Why gay people simply must go to hell
A few years ago I had an extended conversation about gay people with an evangelical man in his mid-50s. I thought that this conversation might be illuminating, in that this fellow is a decent fellow in many ways. He would make a nice neighbor, for instance. He works hard, pays his taxes, makes contributions to poor people, loves his children and abhors bigotry, at least when it involves blatant discrimination of African-Americans. On the other hand, he is deeply troubled with the “problem” of gays. For purposes of this post, I will refer to him as “Donald.”
Here’s how the conversation went:
Do gays choose to be gay? Donald is really perturbed that some people choose to engage in homosexual sex as a matter of sexual variety or perverted fun. On the other hand, he does acknowledge that there are numerous gay people who have not chosen to be gay. They were born or raised in such a way that they turned out “differently.” Donald admits that they had no choice. They have innocently found themselves attracted to members of the same sex. I asked Donald whether his God created them this way, and he shrugged.
Donald admits that many heterosexuals engage in sex that he considers degenerate or immoral. This would include oral sex, anal sex or S&M for example. Donald reluctantly admits that these people should nonetheless be allowed to marry. People who do not want to have children or who physically can’t have children should also be allowed to marry. According to Donald, the state government should grant marriage licenses even to those who are not truly in love with each other, although he doesn’t personally approve of this practice.
Gay people should fight their sexual urges, according to Donald. They should be celibate for their entire lives. Gay people who fall in love with other gay people should not ever express that love physically. Donald claims that human beings do not need to have sex. People can live “meaningful” lives without it, even if they feel strong urges to have sex.
I mentioned my belief: that sex is as essential as food for most people; sex is a central part of being a human being. Donald sees sex as something optional, such as eating a particular food (e.g. ice cream) or going to the beach. I see living together publicly as a bonded couple (with the option of raising a family together) as a fundamental human right. Donald would generally agree, except that gay people do not have this right. Why not? Because the Bible says it’s so.
Simply being gay is not something that will cause a person to go to hell, according to Donald. If a gay person actually has homosexual sex, however, this is a moral and degenerate act. Having homosexual sex is a serious sin which you will cause one to be sent to hell for eternal torture. God has required this. Why? It’s not for Donald to question his God.
Donald believes that having homosexual sex is “unnatural.” He bluntly stated that animals do not have homosexual sex. He was not interested in knowing about bonobos, who commonly engage in homosexual sex as a form of community bonding. He was not interested in knowing that many other species of animals engage in homosexual sex (450 species have been shown to have clear homosexual behaviors). See also here.
In other words, Donald claims that homosexual sex is “unnatural,” but he does not want to talk about hundreds of species of animals engaging in homosexual sex in the wild. He won’t go so far as to call gay animal sex “unnatural,” but doesn’t find zoological field work to be relevant. He doesn’t like talking about human beings as though they are animals. As to that thorny concept of what is “natural,” Donald would consider things such as line-dancing, SUVs, cosmetics and large crucifixes to be sufficiently natural. But one thing that is NOT natural is adult gay people who consensually, privately and intimately express their affection for each other.
I asked Donald whether it seemed fair to him that his religion, if it got a hold of the reigns of government, would prohibit gay people from engaging in the single solitary form of sexual intimacy that interested them, and prohibited this for their entire lifetimes. He shrugged and mentioned that the Bible forbids this. For Donald, it is not a matter of fairness.
I don’t know where any of this leads. Perhaps it doesn’t get to the heart of the issue at all. Perhaps the real problem is something rarely discussed. Perhaps it’s simply a matter that many people are uncomfortable with their animal bodies, including organs such as the penis . . . Oh, no. I uttered that word. I’m so very sorry. I don’t really know how to use a computer that well . . . I tried applying White-Out to the computer monitor, but I see that that word is still there. Well, please pretend that I didn’t say that word!
Donald said one other thing that I found curious. He insisted that marriage is a religious institution. His argument is thus straightforward: since marriage is a matter of religion and the Bible prohibits homosexual acts, then gays should not be able to get married. I find this argument strange in that marriage is actually two things: yes, it is a matter of tradition, including religious tradition. On the other hand, marriage is a civil institution. As marriage is currently established, it need not be a matter of religion at all. People commonly go before judges and get married without uttering a single word about religion. When I bring this up to people like Donald, he shrugs. He makes it clear that if people like him could ever take hold of our government, there would be no such thing as a purely civil marriage ceremony.
