Is Gayness a Disease? Exploring the Debate

[RunToFreeForFly]

I think it is. Gay people trend to do what organism suppose not do. organism should **** the opposite sex.

 

[Erus]

Homosexuality is a freedom. I think it's kind of cool our human race can decide which ... sex to ****. I don't think it's a disease, as in like a virus. Just because I hang around homosexuals doesn't mean I myself am going to be one. It's free will, to choose who you want your lover to be, not depending on their gender. It is only natural for species who are sexual to mate with the opposite sex, but humans can choose this natural way or a different way. To put it straight without fussing around, I'm married to a dog named scooby (he's a shihtzu) and we're very happy together.

.. Last part was a joke.

 

[olde drunk]

I have several gay friends. From what i can glean from their comments, it is a genetic predisposition. to me this means they wanted to be gay for this lifetime.

FWIW, I believe in reincarnation and freewill. We decide prior to birth the nature of the life we wish to experience. I became much more tolerant when I realized that I might be gay in another life. Somewhere, someone said that we are all one within the universe. What if the distain you show toward a gay in this life is causing you problems in your gay life?

Why not work together to help each other deal with the problems of being gay. Afterall, from what I've seen of animal behavior, it is natural to seek any port in a storm. Ever see the alfa male exile another male for being amorous??

love&peace,
olde drunk

 

[arildno]

I think it is. Gay people trend to do what organism suppose not do. organism should **** the opposite sex.

Our closest relatives, a species of chimpanzees, has sex all the time:
Males+females, males+males, females+females, mothers+sons, etc.
They use sex as a language of emotion; reproduction is merely the by-product of some of those dialogues.
Kinda like humans, really..

 

[chroot]

I think it is. Gay people trend to do what organism suppose not do. organism should **** the opposite sex.

1) The word is spelled 'disease.'

2) A disease is a condition which causes the bearer of the disease discomfort or physical harm. Homosexuality causes neither of these.

- Warren

 

[russ_watters]

2) A disease is a condition which causes the bearer of the disease discomfort or physical harm. Homosexuality causes neither of these.

Sure it does. It causes the same physical harm as impotency or a low sperm count. And I don't just mean having sex, I'm talking about the result of sex.

I have several gay friends. From what i can glean from their comments, it is a genetic predisposition. to me this means they wanted to be gay for this lifetime.

I agree that that is most likely, but that's still problematic. Combined with what I said above, if homosexuality were simply a genetic trait, it should be quickly filtered out by evolution: homosexuals tend not to have heterosexual sex and as a result tend not to have offspring, so they don't pass on that trait.

So wouldn't that make homosexuality a common genetic defect...?

 

[chroot]

Sure it does. It causes the same physical harm as impotency or a low sperm count.

Excuse me? I think you'd have to explain this a bit. If you mean "it prevents a person from having a biological child," you're wrong.

if homosexuality were simply a genetic trait, it should be quickly filtered out by evolution

Or, like the appendix or blue eyes, it will stay around forever, because it does not actually provide any negative selection pressure.

Your argument is based on the idea that some subset of the population has a "gay gene" and doesn't reproduce, while all the rest of us don't have the "gay gene" and do reproduce. This is fallacious logic. Obviously, if heterosexual women can beget homosexual childen, the "gay gene" resides in the heterosexual population, too, like the genes for other genetic traits like blue eyes.

If, in fact, homosexuality has a genetic cause, it means that all people, in general, carry one or more of the alleles involved.

If it turns out that there is no gay gene and homosexuality is instead a result of fetal hormonal environment, it means that any child, regardless of genotype, could potentially become homosexual. It's effectively the heterosexual mother's "fault," since she provided the fetal hormonal environment. Rarely are all of a women's children homosexual, however. Even if a woman is capable of causing the fetal hormonal environment that leads to homosexual children, she is also capable of having heterosexual offspring, and thus it provides her no evolutionary disadvantage. If normal, healthy heterosexual women can spontaneously have homosexual offspring, it essentially means that homosexuals have been around forever, and will continue to be around forever.

This is consistent with thousands of years of demographics -- homosexuality has been around since antiquity, and likely will always comprise a segment of the population.

- Warren

 

[dekoi]

Homosexuality is strictly caused by the environment they have been raised in, and the people with the most influence on them. It is not a gene. It has been studied for years, and not one scientist found valid proof for this. Homosexuality, whether it is women or men, is either the foolish experimentation of the sex drive, or emotional harm leading to sexual confusion.

