Thread: Sochi Olympics and the Law against Gays in Russia +

Originally Posted by DrBaldhead

Not enough gays for a gay parade. This phrase alone gives me creeps.

В самом деле? Так же или сильнее, чем дети на этой фотке?

Originally Posted by Lampada

В самом деле? Так же или сильнее, чем дети на этой фотке?

If the guys from the picture on the left make you concerned about their rights more than the ones from the right picture, you might need to revise your views on hypocrisy such pictures.

Originally Posted by DrBaldhead

If the guys from the picture on the left make you concerned about their rights more than the ones from the right picture, you might need to revise your views on hypocrisy such pictures.

The picture are disturbing in DIFFERENT ways. Obviously the malnourished children are more immediately worrying.
But it's a historical fact that civilisations that embrace homosexuality and become obsessed with money start to rot from within.
Ancient Greece, Rome and pre-revolutionary France are well known examples.

And what's happening to "The West" right now? Rotting from within, I'd say...

I think the Russians have the right idea. Definitely not persecute gay people, but not encourage it either.

But I realise the comment really annoys many here who are into polical correctness at all cost. And yeah, the Russian politician who said that Stephen Fry was sick is correct. He's written a book and appeared several times in media to discuss his horrible struggles with bipolar disorders since childhood. He's totally out of it for long stretches of time and he has tried to commit suicide multiple times. He's very talented but he is, in fact, a rather sick man by his own admission. He grew up at an all boys boarding school and having been engaged to a man from that kind of background who was struggling with homosexual temptation, I know a thing or two about how it doesn't in fact only come from within. There are external factors too.

Originally Posted by Hanna

... it doesn't in fact only come from within. There are external factors too.

There is no such thing as 'gay gene'. None of it comes from biochemistry. This is a great problem, the attempt to frame various (many other things could be talked about) as being caused by genes or biochemistry or something. Scientific frauds.

Originally Posted by Seraph

There is no such thing as 'gay gene'. None of it comes from biochemistry. This is a great problem, the attempt to frame various (many other things could be talked about) as being caused by genes or biochemistry or something. Scientific frauds.

Biochemistry and genes AREN'T the same thing.

It's undoubtedly correct that there is no such thing as "A gay gene," singular, that simply turns "gayness" on or off. (Simple explanation: even if such a gene were to appear by spontaneous mutation, it would be selected against, and within 20 or 30 generations, it would become much too rare for the observed rate of 1-5% for homosexual individuals. Another way to put this is that if there IS such a thing as a gay gene, probably less than 1% of homosexuals actually have this gene, and the other 99% are gay for non-genetic reasons --- in other words, "purely genetic" homosexuality is either non-existent, or else it's the rarest form of homosexuality.

There might be such a thing as a complex of several genes (plural) whose combined effect that increase the odds of someone turning out homosexual -- though, again, it wouldn't be an ON/OFF switch, and some of the people carrying these genes would still turn out heterosexual, but not necessarily because of "external factors" like going to an all-boys school.

It's also possible that homosexuality is totally non-genetic, AND YET MAINLY BIOCHEMICAL. For example, the levels of sex hormones in the uterus can have major effects on the fetal brain -- yet these hormone levels do not necessarily have anything to do with the fetus's own genetics.

Finally, I would certainly agree that a lot of gay activists who know nothing about science have jumped on the "genetics" bandwagon. And I agree that the cause of homosexuality remains poorly understood. Nonetheless, I think it's likely that there is a biochemical cause for homosexuality, not because I wish for this to be true, but because I think it's likely that biochemistry plays a huge role in causing HETEROSEXUALITY.

Let me repeat that another way: I don't believe that most people are born "blank slates" with regard to sexual orientation. I think it's far more likely that some combination of genes and hormones "programs" nearly everyone for heterosexuality, but in less than 5% of children, something goes slightly wrong in this biochemically-controlled process of wiring the brain, and the kid turns out homo. To put it another way, homosexuality is an uncommon (but not rare) side effect of the normal "heterosexualization" process in the fetal brain.

