Hugo

Ned, Since you mention child abuse, it's interesting to note that when looking at homosexuals, the number of them who were sexually abused as children is vastly greater than that amongst heterosexuals. You can also see that homosexuals often have also suffered in a non-sexual way. Most homosexuals felt rejected by their father figures, had no father figures at all, or failed to bond with their peers, before they were even aware of sexuality. Many studies have also shown that homosexuals are also very over-represented amongst the ranks of pedophiles. While around 3% of adults are homosexual, that figure rises to over 30% of pedophiles. But in answer to your point, the abuse occurs before the homosexuality. When you say that, 'there is the same sort of theme running through female abuse cases, the victim was convinced "she" deserved the abuse', it raises another interesting point: many homosexuals who were abused by adult males as children became homosexual because the abuser suggested to them that what they were doing was right and natural, or that because they derived any amount of pleasure from it, they must be gay.

And this is worse than the Ba'athists, who would have gang-raped and killed the mother, shot the father and the son (who could count themselves lucky that it was that quick), and then looted and burned the house? Whatever is going on in Iraq now, is a vast improvement on what was going on before the war.

No, thank you, I choose not to live my life in a Descartian denial of reality. Well, if I'm born black, I'm black. There are different characteristics that mark one out as Negroid, but to whatever degree you have them they won't change (short of surgery). But people go from straight to gay and back again all the time. According to the research I cited, all behaviour (not just sexual) is in some part genetic. Like smoking or alcohol abuse. Yes, that's what psychotherapy is. However, the fact remains that homosexuals overwhelmingly suffer from rejection and self-esteem issues, often quite severe. Psychiatrists term this to be psychological trauma.

Not really. WMD once existed and there's no proof that they stopped existing. I would say so. So far, President Bush has actually done what he said he would do, or at least tried to, every time. Yeah, OK, and in a bankrupt and impoverished nation where is the capital going to come from for Iraqi oilfirms? The only way to get Iraqi oil production started again is with US investment and involvement. So, you can accept US involvement, or you can damn the Iraqi people to eternal poverty. Iraq is and will be a member of OPEC. My point stands. If the US wanted cheaper oil, there were far better ways to get it. They could have invested in domestic or foreign oil, instead of which they launched a costly war, after which they still have to invest in foreign oil. Doesn't make sense, does it?

This is an example of a lack of political will. Westmoreland either did not have the political will to win or the governmental authority to do what was necessary to win. In WWII, the bombing campaign against Germany was nothing more than a precept to invasion, and the only acceptable outcome of that war to the Allies was the complete destruction of Nazi Germany. The political will was not to win the Vietnam war, it was to somehow preserve South Vietnam without confronting the fact that should have seemed obvious: the only way to ensure the continued existence of South Vietnam was the destruction of North Vietnam. The war aims specified that a certain strategy was essential, and that certain strategy was never followed. If the successive Vietnam-era administrations were not going to do this, they should have pulled out, and sooner. Clausewitz was wrong. War is not the continuation of politics by other means, war is the cessation of politics.

A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link. I won't go into the details here for obvious reasons, but it is very easy to obtain a fake birth certificate for someone who knows what they are doing. Once you have that, you can begin to accumulate other pieces of ID, until you have built up a whole new identity with passport, SIN card, driver's license, rental agreement for a house, Visa card, Mastercard, etc. When somebody turns up at the issuing office with all this stuff, who would doubt them? If an office asks you for two pieces of ID, and you provide them, how many times have they been heavily scrutinised, and how many have they just glanced at them? Heck, every time I pay on Visa, the cashier gives me my card back before I've even signed the slip. What does this mean? As a terrorist, I can be smuggled into Canada on a ship, a plane or whatever. Not all the borders and coasts can be watched. I then get a fake birth certificate. I then use that to acquire another piece of ID, use those two to obtain a drivers license, etc. Once a I have a few good solid pieces of ID, I then go and get my biometric passport. The biometrics, obviously, will match mine, but instead of being Mustafa Al-Terrorist from Iran, I am now John Ahmed, a Canadian citizen whose ancestors have been in Canada for generations. I can now enter the USA, legally, or go to Britain, or wherever I want, using that passport. Of course, all this is possible now, but it will still be possible with biometric ID, and that's my point: it will solve nothing.

This was not the point. The idea of this thread was to dispel the idea that being gay is like being black, or being a woman. Whether something has a genetic cause or not is no reason for a judgement. Cystic fibrosis is genetic, but it's not great to have it. A charitable nature is not genetic, but that does not make it ignoble. Homosexuality is a behaviour and a choice as much as alcoholism and smoking - the sufferer may not like it, but usually he does not feel he has much power to change what he is. To overcome smoking, alcoholism or homosexuality requires a lot of willpower and effort and will be very difficult, but it is possible. There are former alcoholics, ex-smokers and ex-gays in abundance. To proclaim that homosexuality is equal and invite them to celebrate their sexuality with sordid parades and media limelight, is akin to telling an alcoholic, "No, of course you don't have a problem. The rest of the world has a problem. Have another drink." It might be the easiest answer, for you and for him, but it is not helping him at all and in fact is making the problem worse - being kind to be cruel, if you will. The first step in therapy is to recognise that you have a problem, and so far our society is in a collective denial that will prevent any healing from taking place. It should be noted that programmes designed to help homosexuals do not, contrary to popular belief, show endless pornography and try to make the sufferer attracted to women. They ignore sexuality completely, and focus on building self-esteem and a positive self-image. After some success is achieved building self-esteem, homosexuals are surprised to note that attraction to women suddenly happens "as if of it's own accord." What can we infer from this?