In sum, I found it curious that my differences with Donald were not really matters of clashing facts. Rather, our differences were focused at places where Donald was unable or unwilling to freely consider various facts.
To respond to Richard. The example of the bonobos is a telling one because they are genetically almost identical to human animals. Within bonobo communities, female-female or male-male sex is not an isolated aberration. Rather, sex is woven thoroughly within these communities to facilitate bonding. See Frans De Waal’s Bonobos for rigorous and scientific analysis: In light of these scientific observations, protests that homosexual sex is “unnatural” seems to be either A) contradicted by evidence or B) a category error.
I’m not saying that many people don’t like the idea of homosexuality. Those people certainly exist, but whether such acts are “natural” is a question that animal observations appear to be addressing. Here is a huge list of animals for which there is documented evidence of homosexual or transgender behavior.
You don’t seem to have understood why your argument is logically flawed. You simply cannot use observed animal behaviour to justify what is acceptable moral behaviour for humans!
The logic of your argument is fallacious on a number of levels. Let us forget the rest of the animal world for a minute, even IF homosexuality was an extremely common placed phenomena in human circles, which is only mildly true, (heterosexual practices grossly outnumber any form of homosexual activity), that would serve no cause logically. This cannot be made as an argument for its validity as a moral practice. This is a classic use of an “Appeal to common practice” fallacy. Just because some people do X, X must be moral and right. etc. Now, if one cannot even look to the human homosexual behaviour as justification for its action, how much more fallacious is it to try to use animal behaviour as a yardstick for morality?! Additionally, it can be shown that even in the animal world, there is NO homosexual instinct. So even if it was purely logical to read human motivations and intentions into animal behaviour and derive our morality from it, we couldn’t do it for homosexual behaviour, because it is still an unnatural animal behaviour. Previously, I didn’t want to go into a refutation of your example homosexual animal cases, but I will touch on the bonobo case. I stress though, that it doesnt even matter what bonobos do; if bonobo’s do something, it has absolutely no bearing on if its right or wrong for humans or not, regardless of how genetically similar they are. Mice are remarkably genetically similar to humans. Mice are also known to frequently demonstrate infanticide behaviour when under stressed. Does that justify humans killing their infants when they are stressed? No! Norway rats also will kill deformed or ‘runt’ offspring, and will eat any of their offspring if the mothers become malnourished. Should this behaviour also be carried into human behaviour? According to your logic infanticide is much more ‘natural’ than any observed homosexual tendencies (but I am going to show that both behaviours are NOT instinctive and therefore are not considered a ‘natural animal behaviour’ anyway).
Initially I should state that anyone who is involved in even the most elementary animal behaviour observation will tell you that homosexuality (along with filicide and cannibalism for that matter) is an exception to the norm. This behaviour is not a result of animal instincts but results from other factors such as clashing stimuli, confused animal instincts, inability to express affective states, conflict avoidance behavior and tension diffusion. But it must be admitted that homosexual behaviour in the animal world is a rare and abnormal behaviour. Your “huge list” of animals that have been seen to be associated with some kind of transgender, or homosexual behaviour (which for the vast majority of them is not a sexual behaviour, but serves a parenting or social function.) For none of them is it an instinctive behaviour.
Animal instincts are not obliged to follow absolute determined paths, they adapt to internal and external stimuli. Moreover, animal cognition is entirely sensorial, limited to the sense: sound, smell, touch, taste and vision. Animals do not have the intellectual perception or cognitive ability of humans; therefore, animals often confuse one sensation with another or one object with another. Also, it should be reminded that an animal’s instincts direct it towards its end and are in accordance with its nature. But, instinctive impulses can suffer variations if other sensory stimuli or memories get in the way. The conflict between two or more instincts can also sometimes change how the organism perceives the original impulse.
In the case of humans, we have an intellect which can make decisions when two instinctive reactions clash. We can choose which path is best to follow, even if the best path is against the most conditionally favored instinct. Animals do not have the same level of cognitive ability, there is no intellect, so when two instinctive impulses clash, the one with the most favored circumstances will prevail. Sometimes, these internal or external stimuli responsible for an animal’s instinctive impulses result will in abnormal behaviour such as filicide, cannibalism and homosexuality.
