I honestly believe that homosexuality is part of a greater design

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

since it has appeared in humans since time immemorial and since it appears in animal populations as well. I believe that the Great Designer knew that all specimens of all species just couldn't breed indiscriminately and that some part of the population had to satisfy sexual desires in ways that would not increase the aggregate population. Laws against this are human laws and I think they may have been driven by the desire of any given group to attain superiority over other groups by sheer numbers. That is why I think many religions are specifically against any kind of birth control - it would decrease their numbers and hence their influence.

I DO NOT CARE whether people are sexually gratified by their own sex or the other and hope to live to see the day when this "issue" is boring, moot, insignificant, non-issue, stupid - pick your adjective.

[salinen]

1. Homosexuality is a superior lifestyle

because of overpopulation. I'm hetero.

[BlueStateModerate]

2. Right

Good call; people should just stop reproducing... ever. You might start having second thoughts about that in a generation or so.

[Deja Q]

9. The truth is in the middle.

Intelligent reproduction is what's needed. No rampant breeding, I don't care who. Not with 6 billion miracles already crying and indiscriminately blowing snot all over the place...

[Rabrrrrrr]

3. I honestly believe homosexuality is not about sexual gratification.

I believe it is about love. And I believe the great designer set things up not so much to help limit population growth because of poeple fulfilling their need for "sexual gratification", but in order to have the universe filled with the widest variety of loves possible. Because God is love.

Other than that, I do agree with you - I think religions tend to be against homosexuality because of the "let's outbreed those others!" mantra. Though there is also the primitive thought of "anything different must be fearful" that, even 50 thousand years later, still appears in the brains of some humans.

There is no - in my opinion - legitimate reason to be anti-gay.

[Deja Q]

7. Look from the inside out instead; or Try being gay for a while.

Been looking for Mr Right for over 9 years. Only got laughed at and hit on by guys who only wanted Mr Right Now, and some did anything to get it.

I lost interest. That's not a good way of life.

It is about sexual gratification. And too many people separate the emotional aspect, which does do harm.

For the gay men (and women) who found somebody, made vows and kept them, that's awesome.

For those who have managed to separate the physical act from the emotions, well I envy you. But not everybody can make such a separation, and I tried. And some of us choose not to try; or to give up trying what we decide is futile and go for something different. Don't hate us because for that.

But time changes all people. And some stereotypes are bred from reality.

I somewhat agree it is a part of population control... but that doesn't seem to be a universal mantra either... but I'm not going to threadjack.

I don't know about it being about objectifying women, but the parts of marriage aimed at monogamy are to address emotional and disease concerns. And most of those diseases were typically not fatal. (that's my take, but I'm not good at objectifying people.)

[NashVegas]

14. All Sexuality Is About Gratification

Sex as a drive is as important as hunger. Deny hunger, you starve. Deny sex, you lose the experience of intimacy - and with it, the ability to trust at the greatest levels of vulnerability - as a human being.

[AndyTiedye]

28. Do It Until Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

4. I have absolutely NEVER understood

why anyone should give a rat's patoot about who other people are sleeping with. Your sex life is none of my business. My sex life is none of your business. And nobody's sex life is any of the government's business. If I happened to regard sex with a member of my own gender as strange or unappealing, my remedy would be simply to avoid having sex with a member of my own gender. And since nobody is forcing me to do it, what the hell is the problem? What kind of disturbed attitude toward sex makes some people obsess over what consenting adults are doing in private?

[tuvor]

5. I never understood why any heterosexual man would care if a guy was gay.

I mean, hell! More fish in the sea, right?

[Deja Q]

11. Or a woman for that matter...

Like the one who tried beating me up 17 years ago... or the truckloads who fathomed a hint and started getting all anti-gay on me, despite having men in their lives. They have someone so why should they care? Especially when they took no time adumbrating their opinions, which in return (to me at the time) rendered their opinions pointless.

If they were single and wanted me, then there would have been a point. :think:

[tuvor]

13. Oh, I'm so sorry, HypnoToad.

Don't know what else to say.

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

6. Intimacy and trust. Sex is just a part of it. Two people who love and care

for each other, though they may not be "sexually gratified".

It's not about the sex. It's about love, commitment and intimacy. Which eventually includes sex, at some point.

Apparently, the GOP wants the sex stuff front and center. Unless it implicates them or makes them look like (ahem) fucking hypocrites.



MKJ

[StraightDope]

8. It is with derisive amusement that I note...

That you profess belief in a creator. Unless your 'creator' is evolution, I pity you.

[Deja Q]

10. God made things to evolve.

I do not understand the portion of the population who are blindly against evolution.

Ditto for those blind against the Ultimate.

[Name removed]

18. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

24. :-)

Beautifully stated.
.
And, when it's you, Rabrrrrr, I don't say that lightly. I'd rather hug a cactus.

:hi: MKJ



2nd edit...StraightDope, you have forced me to agree with Rabrrrrr, "derisive amusement" is a hard position to defend. MKJ

[Rabrrrrrr]

25. Does that mean that normally you don't like me?

That you'd rather hug a cactus than compliment me?

If so, that's fine - we can't all like everybody, and can't all be liked by everybody. I don't mind.

I'm just curious.

And thanks for the compliment.

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

27. LOL, you are an institution here. I had a lively debate with you about

"Passion of the Christ".

We didn't agree regarding aspects of the film. You got pretty fired up about it, as did I.