Don't forget, Saddam has also actually used WMD before, on enemy soldiers and on his own civilians. He has also launched wars of aggression and invasion without international sanction, and repeatedly declared his intent and desire to destroy the US, Israel and their allies. Add this to the fact that if he wanted to develop WMD it would be pretty easy, and if he wanted to use said WMD against the US or Israel all he'd have to do would be to make a gift of it to Hamas or Al-Queda, and you have a pretty strong case for pre-emptive action, I'd say. Not that this is really pre-emptive action at all. Saddam has committed crimes that he was never held accountable for. Just think of Gulf II as unfinished business from Gulf I if it helps.

Nova: You are asking me to make a decision that ignores evidence I have, in favour of evidence that I may perhaps have in the future, despite the fact that nothing today leads me to believe that new evidence will ever come to light. Being a sane and rational person, I won't do that.

What if I turn up at the office with a birth certificate, drivers license, passport and SIN card all saying my name is Craig Read and I'd like to get my biometric card, please? I'll have a card with biometrics that will match mine, but a false name, false DOB, false citizenship, false address... a forgery. I'm sorry, Craig, I do agree completely that border security needs beefing up, but I think that the biometric card will do for security what the gun registry will do for gun crime: nothing, except waste money that could have gone to customs and security, or raising police funding.

The cost will be prohibitive, I'm sure. There are around 7 million gun owners in Canada, and a simple registry programme costs over $1bn, apparently. A biometric ID card will be much more complex to produce and implement - let's assume, for argument's sake, it'll be about 1.5x as expensive as the gun registry, and I'm probably being kind. That's $1.5bn. Multiply by 4, for the 28 million Canadians that will need a card, and you get $6bn. $6bn would buy you a lot of border guards, helicopters, patrols, customs agents, and so forth. Is the biometric ID card really going to increase security more than a $6bn shot in the arm for the customs and security agencies?

What you are assuming is that the US is going to set up shop in Iraq as the British did in India in the 19th Century, and frankly, it's Grade-A Bullplop. Even in the countries that were nothing but satellites of the US, the level of control and economic exploitation was never, ever, at the level that the British had over their colonies or that the Soviets had over the COMECON countries. When the US becomes a 19th-Century Colonial power, I'll eat my words. Until then, please exercise some common sense. It's been made clear that the "liberation" of Iraq will be like the US/UK liberation of France, not the Soviet liberation of Poland. First of all, the fact is that at the Northern end of the Urals there is more oil believed to exist than has ever been discovered in the whole Middle East. Secondly, mafia or not, Russian oil companies have already dragged their prices down to within a couple of cents per barrel that the Saudis are. It wouldn't take much investment to bring production costs down further and make that oil far more competitive. You're suffering from media stereotypes of Russia, I'm afraid. Go research Russian oil reserves and Russian oil companies such as Lukoil.

Thelonius, If the USA wished to win Vietnam they could easily have done so. All they would have had to do is to launch a full invasion of the North and the vastly outgunned North Vietnamese would have crumbled before them. The US was not prepared to do this, however, and paid the price for the lack of political will. As regards body counts, even Uncle Ho admitted that the NVA was losing 3 or 4 soldiers for every 1 that the Americans lost.

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It's been refuted. Do the math! The left loves to gloat that the war and occupation are costing $1bn per week or something - do you see the US recouping $1bn per week in oil profits? I don't think so. The war-for-oil argument just doesn't make sense. If the US wanted cheaper oil, an investment of $1bn per week in Russian oil would have yielded far, far better results without any bloodshed.

Maybe. But the failure in Vietnam was not due to the North Vietnamese, who lost every battle they fought, it was due to a failure of political will.

To me, the issue is not about privacy. As Craig has said, your personal information is already on hundreds of databases. Why do you think stores have loyalty cards - they feel like giving free gifts? No, it's so they can monitor your spending habits and send you junk mail, spam and so forth according to those habits. The problem is who's doing it. Let's face it, the government of Canada is as incompetent as it is stupid, and if anyone could screw up this ID card it would be them. I read that since the gun registry became active, it has been hacked 20 times already, and it hasn't even been up that long. Clearly they aren't particularly security-savvy. Furthermore, I'm not even so sure this will vastly increase security anyway. Passports are supposed to be highly secure documents and how many fakes are there floating around? If it can be made, it can be forged.

