@100: First of all, AIDS was not created by human free will.

Also, Christians generally believe, as well, that God can intervene and perform miracles in the world. So if God not turning gay people straight is proof that God is cool with gay people, God not intervening in the lives of mass murderers, preventing AIDS, stopping earthquakes, and so on is also proof that God wants those things around.

Lack of critical thinking is just as much of a problem as anti-gay-rights legislation. In fact, it's the reason why we have anti-gay-rights legislation. So I'm not ok with a religious argument that displays a lack of critical thinking. It's sorta like giving the executive branch too much power: it's all great till the other side uses it.

@ 71 - What I said @ 39 was "feeble minds need to believe in a bearded white guy up above making all the decisions."

I didn't talk about believing in god in some form or another, I talked about believing in a ridiculously eurocentric vision of what god might be, dictated by some people from a long long time ago who were clearly not aware of many scientific facts.

Since you're the one who wants scientific proof that homosexuality is innate, that means you're aware of the importance of science, right? Well, the people who invented that childish version of divinity had no access to much of what we now consider to be scientific. So obviously, according to your logic, we shouldn't believe their version of god, right? Coz it's never been proven by science, right?

So why the fuck do you blindly believe in it?

What I find most offensive about most religious people is that they believe they know what god wants.

If god exists, as mere mortals, the most reverent thing we can do is to accept that we are in no way capable of understanding what god wants. So we are in no way allowed to impose our beliefs on god's other creatures. Those who do, like you, are the worst kind of religious people, since they only really believe in themselves.

I now rest my case.

@ 106 - He never says anything of the sort. Comprehension fail.

What offends me is when people like you write in with their moronic opinions and comments, thinking themselves really clever when in fact their whole argumentation relies on their faulty understanding of what is being said.

You could at least TRY to make that brain of yours work, you know?

Why, oh why is every opponent of gay rights so damn stupid? (Well, that question kind of answers itself, doesn't it?)

97, It's either "." can't figure out the Google, or that he's pissed that Dan is ignoring "." command that Dan reiterate his well known and publicized views on polygamy.

@96: That is hot! :) Would you ever want legal recognition of the three of you as a unit? I think that should be allowed. (Interesting fact: it is possible to be married to someone and have a civil union with a third person at the same time in some states.)

@ 103, you think they're going to go that route? You're a fool if you do, since that means that cancer is up for the same kind of discussion.

Politicians who want to stay elected won't go saying that God created AIDS to wipe out gays. (Of course there are going to be a few exceptions, but those will mostly be local pols in serious backwaters who have no hope of higher office.)

I'll say it again - this is about emotional appeal, not rational. If you think the average 2011 person (who is more likely to be somewhat religious than not) is going to find your hypothetical more appealing than what this legislator is saying, you're a pessimist in the extreme.

@105

Faith doesn't prove scientific facts, nor science faith. I have faith for instance that I love my wife and she me. I can't prove it scientifically, yet it's one of the central beliefs of my life. On the other hand my truck works on rock solid scientific principles. I don't have faith that the turning of the key will start the vehicle. I know that it will, and why it will. There is a necessary role for science in human understanding, and one for faith. Too often advocates of either don't see that.

And while I may have misread your statements you certainly have misread mine. At the core of Christianity is the notion of free will, and the acceptance of the consequences of it. I have no interest, theological or otherwise, in your decision to embrace a homosexual lifestyle. My only cavil is the point at which you assume that choice places obligations on others.

@110: What are you talking about? Read my comment again.

I didn't say anything about any politician talking about wiping out gays. I said (echoing Lourdes in 99) that it was a crappy argument because it would mean that all our current diseases, such as AIDS (cancer would work as well) are also things God wants around.

I get your point about emotional appeal to people who believe in God. I just think it's a stupid argument.

Hey Seattleblues, you still haven't answered my question. What's up?

Blackrose, that's just the logical extension of speaking about AIDS, at least in the context of emotional appeal. And yes, to a religious person, God did create AIDS, along with TB, the Black Death, hurricanes and earthquakes, and all kinds of other bad things.

