destructive, but that’s not the destruction of everyone, only the homosexual oligarchy. The Catholic church is a good practical example. It’s diminishment of Kundalini energy is the reason it is having so many problems maintaining it’s authority.

Erek

10

I don’t think the current state of the institution of marriage is anything to brag about. Considering the height of the divorce rate, the amount of marriages forced on knocked-up teenagers, infidelity, I don’t think heterosexuals need the help.

As to marriage being the basis of society, I remember that wacky assumption being based on the idea that women are property, a notion commonly objected to today. I wish I could remember how that faulty logic went, or how the Inventor of Society came up with it, but I would sooner equate marriage to a toe on the leg of society than the kneecap. IMO we seem to be more fundamentally based on the exchange of goods and pleasantries than brides and grooms.

11

[QUOTE=drmark2000]
Here are a few quotes from the book Sexual Secrets by Nik Douglas and Penny Slinger, ©1979, Destiny Books. This is a compilation of many Eastern phillosophies on sexuality, including Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist.

Well DUH!! go figure. If we don’t reproduce then that might mean the end of civilization. Brilliant!!
Of course when we go through the phase of many gay men and many straight women, I’d like to volunteer to help save civilization.

Any religion that revolves around sexuality, gay or straight, would hinder spiritual evolution, since true spirituality does not reside in the physical. Granting gays equal rights and treating them as equals would only remove some of the “we are the persecuted” mystique that makes it more religion like.

Same DUH!!

Perhaps they seek an acknowledgement of their rights as human beings rather than acceptance of their sexual preference.

It doesn’t seem quite that simple. Fucking like rabbits can lead to other cultural problems such as many unwanted children. Marrige has something to do with parental responsibility. Screww all you want but don’t get pregnant, doesn’t seem to be working.

Do I detect a little bitterness? Among animals there are different sexualities. I don’t agree that fucking like rabbits is the normal inclination for humans. I do agree that cultural and religous traditions have obscured our true nature.
It’s interesting to hear the views of eastern religions. Thanks for posting.

12

My own experience leads me to believe that being gay isn’t always something you’re born with. I’ve met men and women who so emotionaly wounded by the opposite gender that they turned to their own gender for love, support, acceptance and sex.
However if you’re an adolescent or adult who only feels deisre for your own gender then you should be free to follow those feelings without being persecuted or treated as some kind of freak.

The point is to allow gays to have equal rights as human beings and for their sexuality to not matter one way or the other. That also means they have equal responsibility in society.

I think the nature of the gay community will change as they are granted equal rights.
There will be divorce and all that “normal” stuff that heteros deal with now. There may be more people who experiment and choose to be straight. Maybe more people who live comfortbly in both sexualities. The ability to choose a committment recognized by society will bring about changes but I don’t forsee the downfall of civilization because of gay sex. Is there even one example of these theories?

13

Isn’t it interesting how so many people don’t dare criticize ideas that are “Eastern,” that it’s only “Western” ideas that are open to analysis and if necessary, rejection. Why is it that total nonsense is acceptable, so long as it’s “Eastern;” that we can only be rightfully indignant about our own culture’s lies, but not someone else’s?

14

The shortcoming I see with some of the arguments raised here is the assumption that boning other men up the ass is the sum total of a homosexual’s identity and function in society. It’s as if heterosexuals are doing all the heavy lifting, pausing occasionally to have sex in order to procreate, while the gays live a life of sybaritic sloth and indulgence.

Gay folk pull their weight too, you know. They work in jobs, just like us “normal” folks. They pay taxes, too. They throw out the trash on garbage day, mow their lawns, watch TV, and buy stuff, so where does the notion that the desire to receive equal treament and enjoy the rights and benefits that fall on their heterosexual cousins equate to the notion that they

?

I think they’d rather be considered as incredibly average.

Gay marriage has been legal and practiced for, what, a year now? Despite the initial flurry of attention and fear-mongering by folks like the esteemed DrMark, you know what they fall-out has been? Absolutely nothing!! Packs of gay Eagle scouts don’t prowl the playgrounds and shopping malls in search of young boys and heterosexual couples are not publicly jeered or molested. We have not been visited by plagues of locusts, flies, frogs or fire. Hell, in fact we just won the World Series AND the Superbowl!! And the number of reported priest molestations of altar Boys has actually gone down.