In the case of filicide, or infanticide, it is usually a result of clashing instincts. In the case of cats killing their kittens, it is a result of two instinctive modes in the mother cat becoming switched. ( female cats can switch between “play mode” and “hunt mode” in order NOT to harm their offspring. If the “hunt mode” is not completely switched off and the cats become highly aroused through play, the “hunting” instinct comes into force and they may kill, dismember and eat their kittens. The small size, erratic movement and high voices sometimes trigger hunting behavior. Sometimes the maternal behavior instinct is overrided by the hunting instinct. The same type of thinig occurs for cannibalism.
And now for the bonobo. As I mentioned before, another reason for abnormal behaviours is an animal’s inability to express its affective states, especially seen in higher mammals. Animals lack human intellect, so they are very limited in how they can express their affective states (fear, pleasure, pain, desire, etc.). The range that these states are expressed is very ambiguous. Usually all they have at their disposal is their instincts. Sometimes instincts such as the reproduction are “borrowed” to manifest the instincts of dominance, aggressiveness, fear, gregariousness etc. This accounts for the seeming homosexual behaviour in bonobos. This is classic example of instinct “borrowing.” These chimps will engage in what seems like sexual behavior in order to express affective states. According the zoologist of Frans B. M de Waal, an expert in bonobo behaviour, this type of behaviour is the bonob’s answer to avoiding conflict. There are two reasons for bonobo’s nonreproductive “sexual activity” Firstly, anything that arouses the interest of more than one bonobo at a time tends to result in some sort of sexual contact. For instance, if two bonobos approach a box thrown into their enclosure, they may briefly mount each other before playing with the box. While in other species such a situation leads to conflict or fighting, the bonobos have become quite tolerant because they use sexual contact to divert attention and to diffuse tension. Bonobo sex also occurs in aggressive situations. For instance, a jealous male might chase another away from a female. To prevent a future conflict, the dominant male might engage in scrotal rubbing of the male. This is also observed with females. An older female will hit a younger female producing a brief conflict that is resolved by genital rubbing between the two.
This type of sexual activity is seen in other animals as well as you mention with your “huge list”. Other animals have been observed to mount another of the same sex and engaging in seemingly “homosexual” behavior, although their intentions are very different. For instance, dogs do this to express their dominance. It is a demonstration of social power when a dog mounts another, not sex. Female dogs have been seen to do the same thing to express dominance. Another reason for this abnormal canine behaviour is that sometimes the mere smell of an estrus female will be enough to trigger an uncontrolled mounting instinct. If a male bears the scent of a female it has recently come in contact with, any male that smells it will often mount that very male as a result of confused instincts.
Homosexual behaviour in other animals is usually explained by the failure of one to identify the sex of the other. There is frequent confusion in the lower species of the animal kindom as sex becomes more tenuous to detect.
Therefore, homosexual animals do not exist. Even Simon LeVay (an acclaimed homosexual scientist) admitted that the scientific evidence supports no homosexual animals, but that the observations are results of isolated acts and confused instincts. Though ‘homosexual behavior’ is common in the animal world, it is very uncommon that individual animals have a long-lasting predisposition to engage in such behavior, especially to the exclusion of heterosexual activities. Therefore, a “homosexual orientation”, if such a thing exists in animals is an extreme rarity.
Despite the appearance of some “homosexual” animal behavior, this does not mean that there is a “homosexual” instinct. Dr. Antonio Pardo, (Professor of Bioethics at the University of Navarre, Spain) explains it this way: “Properly speaking, homosexuality does not exist among animals…. For reasons of survival, the reproductive instinct among animals is always directed towards an individual of the opposite sex. Therefore, an animal can never be homosexual as such. Nevertheless, the interaction of other instincts (particularly dominance) can result in behavior that appears to be homosexual. Such behavior cannot be equated with an animal homosexuality. All it means is that animal sexual behavior encompasses aspects beyond that of reproduction.”
Finally, as I have repeatedly stated, you cannot apply human psychodynamics to the animal world, that is interpret animal’s motivation and desire in human terms. Even if animal homosexuality was a widespread phenomena, even if it could be shown to be a natural instinct for some animals, that would do nothing for the homosexual movement’s cause. To maintain any “scientific” credibility, you must stick to the human species first of all, and second of all, even there, the “appeal to common practice” fallacy should be avoided at all costs. To argue scientifically for homosexual behaviour one must turn to the medical implications, health consequences, and psychological effects of such a lifestyle. And regardless of what we observe in the animal world, animal behaviour cannot be used as a blueprint for morality and for a model of what we want our society to look like.