 

[PRodQuanta]

dekoi said: Homosexuality is strictly caused by the environment they have been raised in, and the people with the most influence on them. It is not a gene. It has been studied for years, and not one scientist found valid proof for this. Homosexuality, whether it is women or men, is either the foolish experimentation of the sex drive, or emotional harm leading to sexual confusion.

On the contrare, I know nothing of this subject, if it is or if it isn't. But when it comes to anything that relates to health, the human body, and genetic defects, I ask my mother, a nurse for countless years. She, along with the majority of her staff, believes that it is a genetic defect.

Paden Roder

 

[olde drunk]

Possibly a poor choice of words. While inutero(sp) when the mothers harmones are released, they go slightly awry. Testosterone may be released to determine the sex of the child, but the other relesased harmones also overehelm the gender selection with other tentencies.

There have been men born with female genitalia and vice versa.

Bottom line for me, it is no cause for discrimination. It would be like discriminating against red heads just because they have red hair.

love&peace,
olde drunk

 

[selfAdjoint]

Yes indeed olde-drunk, gay is a human condition, not different in kind from the human conditions we all find ourselves in, and no more than ours can, theirs shouldn't depend on whether it's genetic or environmental.

 

[wuliheron]

Countless gay men and women have children. Just because one is gay does not mean you cannot reproduce or ever have sex with the opposite sex. The record number of children born to the same father is over 450. I suppose the rest of us, not just gays, are sick then for not wanting anywhere near as many children.

Nature loves variety, the more the better. Throughout the history of life on earth, the more variety a species can support the better chance it has to survive in the long term as environmental changes occur.

 

[Chrono]

A disease is a condition which causes the bearer of the disease discomfort or physical harm. Homosexuality causes neither of these.

The only thing I can think of that this does happen is when people physically hurt homosexuals. I don't think this happens often, but it does. But I doubt that's what you meant, Warren.

Our closest relatives, a species of chimpanzees, has sex all the time:Males+females, males+males, females+females, mothers+sons, etc.
They use sex as a language of emotion; reproduction is merely the by-product of some of those dialogues.
Kinda like humans, really..

I believe you mean bonobos, and you're right. They use sex as a social tool instead of just a means for reproduction. If a female wants to become a part of a particular group, all she has to do is initiate sex to the other females or males.

 

[arildno]

I believe you mean bonobos, and you're right. They use sex as a social tool instead of just a means for reproduction. If a female wants to become a part of a particular group, all she has to do is initiate sex to the other females or males.

Thank you for providing the name!
I am quite disgusted by those who try to portray human sexuality as primarily focused on reproduction.
It is simply false; anyone who has been in a love affair knows quite well the range of emotions/situations in which it felt "right" to have sex.
Sex goes far beyond reproduction, and those who prefer to have consensual&non-reproductive sex (as gays prefer) should not be discriminated against.
(Just for the record, of the several hundred intercourses a man&wife have during their lives, nets only 1.7 offsprings in average..
Perhaps they have sex for other reasons?)

 

[Chrono]

Thank you for providing the name!
I am quite disgusted by those who try to portray human sexuality as primarily focused on reproduction.
It is simply false; anyone who has been in a love affair knows quite well the range of emotions/situations in which it felt "right" to have sex.
Sex goes far beyond reproduction, and those who prefer to have consensual&non-reproductive sex (as gays prefer) should not be discriminated against.
(Just for the record, of the several hundred intercourses a man&wife have during their lives, nets only 1.7 offsprings in average..
Perhaps they have sex for other reasons?)

It's kind of ironic how I got that question wrong on an anthropology test, but oh, well. I learned it.

Anyway, I agree with you. It makes sense, really. I mean, what's the main reason people want to have sex? For the sheer pleasure of it. It's fun, as some would say.

 

[arildno]

For fun, comfort, tenderness, relaxation ..whatever.
Very rarely do persons go to bed in order to make a baby.
(This rather strange motive is probably the one getting a gay man and lesbian into the same bed occasionally..)

 

[Chrono]

(This rather strange motive is probably the one getting a gay man and lesbian into the same bed occasionally..)

Exactly. They want to test the water. To see what it's about and if they like it. And if they do, they'll keep doing it.

