Religion in Government

Well put Jar.I agree with everything you said except this sentence: I don't think the veracity of that statement one way or the other strengthens or weakens your argument. While I have yet to see actual, valid evidence that supports these recycled claims, I think, if anything, reliance on the 'gays are smarter, more educated, richer' argument actually weakens the main point: the only difference between gays and lesbians and heterosexuals is sexual preference.I guess I'm confused by the need to differentiate at all. Homosexuals are people. Heteros are people. A cross section of the gay community should include just as many smart, well educated, nice people and sociopathic, malevolent predators as a cross section of heteros would.These arguments about why homosexuals want to be married are fascinating. I submit that the reasons why homosexuals want to get married are as complex, simple, reasonable, irrational, wonderful, banal, well-thought, and impulsive as why heterosexuals want to get married. Why isn't that enough?Oh wait, I almost forgot, god hates homosexuals.

I agree. And I don't understand why any homophobes even bring this argument up: it's moot. Homosexuals don't need to adopt, they can have kids 'the good old fashioned way,' or through the wonders of science (e.g. Melissa Etheridge).If anything, homophobes who believe that homosexuality is genetic should encourage gays who want kids to adopt; that way they won't continue to foul the gene pool.

Hmm, many Shiites would disagree with you. So would the Christian Democrats of Germany. So would the Pope. Oddly, Stalinists, Maoists, and Pol Pott would agree with you. Interesting.(For the record, I agree with you though )

Easy. For the same reasons people choose to do all sorts of things they don't really like to do: money, peer pressure, and a desire to please.You don't think plenty of heterosexual women haven't forced themselves to perform oral sex on a man when they would rather skipped it altogether?There are lots of people who perform all sorts of sexual acts they would never have considered nor ever desired to perform until exposed to the influences I listed above.

Not that this comes as any surprise.

God I hope not. Agreed. True, except you are assuming that gay sex is unlike other sexual activities, and it is something you cannot learn to like.Physical stimulation is physical stimulation and if you've learned to get off with members of your same sex, it's entirely possible you can learn to like it.What you are attracted to or enjoy is not simply genetic, but can be learned behavior. You can train yourself to overcome fear of heights to enjoy skydiving. You can train yourself to enjoy pain. You can certainly train yourself to enjoy homosexual sex. To what degree? I think that can depend on the level of exposure you receive before your likes are 'set.' But even then people can train themselves, or be trained, to enjoy things they never did before.I think this is why so many homosexuality=immorality folks are worried about exposure of their children to homosexuality. Of course if people condone gay behavior young men are more likely to be exposed to and ultimately participate in it. The more who try it, the higher the percentage are likely to enjoy it.Does that percentage peak? Will some people never be attracted to the same sex despite acceptance and exposure to same sex sexual interaction? Who knows? The data doesn't really exist. The best you can do is look at history to try to get an idea of how people behaved when homosexuality was not considered to be aberrant behavior.I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that individuals in the US will eventually experience more same sex sexual interaction than ever before and not just because 'genetic homosexuals' feel comfortable enough to come out.Whoa, just realized how long this got. Sorry to get so far off topic, but the subject was drifting there.This message has been edited by custard, 06-16-2004 08:14 AM

Yeah, when I was in Paris I remember seeing all those commercials on TV with those very hot 40-year-old babes... wait a MO-MENT, I don't recall seeing them at all! In fact, even the porn channel in the hotel only showed nubile young men and women!Course that was ten years ago, I'm sure things are different now... I couldn't agree with you more. I want to slap the 'perk' right out of them.

How else do you judge popular culture? Music, TV, and porno. Are there any better criteria than those?This message has been edited by custard, 06-17-2004 05:10 PM

I said 'popular' culture. More specifically, the culture of the majority of people, not a sub-group comprised of intellectuals. Yeah, that's why Baywatch and 90210 were such hits in Europe, because people were busy going to the Prado, and reading all that Voltaire, Gunter Grass, and Solzhenitsin.Sorry, I absolutely challenge the claim that Euros are any more erudite, or, more importantly, any less shallow, than Americans.I have seen great European films (recently saw I'm not afraid, and Man on the Train) and I've seen Euro films that made Dude, Where's My Car seem like Citizen Kane.Their tabloids, crappy television, commercials (my god, have you ever seen Italian commercials? They're better than the Spice Channel!), pop magazines, and godawful music (except the Brits) are every bit as shallow and horrible and representative of their culture as ours are.Although you pique my curiosity -I would be curious to juxtapose, say, France or Germany's best selling books and films to the US; I still stand by my contention that the trifecta of music, television, and porn are just as valid metrics for determining popular culture as any other.We don't judge America's pop culture by the Met, articles in Scientific American, or what's being played on NPR; we judge it by People Magazine, USA Today, Z100, and Friends.This message has been edited by custard, 06-17-2004 05:42 PMThis message has been edited by custard, 06-17-2004 05:43 PM

Touche.