Richard says: “You don’t seem to have understood why your argument is logically flawed. You simply cannot use observed animal behaviour to justify what is acceptable moral behaviour for humans!”
So, Richard. What are YOU using for your yardstick for your opinion that gay sex is morally abhorrent? An ancient book? Personal preference? In other words, are you setting aside Nature when considering what is “natural”?
I never claimed that animals have conscious, deliberate sexual relationships. But it’s not all accidental. I guarantee you that the female bonobos are not repeatedly “accidentally” having sex with other females. The behavior of non-human animals must always be taken with a grain of salt before applying conclusions wholesale to humans. But the many observed incidents of animal homosexuality (in many species) makes open-minded people reluctant to condemn homosexual human behavior as “unnatural.”
The flaw in the argument against homosexual practice is the use of a concept of “normal” which is based on the assumption–usually unspoken, but not always–that the so-called “function” of sex is procreation. While it is true that sex is inextricably linked to reproduction, it is not true that this is its entire function. If you base your conclusion of what “natural” (or normal or, in this instance, moral) means for sex exclusively on procreation, then a determination that homosexual behavior is not only abnormal but evolutionarily counterproductive and therefore, by some reading, naturally perverse is perfectly logical.
However, if you remove that condition–procreation–and look at sex as something else, namely a method of communication (in humans as in other species a source of pleasure) then you have to examine sexual dynamics instead of procreational demands to draw your conclusions.
What do homosexuals get out of sex? Presumably the same thing heterosexuals to–it just takes a different pathway through the psyche. On that basis, sex has one function which rejects “natural” vs “unnatural” pigeonholing, and renders the argument against homosexual practice moot.
You can’t have it both ways–if it’s pure Darwinian impetus that drives your determination of sexual “appropriateness”–i.e. that sex is only for procreation and the longterm benefit of the species–then no morality pertains. If however you’re going to apply human moral conditions, then you have to reject Darwinian imperatives, and such arguments become meaningless. Then what is appropriate becomes what we say it is, regardless of “instinct” or “natural” predilection.
To Richard and “me”:
Life is often a long, cold and lonely journey. If someone can do what seems nearly impossible these days, and find someone who loves and cares for them, does it really matter if they happen to be the same sex? If god is love, why would she deny us love if we find it?
Open your hearts “Christians”. Accept everyone at your table like Jesus told you to do.
Richard writes: “The first objection any logical person, or scientist for that matter, should make is this is that by following the idea that homosexual acts are completely natural, things like parental killing and eating of offspring, cannibalism, devouring mates, abandoning offspring, stealing possessions, sustaining large harems with aggressive male dominance etc, should also be in accordance to animal nature…Are such tendencies that I touched on therefore in accordance to human nature as well?”
To answer Richard’s rhetorical question: yes, they are. Many, if not all, of the behaviors that Richard mentions have been seen in modern humans. However, there is a fundamental difference between sociopathic behaviors such as murder, cannibalism, stealing, etc., and a behavior such as homosexuality: the former do not occur between mutually consenting adults. Humans, like other social animals, have an inherent sense of fairness, so we reject brutal, nonconsentual behaviors, because they disrupt the peace and unity of the tribe. Accordingly, even though murder, rape, etc., might be “in accordance to human nature” — i.e., a natural result of our brutal ancestry — these behaviors are not “common and acceptable human acts,” because our cultural evolution has made them incompatible with contemporary social life.
Is being gay “natural”?
The animal kingdom is crawling with kink: threesomes, sadomasochism, spontaneous sex changes, and coital decapitation, for starters. There are also male ducks with corkscrew-shaped penises and sea creatures that shoot acidic semen leaving their partner pregnant and covered in burns. Nature even has its own date rape drug: the Great Barrier Reef’s yellow slug delivers a sedative to its desired mate with a quick penile stab.
It’s all in the name of successfully passing along genes — much like these creatures’ human counterparts.
From “Hard Drive,” by Tracy Clark-Flory http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/06/13/score/?source=newsletter
Dogs eat each others poop too. The “animals do it, therefore it must be natural” argument is a dumb as it gets. Humans have a more developed cerebral cortex than the rest of the animal kingdom. They are instinctive, we have reason. Therefore the comparison is extremely lowforehead.
Some species eat their young, Black widows eat their lovers after sex. say na more.