 

[olde drunk]

several hundred intercourses?

that would drive me to drink!

love&peace,
olde drunk

 

[arildno]

52*20=1040..

 

[omin]

I think it is. Gay people trend to do what organism suppose not do. organism should **** the opposite sex.

Yes, you're right on the sexual sense in terms of healthy human proliferation.

But in terms of the full human sense, they are more like every other human significantly. Why? Sex is not what we do all day long. If you count all the human activities of every human across the planet over a day and divide that by the number of humans you'll find the ratio with someone who is gay is not very far off, because sex accounts for a small part of everybodies minutes of the day, so they are more like us than not like us most of the time, based on the average count of their human behavior.

Sex is a private matter to most humans most of the time, and their sex really is none of our business. It's private minutes, not public minutes for the most part.

 

[Mattius_]

A good indicator about if it has much to do with genetics is looking at sets of identical twins? If one is gay and the other is not on a large scale of twins then maybe it has less to do with genetics than we think.

 

[arildno]

The converse, however, will not give a lot of information..

 

[arildno]

"Yes, you're right on the sexual sense in terms of healthy human proliferation."
No, he is not.

 

[Dayle Record]

If homosexuality were a negative genetic trait, there would be no homosexuals. It seems to be a somewhat steady state in our species, in terms of percentages.

Our environment is getting more contaminated with estrogen imitators, by the day. It is no wonder that obesity is on the rise, I wonder if the feminization of our environment, will raise the rate of homosexuality?

For the record I don't consider homosexuality a disease, any more than I would consider red-headedness to be a disease. Do you suppose there are more gay people than there are natural red-headed people?

 

[Tom McCurdy]

1) The word is spelled 'disease.'

2) A disease is a condition which causes the bearer of the disease discomfort or physical harm. Homosexuality causes neither of these.

- Warren

in this sense of the definition could one interpt it to be that homosexuality causes the bearer discomfort in the sense of having to deal with a largly heterosexual public who isn't always nice about being "gay" Also in school being gay can very well cause you physical harm... so I guess in one interpatation according to your definiton it would be... but then so would a lot of other things ... like being short

 

[cogito]

in this sense of the definition could one interpt it to be that homosexuality causes the bearer discomfort in the sense of having to deal with a largly heterosexual public who isn't always nice about being "gay" Also in school being gay can very well cause you physical harm... so I guess in one interpatation according to your definiton it would be... but then so would a lot of other things ... like being short

Under this criterion, being smart would also qualify as a disease. Perhaps this criterion ought to be jettisoned. Further, in very tolerant places (here in Seattle, San Fransisco, etc), homosexuals may completely avoid any discomfort caused directly by others' intolerance. We don't want a criterion according to which whether homosexuality counts as a disease will be contingent upon where one happens to live.

 

[arildno]

Actually, I think chroot's definiton is quite good.
It is not the condition of homosexuality as such which is the causative agent of broken teeth; that's the guy who punched your face in.

 

[Tom McCurdy]

Dictionary.com
dis·ease ( P ) Pronunciation Key (d-zz)
n.
A pathological condition of a part, organ, or system of an organism resulting from various causes, such as infection, genetic defect, or environmental stress, and characterized by an identifiable group of signs or symptoms.
A condition or tendency, as of society, regarded as abnormal and harmful.


Websters:
2 : a condition of the living animal or plant body or of one of its parts that impairs normal functioning : SICKNESS, MALADY
3 : a harmful development (

Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease

under these definitions almost anything could be interpeted as a disease

 

[russ_watters]

Excuse me? I think you'd have to explain this a bit. If you mean "it prevents a person from having a biological child," you're wrong.

You got it - but no, I'm not wrong. Certainly, I'll explain:

Or, like the appendix or blue eyes, it will stay around forever, because it does not actually provide any negative selection pressure.

Well, obviously blue eyes doesn't have "any negative selection pressure" associated with it. The appendix maybe - appendicitis. That may take a while to weed-out though.

But for the "negative selection pressure" of homosexuality, its quite simple - someone who chooses to have homosexual sex instead of heterosexual sex isn't going to have offspring. Its really that simple. Sure, in today's day and age, a homosexual can choose to have heterosexual sex just for procreation (do many actually do that?) or choose to have artificial insemination, but how many do that? Do homosexuals, in reality, procreate as often as heterosexuals? In the animal kingdom, do homosexual animals procreate as often as heterosexual ones?

