Hugo

Alright, now we are getting somewhere (once we skip past your atrocious slew of personal insults). You agree with me, then, that homosexuality is not innate like being black or a woman, and is due in large part to environment, which neither negroidism nor womanhood are. It's a behaviour, like substance abuse. Tell Scotch on your way out, he's having a really hard time with it.

Here is my basic point: You initally compared being homosexual to being black or female, as I quoted you so doing. You have now joined me in refuting that idea. Therefore, it's invalid to compare being homosexual to being black or a woman, as you have conceded. That's all. Your questions were not relevant to that. As to your repeated self-contradiction, well, now you say it was merely your opinion, but firstly, you never stated that at the time, and secondly, how are we to take you seriously when your opinion apparently changes with the tides? Can't speak WELL, Riff, can't speak WELL.

Let me make this real simple for you, Riff, because you just are not getting it. You claimed earlier on that gay issues were the same as women's emancipation or abolitionism, because being gay was like being black or a woman. I've shown you the folly in that, and you've agreed. That's all I set out to prove, and once again, you've succeeded in contradicting yourself and shooting down your own arguments. Well done - again. Here's some examples of you contradicting yourself: Which you so wisely follow up with: So... first it's "by far" biological, then we don't know if it's by far biological or what role biology plays at all, then it's both biological and environmental in roughly equal proportion. Make up your mind what you're arguing here. And then, again, you completely contradict yourself by saying: So first you say that "faulty science" for want of a better term has led to the oppression of blacks, women and gays, and then you claim that science has nothing to do with it and can give no answers? Once again, Riff, you succeed in making a fool of yourself. You've blasted your own opinions out of the water, as you did about cloning and abortion. I'm sure you'll desert this thread pretty soon once your position becomes completely untenable, if it already hasn't, as you did in the many threads about Gulf II. As for Scotch, I already told you twice where the stats for gay life expectancy came from. They come from the Center for Disease Control (that's three times now - you need to do more reading and less ranting). If you want you can verify this with a number of independent studies. They are in my previous posts in other threads. Go find them and prove that you can actually put some effort into a post rather than shooting your ignorance from the hip. Here's where, apart from that, you make the gaffes that expose your flawed thinking: Science magazine and the Journal of Human Sexuality are apparently religious literature. That's a good start. Being black or a woman is environmental, according to Scotch. I don't care how many pygmies or bushmen you can find. The point is that they will always be pygmies or bushmen, no matter what they do, or what their environment is. A black man raised in China or Norway is still black, or a pygmy or a bushman or whatever other obfuscation you care to throw in there. There is no such thing as black/white/asian, you say, so how is it that you can identify ethnicity from a blood sample? How is it that scientists can consistently and correctly identify a characteristic that, according to you, does not even exist?

You are being highly obfuscatory. You are having to make leaps to a variety of wild exceptions to somehow prove the unprovable: that being a woman or black is the same as being gay. Everybody knows that there is far more separating negroids from caucasians than a tanning bed, except you, apparently. Homosexuality is a behaviour. Being black or a woman is not a behaviour. Oh, very much so. I get really tired of quoting these facts when apparently nobody's listening, but a gay man's life expectancy in the 21st Century is the same as that of a peasant in the 13th. A lesbian's is not much better. Go ask the Center for Disease Control, it's their material. The act itself is dangerous, the lifestyle and behaviour even more so. I'm not dredging all this up again. Read my previous posts or do your own research and learn the truth.

What you have said doesn't matter at all in this thread. Environment will never make a white person black, or a man into a woman. Those things are fixed. You can counsel a homosexual out of that condition, but no amount of counseling will make a black man white, nor a woman into a man. That's why equating homosexuals with blacks and women is incorrect. Homosexuality is in large part environmental, blackness and womanhood are not at all environmental. Homosexuality is a behaviour, and that's why you can persuade somebody out of it. Have you tried to persuade a woman into full manhood? I'm not discussing equality and rights at this time. My objective in this thread is to illustrate that homosexuality is a behaviour, and that comparisons with blacks and women are invalid. More accurate comparisons would be made with alcoholics or kleptomaniacs: compulsive and self-destructive behaviour that may have roots in genes but certainly cannot be generated without environmental influence.