Ascribing your conclusion based on a tiny, biased sample set (your own sexual development and acquaintences) to an entire population is an assumption. What does it mean 'you liked it right away?' Does that mean you liked it the first time you tried it? So what. If you had been raised in an environment that was welcoming and, in fact, promoted homosexual encounters how do you know you wouldn't have liked being with a boy just as much? (And I am assuming that you were not raised in such an environment based on your previous statements about being a fundie.)But even if you didn't like it, there is no way to know what percentage of the male population wouldn't have liked it and to what degree they liked it. The data just isn't there. Gets back to our sample set problem. For example, in my experience has been such that I have observed that more gay men (and lets stick with men for the sake of simplicity) I know were either abused by another male or had their first sexual encounter with another male more than hetero men. So either case is an invalid sample set.But I have also observed that in this country homosexuality has only recently been considered acceptable behavior. Even now, people have ingrained biases depending on their upbringing.You state you knew right away that you knew you liked heterosexual sex. You ask 'Why would gay sex be any different?' How do you know you wouldn't like homosexual sex? If you were blindfolded and someone gave you oral sex would you still enjoy it? If you later discovered you had received it from a man would that disgust you? Why? Why would it matter? (Perhaps you have tried it and you do know; I'm not asking you to bare your chest here and tell us if you don't want to - this is primarily rhetorical).It's been demonstrated, though I have no evidence on hand, that the concept of what is beautiful or erotic has strong roots in one's cultural upbringing. So you can say you know you aren't gay because you get aroused by thinking of/looking at women and not men, but that doesn't demonstrate your concepts weren't completely dependent on your upbringing.If an individual was raised in an environment where sex and physical love between members of the same gender was considered natural and 'cute,' do you really believe more people wouldn't try it? And having tried it, do you really believe more people wouldn't continue to participate in it, at some level, than they do now?Additionally, I submit you, I, and most heterosexuals have been too indoctrinated at an early age to be able to objectively claim that we are heteros merely because that's the way we were born, and not because of the way they were raised.I think more men would have sexual encounters of varying degrees with other man much more frequently than they do now if we were raised in such a manner that this activity was acceptable or encouraged. That doesn't mean heteros just 'go away,' it just means that men would have more sexual encounters with men. Some men would prefer only to have sex with men, some wouldn't have a preference, and some would prefer women. But I think the incidence of gay sex would definitely increase; and that is exactly what I think frightens many people who find this activity immoral or distasteful. I dissected the genetic question in another thread, and I was unable to find any compelling evidence in the studies published thus far to show that sexual attraction is genetic. So far, everything still seems to point to development factors such as environment, culture, experience.And you should notice I am not talking about pos-puberty acclimation. It's speculated, that your preferences (not just sexual), in fact a great deal of your personality, is formed before you are ten years old. No, I am not conflating anything. I am restricting my point to gay men because it is too confusing to continue to include both men and women in the same argument. {*BLINK*)Excuse me? Seriously, what possible evidence do you have to back up that statement? What makes you think women would be more 'fluid,' whatever that means, than men? If anything, as the gender most driven by sex, I would expect men to be more open to homosexual sex than women; and when you look at the statistics(http://EvC Forum: Is homosexuality a natural response to large populations?), there actually is a higher percentage of men who have had sex with other men (gay and bi) than women (gay and bi).This message has been edited by custard, 06-17-2004 07:42 PM

Ahhh... this is extremely interesting. I wonder if there are any studies comparing the attitudes or reactions of men towards other men who engage in homosexual sex vs. women towards women who have engaged in homosexual sex.To put it simply, I wonder if there is more peer pressure among men to be straight than among women. I only postulate this since homosexuality has so often been linked to effiminacy (e.g. the thought if you are gay you are a wimp and vice versa), and effiminacy among men is the ultimate taboo.So again, I wonder how much if this is ultimately due to social/cultural upbringing and experience. Extremely interesting stuff. Yeah you definitely have a point here. I guess what I would say is that perhaps sexually attractive features are not limited to women (full lips, smooth skin, youthful features, eyes, body symmetry, etc)
so that humans might be predisposed arousal by these features regardless of whether they appear on men or women.This might explain why we see so much literature that refers to 'beautiful,' almost feminine boys when describing homosexual relationships among older cultures where bi-sexuality was not uncommon (Romans, Greeks, Persians, etc).I'm not sure how this argument, 'people are so horny they'll sleep with both men and women,' is a genetic advantage yet I wonder if there really needs to be one. Perhaps humans are willing to pursue sexual pleasure, in its various forms, merely as a by product of our tremendous sex drives.Think about it, why do people masturbate? Obvious answer: because it feels good. But do people just look at their hand one day and say 'wow, that turns me on,' or do they teach themselves that this action provides pleasure?Why dont people masturbate? One answer: because they are told it is wrong and have so much guilt involved with it that it is no longer pleasurable.Certainly there is no genetic advantage for a species to masturbate, is there? If not, why does there need to be a genetic advantage to engage in any sexual activity that does not lead to reproduction? Maybe we just do it because it feels good.And maybe we don't engage in certain types of sex because we don't feel comfortable enough to do so. For example, getting oral sex from another man might physically feel great, but our psychological stress might be such for some of us that it makes the experience less pleasurable and we prefer not to engage in that activity.This message has been edited by custard, 06-18-2004 01:29 AM