And, truth be told, I'd agree with you long before I'd ever have to hug a cactus.

You're just so darn prickly! MKJ

:pals:

[LostinVA]

30. Get a life

[Beetwasher]

12. Well, There Are Arguments For It Being Valuable From An Evolutionary

perspective. I don't think you need to posit a "designer" or a god or a plan though.

I've seen evolutionary theories that argue homosexuals could fill a role in society that can't be filled by someone of the same sex because of competition for mates. If you are aware that someone of the same sex as you is not interested in stealing or challenging you for your mate you can form a different type of beneficial and trusting relationship w/ them, and from an evolutionary standpoint, these types of alliances may have proved valuable for survival.

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

15. Ehhh, I Think It Just Is What It Is.

[whistle]

16. There was another grand design for homosexuals in Nazi Germany

<snip>
Survivors of a forgotten holocaust

Independent, 12.06.2001:

Heinrich Himmler set out to rid Germany of the homosexual 'plague' by mass extermination; Peter Tatchell hears the testimony of the gay men and women who survived Nazi death camps but whose stories were never told after the war

"We must exterminate these people root and branch. We can't permit such danger to the country; the homosexual must be entirely eliminated."

With these chilling words, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, set out the Nazi master plan for the sexual cleansing of the Aryan race.

Heinz F, now 96, was a carefree young gay man living in Munich in the early 1930s. He had no idea of what was about to happen. "I didn't fully understand the situation," he admits with pained regret. One morning, out of the blue, the police knocked on his door. "You are suspected of being a homosexual," they told him. "You are hereby under arrest."

"What could I do?" he asks, struggling to hold back the tears. "Off I went to Dachau, without a trial."

After spending a year and a half in Dachau, Heinz was released but soon rearrested and sent to Buchenwald. He was stunned to discover the grisly fate of gays in the camp. "Almost all the homosexuals ­ nearly all of them," he says, now sobbing, "were killed."

Heinz survived a total of eight years in concentration camps. Following the war, he never spoke to anyone about his experiences. He was afraid. Gay ex-prisoners were regarded as common criminals ­ not victims of Nazism. "Nobody wanted to hear about it," he says, with tears still rolling down his cheeks.

Heinz is one of only eight known gay holocaust survivors who are still alive. Together with five others ­ and one lesbian ­ he recounts his experience of the homophobic witch-hunts of the Third Reich in a new film, Paragraph 175, which premieres in Britain this week.
<more>

http://www.lsvd.de/gedenk-ort/hin-indep120601.htm

[Hissyspit]

17. Who says there is a "design?"

Using the term design implies a consciousness or sentience behind the paradigms that have developed. This is a cognitive habit that comes from life's experience of seeing "cause and effect" produced consciously and it may be ingrained in the brain, genetically, as well. This confusion between "design" and "it is what it is" processes is why many people don't understand evolution and natural selection theories and insist someone has to be "behind it."

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

22. I was stating what I as a single individual think

I don't really care if it fits into anyone else's "paradigm".

That the beliefs of the existence of a creator, evolution,and homosexuality as a harmless expression of natural selection can exist in a single individual is possible - I am the proof.


(edit - I know about redundancy - please don't lecture me about single individual, etc. I couldn't think of another way to express that it's me me me, my thoughts and my thoughts only)

[Hissyspit]

29. I'm not gonna lecture. I understand you OP point. Richard Dawkins

is on the Colbert Report right now explaining what we're talking about.

I've never understood people's problem with homosexuality either.

[Warpy]

19. Some tribes considered gays and lesbians to be

"two soul" people, with both male and female souls.

Others were homophobic as hell.

I just wish we'd get rid of all the herbal romance and recognize it as a harmless and normal variation of human sexuality.

[Hissyspit]

21. It is a "normal" variation in the sexuality of other animals, too.

And humans are animals.

[riderinthestorm]

31. I've read that those tribes allowed gays to marry too

Whenever the conversational tidbit comes up that gay marriage has never been a part of our nation's history (remember I live in fundieville), I remind them that yes, it has been, and is, a part of our nation's history.

Why do so many conveeeeeniently forget our Native American population?

[tinfoilinfor2005]

20. I'm straight and a thirty year veteran nurse who worked with HIV

patients in a large gay community, so I have been around the subject of straight vs gay for many years. The one thing that seemed to be an absolute was that the gay men and women I worked with, lived with, partied with and grieved with was this: They knew their sexual orientation from day one. No one was "turned gay" by another gay person, their parents or their piano lessons. So it was my conclusion that homosexuality was part of the genetic makeup they were born with.

Homosexuals have been around as long as heterosexuals, so not only is it a natural physical state, it has not been changed by evolution. Lashings and burnings and witch hunts have not caused our species to rid itself of it's "gayness".

Alright, I know that I oversimplify, and maybe have the terminologies wrong, but I don't think I'm that far from the truth.

[DoYouEverWonder]

26. I think being gay is sort of like being left handed

Most people are born right handed but some are born the other way. Nothing wrong with either one, just some people are different.

If sex was only for procreation between a man and a women and not for pleasure, then wouldn't we be more like other animals who only have sex when they are in heat or when it's the right season?

[StellaBlue]

23. I don't believe in intelligent design

I *suspect* homosexuality is a genetic mutation and/or some sort of evolutionary mechanism. I have no feelings about other people's sex lives being right or wrong whatsoever. Man, woman, both, whatever.