@ 111 So why do you give so much importance to scientific proofs of homosexuality's innateness? Can't you accept it on faith? You're negating the possible value of your earlier arguments, here.

that said, I like how you're suddenly saying that my decision is "to embrace a homosexual lifestyle" and not "to be homosexual".

To embrace a homosexual lifestyle means that I accepted my true nature and, since I choose to live with the highest possible level of integrity, I've decided to respect it and live accordingly. I don't see how anyone can be against that, but it appears that you are (you're in good company, though: the pope, that defender of pedophiles, has made pronouncements against this sort of integrity). Personally, I'm quite proud, and rightly so, of having made that choice.

But the sad thing is that you don't even get the point about free will, which is that everyone should be allowed to exercise it! Duh! And I can't do that if my rights are curtailed by the religious beliefs of people like you.

And since you ARE allowed to believe that god exists and wants certain things - a right I would never advocate against - you can't force me to live according to those beliefs, then accuse me of imposing the consequences of my beliefs on you! You're the guilty party here.

We're not asking for privileges, we're asking for the rights that you already have... and no, marrying a person of the opposite sex is not an equivalent right, it's a deception (and one has to be particularly thick to use that argument).

So in the end, what you're really advocating is hipocrisy. Cowardice. Lies. Like most religious people.

It is normal and natural for a segment of the population to be homosexual.

@113

Frankly, I missed it.

So, pedophilia and bestiality are natural sexual expressions as well? How about necrophilia? See, you can't have it both ways. If sexuality is choiceless, we have no business stigmatizing any of it. At best, we could institutionalize those with a predilection for kids or dead folks, we could not punish them at law.

Of course, I understand that we punish active child or goat molestors because such actions involve those who can't or don't consent. Since I know sexual expression to be choice driven, this presents no problems for me. I can, for instance, say that homosexuality among consenting adults is absolutely none of my business. I can say that molesting kids is the business of the larger society. And I can do this without logical difficulties. The ones it causes logical problems are those who say homosexuality is innate and inevitable.

And I gotta say, I don't recall being turned on by anything sexually at 3 or 6. You and Ricardo must have been relatively precocious, or I a late bloomer. Don't know.

@Ricardo

I don't think I've ever argued that the impulse to homosexuality isn't sometimes a part of a persons psychology. And I know that I've never argued that homosexuality should be punished by law, discriminated against or otherwise treated as a legitimate public policy issue. I don't want my bedroom policed by my fellow citizens, so cheerfully accept that yours shouldn't be either.

Other than marriage, what rights do I have as a heterosexual that you don't as a homosexual?

Nor do I impose my religious beliefs on you, except as our democracy and the Constitution allow. That is, if a majority of the electorate votes for a person or principle and it doesn't run afoul of the Constitution, that's just the way it is. I live in the Peoples Republic of Seattle, for example. Legislation that seems stupid to me, like that around the myth of global warming, is still applicable to me since I abide by the laws. I have therefore two choices. I can accept the democratic will of the region in which I live. Or I can move someplace whose politics are more congenial.

I respect the right of Savage, you or others to advocate for marraige for gays. I just don't see how that imposes an obligation on the majority who oppose it.

If person is gay, that person is gay. It was never a choice. People can choose to try to act against their true nature. I can tell you, as a gay man who tried to be straight, acting against one's true sexual orientation hurts in your heart and in your soul. The emptiness a straight relationship imparts on a gay person psyche is excruciating. I don't know how to make a straight person understand. They've never felt the pressure to be something they're not. Sexuality is so core to living things, and to force a group of people to conform just to prevent others from being offended is ridiculous and unbelievably cruel.

Wow, Seattleblues, either you've completely misread my question, or you're being disingenuous. I suspect the latter, since I called attention to this query three times.

When did you figure out you were attracted to women? THAT is the question. Not, when did you figure out you want to [insert fetish, for example, have anal sex] with them?

Go read the pre-adolescent experiences related by myself and others again. (Go to 75 for reference.)

Until you do that, you're enjoined from claiming that it's just another choice. I'll be there to remind you that you refused to answer this simple question if you keep it up.