Homosexuality doesn't have to totally eliminate procreation to be a negative selection pressure - it only has to reduce it just a little (and, I rather suspect, homosexuality reduces procreation more than just a little).

As for the characterization of this as a disease, perhaps impotence was a bad example: it has more than one cause. I was thinking in terms of a psychological cause. Heck, if homosexuality were to prevent a gay man from getting an erection and having sex with a woman, that'd work fine for my analogy.

There are all sorts of other psychological disorders, though that interfere with a person's ability to procreate. "Social anxiety disorder" basically is a fear of social interaction that makes people become hermits. Someone who avoids social interaction will have less of a chance of procreating than someone who is charismatic and social.

Your argument is based on the idea that some subset of the population has a "gay gene" and doesn't reproduce, while all the rest of us don't have the "gay gene" and do reproduce. This is fallacious logic. Obviously, if heterosexual women can beget homosexual childen, the "gay gene" resides in the heterosexual population, too, like the genes for other genetic traits like blue eyes.

Blue eyes is a recessive trait, that's why it resides in people (like me) who have brown eyes. But again, if having blue eyes interfered with your reproduction, they'd eventually be filtered out of the gene pool.

This is why I do not believe that homosexuality is simply a normal genetic variation like blue eyes. If it were, it would have been filtered out by now. I realize, that's not a popular view. People want to think its "normal."

If it turns out that there is no gay gene and homosexuality is instead a result of fetal hormonal environment, it means that any child, regardless of genotype, could potentially become homosexual. It's effectively the heterosexual mother's "fault," since she provided the fetal hormonal environment.

Could be - would that make it a birth defect?

Rarely are all of a women's children homosexual, however. Even if a woman is capable of causing the fetal hormonal environment that leads to homosexual children, she is also capable of having heterosexual offspring, and thus it provides her no evolutionary disadvantage. If normal, healthy heterosexual women can spontaneously have homosexual offspring, it essentially means that homosexuals have been around forever, and will continue to be around forever.

That is, in essence, my view. But then, doesn't that mean we should try to investigate the particulars of this "fetal hormonal environment" so we can try to prevent it from happening? Perhaps its associated with a certain diet or chemical or whatever...

This is consistent with thousands of years of demographics -- homosexuality has been around since antiquity, and likely will always comprise a segment of the population.

There are a lot of traits of humans that have been around "since antiquity" - that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to eliminate (fix?) some of them.

 

[Philocrat]

I think it is. Gay people trend to do what organism suppose not do. organism should **** the opposite sex.

I was raised in a family where every man was taught to love women as human beings, reproductive agents, and lovers. I still keep this position and so it shall remain. Now to answer your question. It is impossible to call being gay a disease unless you are willing to show us the evidence. For there is nothing which logically rules out being straight also being a disease. This problem that people have is when it comes to defining the notion of 'NORMALITY'. I think you people are blaming the gay people for something that is entire Nature's. No one controls what they turn out to be as far as reproduction is concerned. One moment Nature tells us that things are this way, and ought to be this way, then upon the blinking of an eye, the same Nature turns around and tells us that, by the way, things could have been otherwise.

The BIG Question:
-----------------------------------------------
Why would Nature provide us with the so-called 'NORMAL CAUSAL PATHWAYS, while at the same time leaving 'POTENTIAL AND ALTERNATIVE CAUSAL PATHWAYS wide open?
-----------------------------------------------

This is the hard-headed question that those who argue in ignorance must provide conrete answer without any shaky foundation.

NOTE: The availability of Alternative Causal and Mutational Pathways in the underlying structure of the world is a contradiction of what is supposedly normal.

 

[Philocrat]

On the issue of replacing future populations by the supposedly 'NORMAL WAY' of using women to reproduce, well, with the current pace of technological developments in biological science, especially in the genetic engineering discipline, this may very well become obsolete, if not aleady is. Women themselves, who are also increasingly turning to homosexualism, may very soon find new roles to play. Nothing rules out a Conveyer-belt reproductive model subsequently emerging from this discipline. Disease or no disease, Let's just wait and see.

 

[russ_watters]

I think you people are blaming the gay people for something that is entire Nature's. No one controls what they turn out to be as far as reproduction is concerned.

No one here has said anything of the sort. Yes, I know: gays don't choose to be gay - everything I (and others) have said has been about natural causes. You cannot turn this into a gay-bashing thread because no one is doing it.