My point is that women may find the idea of oral sex repulsive at first, but after performing it, or participating in it, they may grow to actually enjoy it. Why? Because they never tried it so they didn't know that turns them on, or because they derive pleasure from giving pleasure to their partners: a desire to please.Not sure why you linked desire to please strictly to abuse, but lots of lovers will try new things merely because they think their partners might enjoy it. Read Penthouse Letters sometime. Yes, but you are assuming that most people only want chicken or liver whereas I am arguing that there might be more people trying and enjoying both, or all of the items offered by the buffet but they don't because they are raised to believe everything but the liver is bad for them.I don't see any evidence that sexual proclivity or orientation is genetic any more than most of the other aspects of an individual's personality are genetic. I certainly think that experience and environment have a great deal of impact on an individual's personality, and that includes his/her sexual desires. Sure, your words perhaps; but I would never characterize gay people in that way.This message has been edited by custard, 06-18-2004 03:25 AM

Actually yes it is. Physical stimulation is physical stimulation and has nothing to do with the gender of the individual providing it.How do we know this? If we performed a double blind test on men where we told all of the men they would be receiving oral sex from a beautiful porn star, then blindfolded them and had a gay man perform oral sex on half of them and the star on the other half, do you honestly think the men who received oral sex from the man wouldn't get aroused?The revulsion or disinterest that heterosexuals feels towards sex with other men is mental, not physical. But that can be just as compelling.Are you really arguing that our sexual appetites are hardwired by genetics? If so, how do you explain people who enjoy S&M? Is that genetic? Did they always know they liked S&M? Or did they try it and discover they liked it? What about people who only enjoy sex with the lights off? Is that genetic? Or did they discover they were more comfortable with the lights off?Why is this different for gender preference? How do you explain bi-sexuals who switch back and forth between genders? Is that genetic too? We have a gay gene, a bi gene, and a hetero gene?So I've got my S&M gene, my lights off gene, and my gender preference gene. Lots of genes to determine my sexual activity.Isn't it more likely that we just have a sex drive gene capable of going in all directions which are then shaped by our environment?If gender preference isn't genetic, then doesn't it have to be developmental. If it's developmental, it's a result of environment. Actually that's not true either. If it were, people wouldn't ever be able to change or grow. Three-year-olds are much more sociopathic than an adult who is thirty-years-old. Why is that? Because the adult continues to accumulate experiences that shape his personality as he grows older.It's only some core personality traits that psychologists speculate are set by the age of three (or five depending on your source). So doesn't it seem to make much more sense that sexual preferences, including gender preference, is shaped by environment?If it isn't, why do some countries and cultures have higher incidents of homosexuality than others? Because they are more predisposed to gay genes? That's a bit of a stretch.

Data? But what causes your brain to 'think that way?' Exposure to environment. And of course people tell you your genitals should tingle (if not in so many words); you grow up with your parents telling how cute the little girls in your class are, you grow up seeing mom and dad interact with each other, you see man/woman relationships everyday - including things like kissing, touching, etc. And people also tell you when your genitals shouldn't tingle. They tell you it's bad or immoral or disgusting if your genitals tingle when you look at a boy instead of a girl.You don't think your mind is being shaped at every turn? Please. Yeah, it's called trial and error. They try the hetero lifestyle and find it doesn't work for them. How many heteros try the gay lifestyle? Hardly any unless they have a gay friend. My point is not that there should be less gays and bisexuals, but that there should be more and the only thing holding them back is environment. No I haven't, but I particularly enjoy the arrogant manner in which you present this evidence. I think I'm really beginning to enjoy that. Wonder if I'm genetically predisposed?Seriously, do you have any data for anything in the last twenty years? 1953? Please. Sure, the word electrolysis mean anything to you? The word Asian mean anything to you? The word eighteen-year-old mean anything to you? That's a great point, but you'll also admit that even though you and I lived in the same general environment (USA, Brady Bunch, Star Wars, Electric Company) we still have experiences that are extremely dissimilar, and those, as much as our similar experiences, have just as much impact on our individual development.That's why siblings raised in the same households have different personalities and behaviors even when they are only a few years apart.The fact that we are constantly exposed to heterosexual 'norms' growing up does nothing to weaken my argument that more hetero men would engage in gay sex if they were exposed to less heterosexual norms.