Re: Mardi Gras: I love boobies as much as anyone, I'm just not fond of that particular party. I've lived in tropical countries where that sort of stuff is very common and in my opinion it doesn't really enhance people's well-being. That's for another discussion though. I already said I'd at least 'raise the flag'.
What do we know that's so different? Are you suggesting that the Occupy Wall Street movement has no validity whatsoever in the face of the kind of blatant corporate greed and political corruption that has destroyed the lives and livelihoods of many? Wow, you trust more than I do!
We know that it's Utopian to dream of a society without any sort of private property. Now the would-be communists demand much more reasonable things.
The only thing your 'truth' demonstrates is the ongoing need for Gay Pride-type activism. Your musings have absolutely no grounding or support anywhere in modern science, medicine, psychology or ideas of human sexuality.
That's what the mainstream media tells you. There is this myth propelled by humanists that everyone who is a homosexual to any degree is genetically predetermined to be so, whereas many straight people lack these genes. Biologists understand that this is nonsense.
All serious research and even common sense point otherwise. Same-sex relations were for example very widespread in ancient Greece. In modern Greece much less than 5% of the population participates in same-sex relations. Genetically, modern and ancient Greeks are similar enough so that if homosexual acts were a product solely of their genes they'd still be at it today. The reason why they don't is because social factors dictate it doesn't happen.
If I got into the biochemical specifics of the issue I'd spend all day writing an essay here, but basically an increase in an individual's tendency to engage in same-sex relations can be attributed to either genes (unlikely for most people), different patterns of development caused by maternal hormones (in utero environmental factors), or environmental factors after birth.
Desperation and inability to have sex with women, for example, can lead to an increase in homosexual acts in many primates (ourselves included). This has been observed in chimps, and you have to look no further than jails and ships to see it happen with us. In South American military schools it was fairly normal for more masculine kids to use less masculine kids for pleasure. Culturally, the only 'homosexual' in that equation was the receiver.
Tewder said:
The flaw that you and so many make, and that fogs any objective judgement quite frankly, is in the implicit value you confer on heterosexuality. It is a rote heterosexist perspective that takes for received knowledge that what is heterosexual is prefered, healthy and 'normal'. There is no basis for this except to say that it may be prefered, healthy and normal if you are heterosexual, and only if! Besides, most who study these things now understand at this point that our concepts of sexuality - the way we perceive it - are social constructs, 'labels' used as points of reference that don't really reflect the vast diversity of human sexuality. The fact that somebody promotes such labels reflects their own upbringing and conditioning more than it does any sort of objective reality.
Only humanists would argue that normality is subjective. It isn't. But you must define it before entering a debate. If you are talking about statistical normality then exclusive homosexuality is definitely not normal - not in wild animal species, not in humans, exclusive homosexuals are very hard to come by. If you equate normal with natural, i.e., not a product of human mischief but rather a genuine expression of someone's instinctive emotions, then most human behaviour is normal. When I use 'normal' I use it in the statistical sense.
We evolved over millions of years as sexually reproducing organisms. Our physiology is tailored to offer optimal performance and fulfillment when we play out our life in accordance with what we've been programmed to do for ages. There is nothing subjective about stating that sexual reproduction in our species should in theory lead to high levels of fitness and well-being (which doesn't necessarily mean a longer life exptancy, for example). Bisexual behaviour is abundant and may even confer additional benefits. Exclusively homosexual tendencies are a much more human-specific (and sheep-specific funnily enough) phenomenon. Asexuality is even rarer.
But quite clearly as I stated in my previous post, I do believe that if bisexual behaviour occurs frequently when social norms don't constrict it (and it does) there must be an adaptive reason for that too. There are studies that show that with each male son, the next male son's chances of being gay increase. This shows that the causation of homosexuality in certain males may not be genetic, but rather environmental (if in-utero). Homosexual males may stick around closer to their families and act as agents of kin-selection. For the same reason, a genetic component increasing the strength of homosexual impulses may make its way into families fairly regularly (though based on current evidence and contrary to popular belief there is less support among the scientific community for purely genetic causes than any other alternative). Females who have homosexual brothers appear to be more fertile than females with heterosexual brothers, in which case male homosexuality may just be a collateral effect of a process through which mothers enhance their fitness by making fertile daughters after they've had sons.
But let's not be defensive here, there's nothing wrong with liking whoever (or whatever) you like regardless of whether the circumstances that made you like them were pre-natal or post-natal, or whether they are adaptive or not. I personally don't find overweight people attractive in the slightest. I can't get off sexually by watching an overweight person, and I can't get off sexually by watching another man. I also can't get off watching a woman with curly hair, for it reminds me of my mother (the only curly haired woman I interacted with as a child). I know people who prefer overweight people, and I know people who prefer other members of their own sex. I respect their preferences and believe that they are as natural to them as mine are to me. This doesn't mean that their likes, just like mine, weren't developed at least partly after they were born (not accounting for imprinting and gender identity is ludicrous). I'm not arguing that the extent of that equation doesn't vary significantly from one individual to another - for it quite clearly does.
I once had a lesbian girl tell me that her need to dress like a man, get a man's haircut, etc. was genetic. I insisted it wasn't and got a 'homophobe' reputation among all her gay and bisexual friends. I've had similar arguments countless other times with LGBTQ people and it led me to conclude that mainstream LGBTQ organistations don't encourage critical thinking and empirical evidence among their members. Instead they encourage this 'everyone is against us, don't let them tell you that you weren't born exactly how you turned out to be'. Hence my lack of sympathy for the parade.
I will add on a final note that the fact that we are having this discussion here is largely thanks to the fact that the parade exists in the first place, and that that is an undeniable accomplishment of the whole movement and may by itself justify its whole existence.