By analogy, we aren't "blank slates" with regard to the number of fingers we have -- five is the norm for our species -- but neither is the development of five fingers guided by God or Angels in the mother's womb. Unconscious genes and hormones usually interact in a flawless and automatic way to give us five fingers on each hand, but occasionally something goes wrong in this process and a kid is born with only three, or six, or more.

I would add that a lot of this remains speculative -- because we still don't understand very well how sex-hormones affect the fetal brain in humans. (We have lots of experimental data for other mammals like rats and sheep -- but, obviously, it's not ethical to remove a baby girl's ovaries and pump her full of testosterone in order to "see what happens.") I would tend to guess, however, that sometime in the next few decades, the claim that humans can be "born gay" will either be confirmed beyond doubt or disproven beyond doubt, as understanding of the brain/hormone connection improves.

Originally Posted by Hanna

But it's a historical fact that civilisations that embrace homosexuality and become obsessed with money start to rot from within. Ancient Greece, Rome and pre-revolutionary France are well known examples.

This statement is questionable for at least three reasons:

(1) Has there ever been a civilization that wasn't "obsessed" with money? I would say that caring about money is that's practically a pre-requisite for being civilized.

2) What does it mean to "embrace" homosexuality? I'm not sure exactly which examples you're talking about in France, but certainly in the loooong histories of classical Greece and Rome, homosexuality was tolerated under certain conditions, mocked in other conditions -- and the degrees of tolerance, when such existed, varied from one era to another.

(3) Christianity became the state religion of Imperial Rome in 380 AD; Rome was conquered and looted TWICE within the next century (410 by the Visigoths and 455 by the Vandals). By your logical standards, then, the embrace of Christianity caused the internal rot of this once-mighty pagan empire much more quickly and devastatingly than any "embrace of homosexuality" did.

By the way, I am rather against the idea of using tax money to pay for transsexual surgery, but ESPECIALLY the idea of paying for procedures like breast implants for "MTFs" -- since fake boobs have no objective health benefits (whereas it MIGHT be justified to pay for their hormone treatment -- hormones have neuro-psychological effects, and therefore giving hormone shots to a clinically depressed transsexual might, in theory, help the depression better than anti-depressant pills alone).

And with that issue aside, I've also heard that some very anti-gay regimes -- including Saudi Arabia and China, I believe -- have offered to pay for the transsexual surgeries of men arrested for homosexuality, even if these men don't ASK for the surgeries, and don't identify as women! In other words, the surgery is basically a condition for NOT being imprisoned, or for having the sentences shortened. Evidently, the regimes find that the easiest way to deal with homosexual men is to turn them surgically into heterosexual "pseudo-women".

P.S. But I don't rule out the possibility that transgender identity is "real", organic, and to some extent neurologically hardwired by fetal hormones. As I wrote above, hormone/brain interactions are VERY complex even in mammals with brains a lot simpler than ours -- and at the present time, science doesn't understand them nearly well enough to exclude the hypothesis that transsexuals are literally "born that way." Or, perhaps, some percentage of them are "born that way," while others psychologically construct/invent a "trans identity" as their way of dealing with various traumas. In other words, there may be more than one "type of transsexual," just as there may be different types of homosexuality -- some forms that are "in the brain" (neurological) and other forms that are "in the mind" (psychological). Anyway, it's surgery as a THERAPY for "Gender Dysphoria" that I'm skeptical about, and not the claim that "Gender Dysphoria" exists. Part of me suspects that doctors fifty years from now will look back on sex-reassignment surgery as a horrifying sort of pseudoscientific quackery, as we now look back on lobotomies.

P.P.S. One other thing that occurs to me -- it's important to understand that homosexuality and transsexualism are different/independent from each other, even if one accepts the hypothesis that both may ultimately have biochemical/hormonal roots. For example, some male-to-female transsexuals are attracted to men ("androphilic") ; they live as gay men "pre-surgery", but hope to live as heterosexual women after the surgery. But other MTFs are attracted to women ("gynephilic") -- and they hope to live as lesbians, not straight women.