There are three responses to this. Firstly, President Bush has not been particularly inactive in domestic policy. For example, insistence upon mandatory school accountability standards (although his original plan was dismantled in Congress), healthcare reform, tax reform, a ban upon cloning, funding for religious institutions providing social services, other "faith-based initiatives" and the CARE Act, cutting state funding for abortion clinics, refusal to condone gay marriage, gay adoption, or to endorse hate speech laws that would muzzle people disagreeing with homosexuality for scientific and medical reasons, and so forth. Secondly, since 9/11 the American government has been a wartime government. America was really at war before then, but 9/11 was when it was really brought home. Wartime governments always, out of necessity, focus on foreign policy before domestic. Thirdly, even if what you said was true, we would be talking about incompetence or failure to perform rather than actual abuse and violation of policy. If an employee is underperforming, you don't fire them immediately, you take steps to improve their performance.

Just a point here: If you were an executive, and you were found receiving oral sex from your secretary or an intern, in your office, on company time, you would be fired. That's an offence worthy of summary dismissal, in any company you care to name. Clinton was an employee. He was employed by the people of the United States, their tax dollars paid his salary. While he is in his office, he is being paid to run the country. If he isn't doing that and is receiving oral sex instead, I'd say he can be fired, or impeached, just as the executive who wastes company time and resources by having sex in his office during business hours can be fired.

As I said, all you can actually prove is cogito ergo sum. You cannot absolutely prove to me that you are a real person and not an AI program posting on this forum. I can't absolutely prove that I'm not a brain in a vat somewhere with an extremely elaborate virtual reality system feeding information to my sensory centres. According to the best of our knowledge, the world around us is real and we are actually living in it. According to the best of our knowledge, homosexuality is not innate. You mock those who thought that bubonic plague stemmed from miasmas, however, they, like us, were proceeding according to the best of their knowledge and the information that was available. That's all you can do. If you don't subscribe to that, then please, feel free to drive yourself insane with solipsical questions and doubts of your own existence. So, yes, homosexuality is not innate. That's my position, and it is made according to the facts available, and if it is proven wrong my defence will be that I made a sound judgement based upon the facts available. However, I don't think that will happen, any more than I think somebody will one day prove that eye colour is caused by environmental influence.

Riff, Sun-Tzu said, when something has been explained and is not understood, it's the fault of the explainer. When something has been explained five times and is not understood, it's the fault of the listener. Well, Riff, I've repeatedly explained my views to you, pointed out your self-contradictions and talked you through them. Nobody else on this forum seems to be having a problem. Whether you are deliberately obtuse or genuinely slow-witted is not my concern but I will not waste my time and forum bandwidth explaining the same things over and over again to you. If you do not understand by now, you never will. If you want to play the Experience and Qualifications game, you will notice that the sources I cited are all far more experienced and qualified than you, so you lose. These are not my opinions, they are scientific fact gleaned from some of the finest minds in the field. It is not my fault if you do not wish to argue on the basis of logic or evidence, but if you choose to insist that your opinion is worth more because of your qualifications, then you have no defence if I find research from people even more qualified when it contradicts your opinion. For example, you criticise my definition of "heritability" but it is not mine, it is Dr. Jeffrey Satinover's, a medical doctor and geneticist. Are you a medical doctor? Have you been researching genetics for years at some of the finest laboratories in the USA? Have you had your writings and findings published in national research journals? Because if you haven't, this guy's experience and qualifications trump yours, and it is your definition that is wrong - according to your dubious methods of debate. Nova, Well, according to the scientific sources I cited science has already proven who is right on this subject - and it isn't EGALE. There is no genetic basis for the acceptance of homosexuality. That was the point I began this thread for. As I said before, skin colour and gender are innate and genetic. Homosexuality is not innate, it is a behaviour and no more genetic than smoking. I have attempted to show the fallacy of comparisons between 'oppressed' homosexuals and oppressed blacks and women. The gay rights movement is not equivalent to the civil rights movement nor the suffragettes.

The sixth commandment is not "thou shalt not kill", it is "thou shalt do no murder." Subtle difference. In my estimation, Arafat and his cronies have declared war upon Israel and indeed, upon civilisation as we know it. In war, it is acceptable military practice to target your enemy's command/control structures and personnel. That would mean that, as long as Arafat continues his terrorism and war-mongering, he himself is a valid military target.

Why debate anything, then? After all, all that you can really "prove" is cogito ergo sum. You have to proceed with the facts you have available, and according to all the research I cited, current consensus is that homosexuality is caused by a combination of complex genetic factors and environmental influence, which is the same as any measurable human behaviour, e.g. pedophilia, and that does not make it "right" or "natural".

Islam recognises all "prophets" from Moses to Jesus, the Old Testament and the New as well as the Quran. Mohammed did not invent Islam, he just tapped into it. Go read up on Islamic history, please, this is all basic stuff.

Yes, and such was the relationship that the US had with its more egregious allies. Hence the fact that former US allies (Mujahedeen) are now stabbing the US in the back, and the US is doing it in turn to Saddam Hussein. Go read some history. You have no idea what you're on about. Please, go read the armaments production figures for all world powers 1940-1945 and then tell me the war was winnable without the US. Yes, and only one country actually ever paid its war debt. The US wrote the rest of them off.