This raises some interesting questions. On the one hand, separation of church and state is very arguably a good thing. It is a deterrent towards secular leaders wishing to harness the power of popular religion to do their bidding e.g. Mohammed, it is a deterrent to religious leaders looking for worldly power e.g. medieval papacy. To this end, then, it would not be good if a secular, political leader began bringing religion into his policies and his lawmaking - it opens the possibility of abuse. On the other hand, one can also say that if a religious person is elected by a majority vote, can the electorate really complain if he conducts his public policy in a religious manner? Basically, if you elect a Christian, do not be surprised if you become governed by a Christian. Lost, I find your views perfectly acceptable. I'm no fan of organised religion, however, there is a great difficulty striking a balance because on the one hand, the average man is not a spiritual athlete and therefore may actually need the help of a spiritual guide or teacher, on the other, the existence of spiritual guides can and often has been counterproductive, especially when organised in such a way as to promote values and motives other than the original teaching. Witness the Catholic priests who abused children, acting in a manner wholly at odds with their faith and probably disabusing a lot of people of it, and medieval pardoners, absolving sins for money - neither are things you could readily see Jesus himself doing, and they should not be done by those who claim to be the successors of his disciples. You are right not to believe in the absolute word of God. Religious texts are a tool and a guide, nothing more. The Bible is not a text by which to live, it's a text to ponder and contemplate as you search for your own spiritual truth. It's also important to remember that religious texts were written by men, perhaps under divine inspiration, but nevertheless men, and therefore should not be taken as literally the word of God any more than the translated texts of a foreign author should be taken as his original thoughts.

So, you believe that America's conduct was the ultimate cause of 9/11 and they are to blame for it. Fine. Then the conduct of homosexuals is the ultimate cause of gay-bashing, and they are to blame for it.

No, how could there be? The sworn purpose of the fanatics is the destruction of Israel. Because of that, lasting peace between the two is about as likely as lasting peace between Hitler and Stalin.

Scotch, I'm sure I don't need to reply to this: everyone can see what an idiot you are making of yourself. Black is cultural, indeed. What rubbish.

Here's where you are misreading me: The topic title, my arguments and my proofs point to the nonexistence of a simple gay gene or even a clear gene sequence. I'm not asserting that there is no genetic involvement in homosexuality and neither are my sources. You should have been able to gather that. The reason I did this is because many people (including some on this very forum) have asserted that being gay is like being black or a woman. It isn't. Being black or female has purely genetic origins and is immune to the influence of environment. Homosexuality is a behaviour, nothing more, and as such is not purely genetic. It is highly susceptible to environment. Therefore, it's invalid to defend homosexuality on the grounds that it is as innate as womanhood or as being black, and therefore, equating "oppressed" homosexuals with the oppression of blacks or women is just as invalid. That's what I'm driving at. Hopefully we can understand each other and you can stop with the petty insults.

Riff, I already brought this up with you! You insist on making these ridiculous assertions, and as has been proven in six separate threads now, you are incapable of backing them up with anything or even being able to defend them. Now, I suggest you come up with a half-decent argument, or put a stop to your half-baked anti-American drivel.

Ned, Very sorry to hear about your wife - as you say, it is tragic that people have died of cancer and other diseases while efforts were undertaken to find a cure for AIDS - a disease for which the prevention is already known. Now, on to everything else. Homosexuality is, sadly, a deviancy. The primary purpose of sex is actually procreation, not pleasure. As I have said before, eating can be pleasurable, but the primary purpose of eating is not pleasure. Sexual relationships in which procreation is not apparently possible are deviant. Notice the wording there. There is usually nothing to indicate sterility, for instance, in one partner of a heterosexual couple. I would think the number of instances where sterility was known before the relationship began to be very small. There are, of course, exceptions, but in the case of heterosexual couples they are still going through the motions even though blanks may be fired. A quick analogy: if one's car has a flat battery, it's not terribly incorrect or inexcusable to try the ignition key anyway. However, putting live fish into the gas tank is never going to help, flat battery or no, for no matter what the circumstances it's simply the wrong thing to do. On that note, when one is discussing sexual relationships with same-sex partners, or children, or animals, or even inanimate objects (if such a thing is possible) it's obvious to anyone that no offspring can be borne. Therefore it defeats the purpose of sexual intercourse. Certainly it's possible for science to overcome the deficiencies of these relationships, but to say that this somehow disproves the deviancy is akin to saying that, by having a mechanic recharge your battery while you put live fish in the gas tank, proves that putting live fish in the gas tank is an equally good way to start a car. Having established that, I believe that the deviancy of homosexuality comes from environmental influence on a vulnerable genetic background - as virtually all complex human behaviour is. We do not know what genetic sequence makes an individual vulnerable to environmental influence towards homosexuality and we probably never will for a very long time, but we do know what environmental influences will produce a homosexual: abuse as a child, low self-esteem, rejection by or lack of a father figure, reinforcement of the wrong gender identity by parents, rejection by same-sex peers at an early age, and so forth. Should homosexuality be outlawed or made criminal? No, of course not - it's a sickness, not a crime, and it should not be a crime to be sick. Homosexuals deserve pity and compassion, not punishment. The key is to understand the nature of homosexuality, to educate people as to its nature, and to help homosexuals to return to normalcy. Such a return is possible in the vast majority of cases and, where the subject is willing (as, say, alcoholics or junkies have to be), great successes can be made. Such programmes always focus on building self-esteem and self-worth in the sufferer, who finds as the programme goes on that his sexual orientation begins to change, seemingly of its own accord. This is my stance: if homosexuals wish to continue what they are doing, fine! I couldn't care less, as I could not care if an alcoholic wants to drink himself to fatal cirrhosis, or if a junkie wishes to overdose himself into oblivion. It's a free country (so far). However, I object when deviant behaviour is promoted by government, by some churches (against the teachings of their own scripture, moreover), by schools, by the media and so on. This is just lies. I want the truth to be told about homosexuality, I want help to be made available to homosexuals who need it and who are willing to get it, and I want the cultural endorsement to lessen at least to the point where more homosexuals will feel able to seek help. If, after all that, homosexuals are still dying of AIDS after having sex with 12 men in a single evening at the bathhouse, well, nobody can say they were not fairly warned.