@118: Oh Rob, you break my heart. What an awful way to live, even for a little while. And people like Seattleblues will never understand that. But I have hope for the future, when his ilk have finally shuffled off this mortal coil, and the kids coming up look back at them with the same distaste and embarrassment that we look back at the racists of generations past.

Oh and SB, you never did get back to me on Alan Greenspan. Why don't we discuss it when I see you at Slog Happy?

@109: Why yes, yes it is. :)
In my personal situation, marriage isn't so much of an issue. Been there, done that, and I find I like having my own space. But I do know some poly people to whom it is more of a concern. They are all moving into a big house together with their children, so functionally I guess it will be much like the shared living situations of Grandparents generation. I should ask them next time I see them if they would want to expand their existing marriages to include the other couple and significant others.

This congressman has fallen into a common fallacy. The terms "born with it" and "didn't choose it" do not mean the same thing. Too often people say "it's genetic" when they mean "it wasn't because of any action that the person decided to make." Non-chosen factors are a lot bigger than genes.

Frankly, I wouldn't rule out psychological or early-childhood causes or contributing factors to sexual orientation. This doesn't mean that I think homosexuals choose to be homosexual; I don't. I just understand that "genetic," "born with it," and "not his/her choice/fault" are three different things.

It's clearest to see in obesity. People say "obesity is genetic" when they really mean "we should reject the old idea that obesity is due to the sins of sloth and gluttony." However, there are lots of non-genetic factors that help cause obesity through absolutely no fault of the obese person. For example, if a woman doesn't get enough to eat while she's pregnant, her child will be born with a more efficient (fatness-prone) metabolism. This is not genetic but still not something over which the obese patient had any control.

@122: THANK YOU. So many people presume that all innate characteristics must be genetic rather than the result of early developmental factors!

@60
Seattleblues, I don't know what is more striking: your ignorance or your willful disavowal of facts.

Gays can't be discriminated against in housing, employment or public accomodation? Really? Not in the state where I live. Gays can be discriminated against in all three of those areas. Gays are not a protected class. In fact, in some fields of employment (education for example), an awful lot of people would like nothing better than to discriminate against gays and lesbians, which is why so many GLBT teachers are desperately closeted.

More protection "from speech they don't happen to like"? Really? Not in the country where I live. It is just as illegal to say "All heterosexuals should be killed" as it is to say "All gays should be killed." I happen not to like a great many things that both you and Period Troll say, but I would defend your right to say those things.

"Gays]may marry any consenting person of the opposite sex, just as I can." Thanks for giving me the freedom to do something I don't particularly want to do. How would you feel about a law, though, that mandated that you were free to marry any consenting person, as long as that person was of the same sex as you? You probably wouldn't like it very much. Here's a radical idea: how about a law that allows people to marry the consenting adults of their choice regardless of sex or gender? That would be true equality.

>>It's an expression of how dedicated to civil rights we are in this country that we protect even self destructive choices.<<

Self-destructive in what empirically measurable sense? Be sure that your data refers not to the effects of homosexual promiscuity (as promiscuity is dangerous no matter who is practicing it), but to the effects of homosexual relations in and of themselves.

>>I don't choose sickness, but I can choose to pursue health. My family has a history of heart disease. So I should stop exercising, eat badly and give in to the inevitable heart attack, since that's the predilection I have.<<

If you find that your having a heart attack is of some utility to you, and of no harm to anyone else, I suppose you can have at. Hopefully anyone making an argument to the contrary would do better than you've done here.

>>Or not. I make choices about moral or physical failings and those choices determine my character, not the failings themselves.<<

No doubt. I may have missed the part where you demonstrated the "moral failing" independently of recourse to the empirically undemonstrated and fundamentally counterintuitive posit of an anthropomorphic deity.

>>I never chose to be straight any more than I chose to have 2 arms and 2 legs, or to breathe through mouth and nose. It simply is the natural default position for human beings.<<

So is right-handedness (which also has elements of both predisposition and choice). I could, of course, train myself to write with my right hand, but we have no reason to believe I would be as adept or as fulfilled as I am writing with the left.

