December 17, 2011

• Boring Update about My Life, and Other Things

  So I'm finally done with work for a bit. I connived a friend into helping me deliver my elliptical machine from Sears. The parts are now all over my apartment. Assembly is going to be a pain but I need to exercise more and this is the way to do it. Just had some Chipotle too, yum, and the place was almost empty. In-out in 20 minutes, yay! Also, I'm glad to see Meebo Chat is back, but please don't IM me at 1AM!

  The other day, Forever Musing asked a great question about whether there are any reasons why homosexuality would be immoral if the Bible never said anything about it. I thought it was very much worth addressing, but I wanted to address it in a way that wouldn't bring out the crazy folks on Xanga. So apologies if you really wanted to know more about my life and instead are getting this instead, heh.

  Most non-religious concerns about non-heterosexual sex are two-fold. One is a biological design problem: crudely put, male and female reproductive systems appear to have been designed for each other, and reproduction can only happen naturally when a male and female have sex. The second is a health problem: at various times, depression, STD's, and death have been more widespread in non-heterosexual communities. I don't have the latest stats on me and am too lazy to look them up. It's Saturday for a reason, heh. Of course, advocates of homosexuality have various reasons to disagree with those two concerns (cultural bias, persecution, and freedom of choice being a few).

  I must emphasize that I am not doing a full debate here, I'm just sketching under what conditions homosexuality could be determined to be immoral without being specifically prohibited in the Bible. So let's then move to a planet where all our religious and culture baggage is missing and take a look.

  In the end, both these non-religious concerns of biological design and health actually fit under a bigger issue. Let's pretend that we are on a planet much different than we inhabit now. Forget culture and intelligence and religion and context for a moment. For homosexuality to be immoral, men and women in general must be fundamentally different from each other, not just in body, but also in other ways. This is another way of saying that opposites attract, and that men and women in some way are uniquely designed to meet one another's needs in a way that same-gender lovers cannot, due to nature, not nurture. (Yes, ironically the best argument turns into a "Born This Way" argument, and yes, I'm amused about it too.) It can't be a cultural thing: there must be something about non-heterosexual sex that is against some natural law or pattern itself. There may be feminine men and masculine women, but at the end of the day, there would be a sharp difference between genders that continues even though men and women do the same work and are treated equally.

  If the difference existed, then one might argue that nature itself does indeed discourage homosexual behavior, and that our outward bodily differences are merely a symptom of the deeper differences within. This now becomes signalling behavior of sorts, just as a poisonous frog might be a bright color on the outside to discourage predators from eating it. Mind you, it doesn't mean that anyone who engages in non-heterosexual behavior instantly dies (Do I really have to explain this? Sad that I do). Immoral is not directly related to real-life punishment and consequences, something that way too many would-be advisers and judges forget.

  Some indications of whether males and females are fundamentally designed/evolved differently, if it is true, would be as follows. Keep in mind this is a rough sketch, and I am not sure all these potential experiments are properly designed.

  *Heterosexuals, as a whole, would show a variety of fundamental, innate differences between males and females that could not be chalked up to social constructs or upbringing. For example, males and females serving in the Army, trained and taught in the same ways and same methods, would still have fundamentally different ways of doing their work.
  *Homosexuals/Lesbians/Bisexuals would, on non-sexualized traits, still score more closely to their own gender regardless of who they are having sex with.
  *Trans, once they had been operated on and taken hormones, would indeed show changes of emotion and thought associated with their new gender. This one was the hardest one to think of, but it seems to me that if surgery and drugs are involved, that should essentially change nature. One could also argue that the changes are more nurture-related. Ouch, now my head hurts trying to get the logic right.
  *Human protandry cases, such as here, would show that when females become males physically, they also take on the typical male mindset and desires, and vice-versa.

  To me, this would build a non-Biblical case for finding homosexuality immoral: that it goes against the natural order of things and that our biological differences in gender are merely symptoms and signals of the deeper differences that are bound up within us. Here's the bad news: good luck definitely proving either side! But there you have it, my best take on whether non-Biblical grounds for finding homosexuality immoral exist. Thoughts? I am trying to make this as theoretical as possible to answer @Forever_Musing question. Please try to keep your response polite and realize that people who think differently than you will read your comment.

  • 1:49 pm
  • 11 Comments