There's no need to get angry, Riff. I'm not defensive about my original point because I have yet to see anything that disproves it. I didn't draw my conclusions from any one, biased scientist as you'll see. I drew them from Dr. Dean Hamer, the gay geneticist who set out to prove the existence of a gay gene and had to conclude that "From twin studies, we already know that half or more of the variability in sexual orientation is not inherited." When asked by Science if homosexuality was genetic in origin, he answered "absoutely not." I also drew from Dr. Joel Gelernter, who said "it's hard to come up with many findings linking specific genes to complex human behaviors that have been replicated. ...All were announced with great fanfare; all were greeted unskeptically in the popular press; all are now in disrepute." I drew them from J. Beckwith and P. Billings, arguably the two leading men in American genetic research, who say "we think that the data [in this case] in fact provide strong evidence for the influence of the environment." I drew on C. Mann, author of a leading article in Science on genetics and homosexuality, who said "The same data that show the effects of genes, also point to the enormous influence of nongenetic factors." I drew on Simon LeVay, author of "Gay Brain", who states that "[M]any scientists share the view that sexual orientation is shaped for most people at an early age through complex interactions of biological, psychological and social factors." I drew on Dennis McFadden, neuroscientist at Texas University, who said "any human behavior is going to be the result of complex intermingling of genetics and environment. It would be astonishing if it were not true for homosexuality." I drew on sociologist Steven Goldberg, who said "I know of no one in the field who argues that homosexuality can be explained without reference to environmental factors." My interpretations of "heritability" and so forth come from "The Gay Gene?" by Jeffrey Satinover, M.D., in The Journal of Human Sexuality, 1996. Now, against all this, you are posting your opinion as though it were fact. You claim to be a geneticist and yet you fly in the face of all your colleagues, who unanimously conclude that the environment has to be a very significant and possibly the actual determining factor in homosexuality, that environment usually being psychological damage from a variety of sources. But you cite no sources. You cite no research. You cite no studies. You have no corroboration. Why would I believe that my original point was "dead", Riff, simply because of your clumsy and misguided assertions? Perhaps you'll clarify your position and cite some evidence for it. I'm a little tired of the chest-beating "listen to me, I'm an expert" nonsense.

Quite. SirRiff has "cleared up" my "misinformation" by reiterating my original point. Which was that the evidence thus far shows that homosexuality is caused by environment, as the top geneticists in the US have already opined. You may not respect Science magazine, Riff, but you would think that you would have some respect for the superiors in your field. Genetics may play a factor (and as you said, it's not certain), but it is a factor like cervical cancer rather than eye colour: an influence rather than a determinant. As I also said, what you need to understand is that "inherent" is not always "good" - it's perfectly possible for a condition to be pre-determined by either genetics or environment over which the sufferer has no control, but that does not make that condition great, wonderful, beautiful and worthy of celebration. Homosexuality is one such condition: a self-destructive symptom of psychological trauma, caused by negative environmental influence which may or may not have interacted with a vulnerable genetic predisposition. To celebrate this is like celebrating alcoholism: to paraphrase George Orwell, you must be an intellectual to be so stupid.