>>So, pedophilia and bestiality are natural sexual expressions as well? How about necrophilia?<<

Sure. Laws against bestiality and necrophilia seem to me most useful in protecting jurisdiction; that is, no one may molest animals you own or the bodies of your loved ones. I do not otherwise support laws against either (though I do not support either act morally). As for marriage to either corpses or cows, neither has legal capacity to enter into a contract.

Worth noting though, that pedophilia itself is not what we regulate; statutory rape is. We do not regulate or stigmatize the proclivity (and to the degree that we do, I would suggest that we shouldn't); rather, we protect the victims of those who would be harmed by the fulfillment of that interest.

>>If sexuality is choiceless, we have no business stigmatizing any of it. At best, we could institutionalize those with a predilection for kids or dead folks, we could not punish them at law.<<

If there were a way to ensure that this has a net effect of protecting kids (as I said, I'm not too concerned with dead folks), I see no reason to disagree. The concern, again, is for the victim, not against the perp.

>>Of course, I understand that we punish active child or goat molestors because such actions involve those who can't or don't consent. Since I know sexual expression to be choice driven, this presents no problems for me. I can, for instance, say that homosexuality among consenting adults is absolutely none of my business. I can say that molesting kids is the business of the larger society. And I can do this without logical difficulties. The ones it causes logical problems are those who say homosexuality is innate and inevitable.<<

I don't see why. Proclivities are not chosen; activities are. In the absence of deity (a reasonable default position, though not the only reasonable default position, in the absence of evidence for deity), activities are judged by consequences. In many cases, consequences are judged by measures of harm. It seems to me that the question of nurture vs. nature is moot.

>>Other than marriage, what rights do I have as a heterosexual that you don't as a homosexual?<<

Until pretty recently, the right to serve in the military without hiding your sexual orientation. And what about the right to marry the romantic partner of your choice?

>>Nor do I impose my religious beliefs on you, except as our democracy and the Constitution allow. That is, if a majority of the electorate votes for a person or principle and it doesn't run afoul of the Constitution, that's just the way it is.<<

I would submit that unless there is some empirically demonstrable civic utility served by such principle, its codification amounts to interference with free exercise--not because freedom of religion is tantamount to freedom from religion (it isn't), but because freedom of religion necessarily includes freedom of irreligion.

@113: Ok, let's forget about AIDS for a second and talk about any other disease. Many religious people think God caused disease, but that it's still ok for us to try to cure or treat it. Some of them even think the whole reason God made suffering was so that we would have a chance to struggle with it and overcome it. So the argument "God made gay people, so they must be ok" is a poor one, and religious people are easily capable of seeing and recognizing this. The argument, emotional as it may be, is unlikely to convince anyone who doesn't already support gay rights.

You seem to think I'm suggesting that a politician say all this, which I can recognize might be impolitic.

@127 - As I said, let's differentiate between the results of homosexual promiscuity and the results of mere homosexuality, or monogamous (serially or genuinely) homosexual activity. Promiscuity has its price for gays and heterosexuals.

One get AIDS from having unprotected sex with an individual who has AIDS. Yes, anal sex (also engaged in and enjoyed by heterosexual couples, in numbers that actually dwarf the total number of homosexuals) is more dangerous than vaginal sex because of the greater likelihood of coming into contact with blood. That said, unprotected sex with someone whose medical history you don't know speaks to promiscuity, rather than to orientation.

Hey troll!,
You forgot about lesbians! I guess we're not as infuriating as gay men, still. Damn.

As has been noted before, it is quite possible that male homosexuals behave more promiscuously in their youth(s) due the absence of leavening female influence--that is, they are more likely to engage in this riskier behavior without protection and with individuals whom they don't know. Again, speaks to the question of promiscuity, not same-sex attraction or sex within same-sex relations.

Also, because HIV and AIDS first appeared in this country in the gay community, and initially spread very quickly, it's hardly surprising that it would continue to affect that community disproportionately, since gay men would be considerably more likely to pass it to gay men than to anyone else.