That said, given a choice ahead of time, how many pregnant women would choose to have gay children? Straight children? Given a choice, how many gays would be straight? Straights gay?

It is impossible to call being gay a disease unless you are willing to show us the evidence. For there is nothing which logically rules out being straight also being a disease.

Well, there is a difference, which I pointed out: reproductive problems.

This problem that people have is when it comes to defining the notion of 'NORMALITY'.

In this context, I define "normal" as feelings and behaviors which lead to reproduction: Ie heterosexual desires leading to heterosexual sex leading to procreation. Homosexual feelings lead to homosexual sex, which does not lead to procreation.

 

[Philocrat]

No one here has said anything of the sort. Yes, I know: gays don't choose to be gay - everything I (and others) have said has been about natural causes. You cannot turn this into a gay-bashing thread because no one is doing it.

That said, given a choice ahead of time, how many pregnant women would choose to have gay children? Straight children? Given a choice, how many gays would be straight? Straights gay? Well, there is a difference, which I pointed out: reproductive problems. In this context, I define "normal" as feelings and behaviors which lead to reproduction: Ie heterosexual desires leading to heterosexual sex leading to procreation. Homosexual feelings lead to homosexual sex, which does not lead to procreation.

I think you should read my next posting on what I think about reproduction. On my first posting, I am merely stating the philosophical implications of what the whole argument is up against.

 

[cyfin]

Homosexuallity is a social group. It can be influenced by peer preasure. In china, Male children were more desireable than female children for economic reasons and you were limited in the number of offspring you could have. With modern science, parents soon were able to choose the sex of their childern. Obviously, males were chosen over females. This resulted in a large increase in males. With this, you saw a direct increase in the number of homosexual males. Simply put, there were not enough women to go around so they turned to each other.

If homosexualitiy were genetic, the parents must have all contracted the disease in order to spread it to their childern. Another posibility is that somehow genetic mutations occurred throughout a large group of people with nothing in common. Both of these are highly unlikely.

In America, it seems the more we see of homosexuals, the more people become homosexuals. People waking up in the morining after watching "Queer Eye For the Stright Guy" and realizing they were gay all their life, but never knew it until the TV told them.

It is my predection that once the shock value of homosexuallity subsides, and they realize its not much diffrent emotionally than heterosexuallity, then you will se a decline in the number of homosexuals.

Heterosexuallity is a very compedative thing. Men fighting for women. women fighting for men. If you are not able to keep up compedatively, its understandable that you might give up. Homosexuals are more sympathetic toward other homosexuals simply because there are so few of them they feel compelled to help each other. This is a common social event. In school, the "geeks" will always group together usually not becuase they have something in common, but because they are seen by the rest as diffrent. In my high school, there were only a handful of African American students. All of them grouped together as friends. Their interests probably would have placed them in other groups, but because tey were a minority, they choose each other instead.

As for the comments about nature. There is nothing natrual about it. As humans we have instincts and logic. Instint tells us to have sex. Logic tells us to have sex with the opposite sex. Its a lot easier to override our logic than to override our instinct.

A good question is why women do not have as large an increase in homosexuallity as men do? I think this is because women, in general, do not have as great of sex drive as men do. And likewise are not as compedative. Also, homosexuallity in women is not at shunned as homosexuallity in men. Therefore there is sense of pressure behind choosing a sexual preference. A man with a low sex drive might be easily preasured into homosexuality simply because he does not compete as other men do. Something like a self-realizing prophecy.

 

[selfAdjoint]

If homosexualitiy were genetic, the parents must have all contracted the disease in order to spread it to their childern. Another posibility is that somehow genetic mutations occurred throughout a large group of people with nothing in common. Both of these are highly unlikely.

This does not agree with what is known about genetics. First, genes are not "caught" like a cold. Second a gene doesn't need widespread simultaneous mutation to spread through a population, mating and meiosis will do it. However it is true that a gene will not maintain itself in a population without confering some advantage some way. Sickle-cell anemia, for example confers some resistance to malaria on those who have one copy of the gene and is only fatal to those with two copies. Rather a brutal advantage, but of course nature doesn't care.

So what would be the advantage of a hypothetical gay gene? I can't help but note the high concentration of gay individuals in the arts. Does gayness confer creativity? Or just a culturally mediated off center imagination? That the mechanism factors through culture wouldn't contradict a genetic source; the advantage just has to work out.