Quite right, Ned, religious freedom is in danger here. The gay advocacy umbrella has made it pretty clear that the Big Three monotheistic religions have to go down. Anyway, what we have not touched on so far this thread is that granting marriage to homosexuals is a social, legal and governmental stamp of approval on a mental health problem and a dangerous, self-destructive deviancy. You can tolerate without accepting, you can accept without endorsing. Our society accepts homosexuals and is rapidly moving towards endorsing them, and this is wrong. We must tolerate the homosexual, for they are as human as we, but we must not accept, because the homosexual needs help as much as an alcoholic does. The key to treating alcoholism is the recognition that a problem exists ("my name is Bob and I am an alcoholic" is the first step in AA), and so far we are in a cultural state of denial that will prevent a real solution from ever being found. It's debatable whether or not homosexuals can have "love" as heterosexuals do anyway, because homosexuals are psychologically damaged and usually suffering from a great deal of mental anguish and complexes. Furthermore, it's difficult to see how you can attain love in a sexual way when the part of your psyche that determines sexual attraction isn't working properly. Can a car with a malfunctioning engine "drive" in the same way as a serviceable one? Sure, it can rattle and heave it's way down the road - but it is not the same thing at all.

Scotch, I don't know what you are used to, but in this forum generally people are pretty intelligent, and simply repeating a point that has already been refuted without citing any further evidence is not a valid argument and won't fly here. Lost, I'm sure that you are just being inflammatory to word your post in such an ad-hominem way, but I will try to answer you anyway. Gay men are more numerous and are generally the more vocal, if only because of that. NAMBLA is all-male in its membership and its intended victims are all male. Furthermore, while homosexuality in any form is a deviancy and a mental problem, it would appear that the male form is just worse. Life expectancies for lesbians are somewhat higher, the incidences of disease somewhat less (although both are still dire compared to heterosexuals). That doesn't mean that lesbians are not suffering, it just means that you focus on the worst cases first. I would have thought that when I talked about "homosexuality" for instance, it would have been obvious that I meant both genders. Do I need to slather my posts in PC jargon for you, and reword such phrases as "the ascent of man" to "the ascent of male, female, transgender, transsexual and questioning humans?" In all the examples of the problems homosexuals suffer I also cited figures for lesbians as well as gays, where appropriate.

Thank you, Ned. Scotch, I never claimed that homosexuality was a fully conscious choice - I do not believe that anybody wakes up in the morning and says "I think I'll be gay today." It's obviously not genetic either, like eye or hair colour. What that leaves, then, is the influence of the environment. There may be genetic factors, but as I have cited, such factors exist for practically every measurable human trait and their existence proves nothing about a gay gene or genetic causes. An analogy: I may be heritably predisposed to alcoholism since that runs in my family, however, that does not mean I will be an alcoholic. However, if both my parents have blue eyes, I have blue eyes - no ifs, buts or maybes. Furthermore, if I do become alcoholic, the fact that I was predisposed does not make my alcoholism beautiful and worthy of celebration. And that leads us to what you truly have to get your head around, that "innate" is not "good". I'm sure Jeffery Dahmer did not consciously choose to act the way he did, however, what he did was terribly wrong. In the same way, the causes of a very self-destructive behaviour such as homosexuality do not negate the nature of the beast itself.

What strikes me as distinctly odd here is the Canadian post-Trudeau contradiction of socialist economics with elitist social values. This airport thing is just another example. Canadian history is replete with real heroes, but instead we name an airport after a highly controversial prime minister who should be remembered for his asinine policies. Canada has the economic aspirations of Soviet Russia, but unlike the Soviets has no heroes of industry or of the common man. The prized citizens of Canada are not the working people, they are the intellectual and political elite who have very little to do with the real world. Canadian society has the economic outlook of Marx and the social outlook of Nietzche. Does anyone else find this odd?

There is more to homosexuality than the wonderful "Will and Grace" facade, you know. I suggest you read documents from the Center for Disease Control and so forth, rather than some head-in-the-clouds fiction. Some snippets for you: A mere 9% of gay men can expect to live to 65. Their life expectancy today is the same as that of a 13th-Century European peasant. 80% of serious STDs in the US are suffered by homosexuals. A teenage boy who experiments with homosexual relations is 27 times as likely to contract a serious STD than one who remains strictly heterosexual. Half of all gay men aged 20 today can expect to be dead or HIV-positive within ten years. Almost a third of gay men have more than a thousand lifetime sexual partners, and most of those are anonymous. The same number of lesbians will have over five hundred. But you are right... gay is beautiful. I guess I am just myopic, that I cannot see the beauty in disease, suffering and death.