@ Seattleblues: heterosexuality is the norm, the majority, sure. But homosexuality occurs in nature, in the animal kingdom: we're basically animals w/ big ol' brains. As for folks who 'choose' to be gay, SB - when did you choose to be straight?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJtjqLUHY…

Also, when do we get to vote on straight marriage? Why should we, that's ridiculous, right?

...think about it.

@136: Actually, AIDS appears to have spread initially by heterosex. See, in some parts of Africa, bushmeat (including that of chimpanzees) is a major food source. And viruses similar to HIV have been known to exist in chimpanzees. The most likely theory for the appearance of HIV is that a hunter or butcher in Africa came into contact with blood from an infected animal, which perhaps got into a cut or scrape on his body, and the virus made the jump to humans. The virus spread initially due to a long incubation period and a lack of awareness, via heterosex. There is a great deal of evidence that HIV spread to the USA via (heterosexual) sex tourism. Nice try, Alleged.

Why did AIDS first appear in the homosexual community?

Because the individual who "brought" it stateside was a gay man, according to most accounts. One assumes most of those with whom he had sex were also gay men; had he been a straight man, one could reasonably assume that most of those with whom he would have had sex would have been straight women.

You really don't think these questions through before you ask them, do you?

Excellent speech. That's the kind of progressive views I admire and think of when it comes to my home state, not people like Michelle Bachmann who give it a bad name. His "arc of history" comment was spot-on.

@138, 140: http://www.webmd.com/hiv-aids/news/20071…
Our stories are now as straight as a beeline.

@134 "it is quite possible that male homosexuals behave more promiscuously in their youth(s) due the absence of leavening female influence"

lulz

@142: Well, that makes gay guys kosher for Passover, at least.

@140 - Since I claim to be neither a historian nor a doctor, my understanding of the historical trajectory is always open to revision. I'm not interested in "getting my story straight" because, let's face it, that's what people do when they're lying. I openly admit that I'm only sifting.

My wife will be a little surprised to discover I'm a "girl" . . . but only a little. :)

Oh, and venomlash, interesting research. The point on which I think we can both agree--aside from a general disdain for people who have neither the stones to register when they post nor the circumspection to know when to fall silent--is that neither timeline seems to indicate that same-sex attraction is inherently and objectively dangerous.

And I gotta say, I don't recall being turned on by anything sexually at 3 or 6. You and Ricardo must have been relatively precocious, or I a late bloomer. Don't know.
-Seattleblues

I know I'm days late in replying to this thread but, oh well, wanted to respond to this. Seattleblues, it's not about being turned on. It's about crushes. You know, the crushes that you probably got on girls as a kid. I have a friend who has a 4 year old daughter. She was telling me the other day that her daughter has a crush on one of the boys in daycare.

Now, not all people (gay or straight) remember these early crushes and some of us may have not had crushes that early at all. But some people do and they remember them and that's why there are people (usually gay men) who realized they were different so young.

"I was angry at God because I thought he made me gay. I didn't understand that it wasn't God's doing, but my own. I eventually realized that I had chosen this path for myself because I was just trying to protect myself against further hurt from men. And I believe I had also been looking for my mother's love in the arms of another woman. Plus I had been sexually abused as a child in all this contributed to my choice to be a lesbian."

we have so many gay and lesbians now. the lesbians do out number the gay men. i will never understand why god created such filth like this. the lesbians are the worst because a lot of us straight men that are out there are trying to meet decent straight women. they are nowhere to be found. these lesbians are just no good dirty, filthy pigs, that are destroying this world of ours. there are a lot of us good men now, taking a beating because of these lousy women now.

Bull! There is no scientific proof that it is genetic, FACT. So a disease prone behavior that kills millions is good for society? So lets stop fighting cancer and smoking since we want to encourage deadly and unhealthy behavior. Its simple if it was normal or moral every other person would claim to be gay. Not the case at all! How can one support, encourage and engage in a behavior that kills millions?

Boy, i wish that God would stop creating so many lesbians which it is so much harder for us straight guys looking to meet a good woman now.

Why do people say God Made you Gay. Please show me where it clearly says that God created Gay People.. And I'll show you where God Create a Porn Star.