True, several gays who were legally married are now filing for divorce. Wow…just like straight people. You seem to think this is some sort of indictment of homosexuality. I say rather that it’s an indictment of marriage in general.

15

Oh, dear. Inflammatory statements can get out of hand all too quickly. Sexual politics is one of the most inflammatory of all (next to a related topic: gender politics). I think you should have considered more carefully how to phrase that, to not be a blanket condemnation of all gays.

When gayness goes bad — and this is not an attack on gayness, because anything in human life can go bad at times, heterosexuality no less — it opens the door for male supremacy and misogyny to get in. I do NOT believe that male supremacy and misogyny are inherent in gayness. Most gay guys I have known are blessedly free of such things. Rather, these things are a cancer that grows on gayness and perverts it to be what it should not be. Healthy gayness is not like that. I’m thinking of Sparta, a militaristic society in which women were chattel and where tough boys dominated. This is an aberration in the history of gayness and not characteristic. It’s a warning.

It isn’t gayness that produces authoritarian male supremacism and the oppression of women. Rather, sex segregation, as under the Taliban for example, is a characteristic of male supremacism. When men are denied the company of women under a harsh regime, maybe gayness is the only place they can turn for a bit of tenderness and loving which is every human’s birthright. In this case, incidental gayness is an artifact of an oppressive system, not the other way around.

I love my gay brothers as allies in the struggle against discrimination. I love them for contributing a unique way of seeing things to the human story. While the thought of an all-male situation with no women is personally very difficult for me, I recognize the principle of different strokes for different folks. I will continue to struggle for gay liberation as I welcome the gay contributions to the struggle for gender liberation and women’s liberation. We’re all in this together.

16

Yep. Personally, I encourage male homosexuality, but oppose lesbianism. All male homsosexuality does is cut down competition for chicks. :wink:

17

But officially sanctioned homosexual marriage is something new. As far as I know, no other society has ever officially recognized marriages between persons of the same sex. Which only means that it’s an experiemnt that hasn’t been tried, so we don’t know what effect it would have.

I do believe that the disappearance of marriage would mean the end of society as we know it, but many things have irrevocably changed society in the past. Some of those changes have been good, some bad, some neutral, and some controversial; some inevitable, and some voluntary.

I don’t know nearly enough about history, psychology, or anthropology to give an informed answer to the OP’s question of whether a society can survive and flourish without marriage. You’d have to look at lots of other societies and what made them work or not work.

What does seem obvious to me, though, is that heterosexuals have done far more to harm the institution of marriage than homosexuals have.

18

I think that the Eastern take on this is more as a spiritual degradation that, eventually and inevitably, destroys the civilization. A homosexual orientation does not preclude fathering children, and plenty of homosexuals throughout history have managed to do that. They may not have liked it very much, but they’ve done it. Shows some character, I guess, in a sense.

The Tantric branch of Yoga is specifically concerned with the use of sexual union to enhance connection with the divine. Speaking for myself, I’ve definitely experienced that phenomenon. To paraphrase The Monkees, “Then I saw her face (showing pleasant enthusiasm), Now I’m a Believer!”

Other branches of Yoga might agree with your assertion above, but not Tantra. The best general reference I know of for understanding the principles involved is the book I referenced in my previous post.

You’re quite right. Perhaps I went a little overboard. Still, I would contend that it is part of our nature to lead considerably more active sexual lives than our current structures permit us. Some structuring is obviously necessary, to avoid population explosion, but we do have numerous forms of birth control.

Bitterness? Nah. That came first. Now it’s disgust. Maybe someday I’ll progress to amusement.

You’re most welcome

19

By all means, go ahead and criticize. I happen to agree with Eastern thought on this topic, but there are other aspects that I don’t accept.

I do consider it a fact, however, that Eastern spiritual thought (which also extensively addresses the physical world) is, in general, far more sophisticated than anything produced in the West thus far. This doesn’t mean it’s always “right,” but it is more sophisticated.

20

A fact? Wow. In what way is it more sophisticated? Factually, I mean.