Far greater Quebecers and far greater Canadians are lying in the ground in Normandy.

You said: From "The Gay Gene?" by Jeffrey Satinover, M.D., in The Journal of Human Sexuality, 1996: From C. Mann, author of the lead article on genes and behavior in a special issue of Science: As these scientists have stated, virtually every human characteristic is in some measure heritable. But in the case of homosexuality, what they are saying is that genes are not responsible - it takes environmental influence to create a homosexual. To justify homosexuality on genetic grounds means celebrating child abuse and serial killing, since these characteristics stem from much the same causes - environmental activation of a vulnerable genetic sequence. Environment does not mean free will, but neither does it mean "good". Because you were scarred as a child outside your control does not mean that scar is beautiful and should be celebrated. It might be downright ugly and require plastic surgery. You understand?

Euthanasia is not so much a bad act as a creator of a bad attitude. Look at it this way. Since abortion was legalised, options for single mothers, mothers in further education, etc. have been very marginalised, much more than you would expect were abortion to have remained illegal. Almost no workplaces or colleges provide creches or childcares, for instance. This is because single, pregnant women feel pressured into abortion instead - it is touted as the responsible choice, while only idiots ruin their lives by having children. The same situation will also arise with euthanasia. The aged and terminally ill will feel pressure put upon them to die. People will ask how they can put their families through such suffering, how they can burden taxpayers, health insurance or their relatives financially, how they can waste a hospital bed when it could go to someone with a chance, etc. Basically, people will be indignant that some people dare to live, much as people are indignant that some young, single women dare to bear their children instead of killing them. I have absolutely no wish to live in a society where social pressure is literally fatal to the underprivileged. Everybody has a right to live and to be allowed to live unmolested by those who would kill them.

Yes, I've heard of euthanasia. Have you? Read on and learn. Did you know that since euthanasia was legalised in Holland, the Dutch authorities discovered that about 60% of doctors admitted having euthanised patients without consent and without notifying the authorities at least once in their careers? Did you also know that the new law, passed in April 2001 in Holland, changed the legal burden of proof from the doctor, to prove that euthanasia was requested, to the prosecutor to prove that it wasn't? What that means is, if I am a doctor and you are a patient, unless you have a written legal document or somesuch specifically saying you do not want to be euthanised, I can kill you, and your family has no legal recourse whatsoever. The problem is so great that 20,000 Hollanders carry "life cards" that specifically request that they not be euthanised, should a doctor try to do so against their will. Furthermore, the new Dutch law states that consent has to be given, but that no time frame must be stipulated - I could have written a document 20 years ago stating my wish to be euthanised, and have since changed my mind, but legally, that document can still be used to acquit any doctor who euthanises me. A study in 1990 by P. van der Maas, J. van Delden, and L. Pijenborg revealed that 31% of cases did not give their explicit consent. A follow-up in 1995 showed that figure to still be at an alarming 22.5%. As you can guess, I do not favour euthanasia either and my original point stands. I'd like to make that choice myself, please! The fact that so many people in history have survived the worst kinds of abuses and tortures and still gone on to greater things without giving up hope proves that you can never assume anything about a person. You definitely cannot guess that they would rather die and act accordingly. This point is totally indefensible. I think you can see that.

Here is the situation, Scotch. I quoted the two top geneticists in the US as having said, on record, that there was no evidence that homosexuality was genetic and that the evidence thus far points to an environmental cause. The homosexual geneticist who set out to prove the existence of a gay gene had to conclude that there was none, and that it was environmental. Against all this, there's you, with no expertise, no research, no corroboration at all. But you expect us to believe you! It's not "pseudo scientific crap", my friend, it's properly researched and corroborated by independent sources. I invite you to do some research and find something that proves your arguments, please, I'd be interested. But your uninformed opinion is worthless in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. I'm not going to go into this in any depth since I already have. Please go to the "Beyond Satire" thread and read my opinions and my supporting evidence there. That will answer your question.

Any semi-decent OBGYN knows that the baby is an independent human being and any "advice" they give should reflect that. That's why the pro-abort argument revolves around lies: it's a clump of cells, it looks like chopped liver, it can't feel pain, etc. On the last item it's interesting to note that in prenatal surgery the fetus is anaesthetised separately - obviously it can feel pain. Two points. Firstly, you never, ever give any person the right to decide the life or death of another arbitrarily, even if they are mother and child. That is the height of immorality. Second, what's "best" for the child is never death, my friend. But they chose it. To make a valid comparison, you would give an example of someone very lonely and poor who was murdered in a government-sanctioned killing, because somebody had decided that his life was not worth living.