bdcjacko said:
I have had a few friends that are gay or transgendered or both and had talks with them about the human condition and such. And so I convinced gay is not a choice.
I bring this up because my girlfriend just told me she is in a debate with a work friend who still thinks it is a choice. How could it be a choice? I mean logically being gay doesn't make sense. I mean on the down side you are degraded, belittled, and repressed by society. You are stigmatized and grudgingly accepted in most place that don't specifically cater to homosexuals. None of that sounds fun, but on the other down side you can take it in the butt and not get married.
The only real plus side I can see is that you can dress how ever you want, and if someone says you look gay, you can reply, "I know, isn't it great?"
Anyhow, what are your feelings on this?
I'm anti-gay men which I won't get into here, simply because i've debated it on these forums before and it's not going to do anything besides start an endless, irresolvable battle. What I think is probably still far back on the forums though if your really interested.
To speak neutrally however, your question has a clear answer:
To answer your question the whole "gay is a choice" thing is political, and comes from the gay rights movement itself. This arguement doesn't generally spring from the anti-gay community, though it is used (turned back on them) in the course of debate.
The basic issue is that if being gay is an inherant state of being, then it can be corrected. Thus out of an interest in not having homosexuality defined as something that can be corrected (a medical condition) the arguement about it being a lifestyle choice is made. In response to it being a choice, implying that someone can choose not to be gay, it's argued as being an intristic state of being. This is one of the reasons where my stance against homosexuality (for men, I won't go into my full opinion since it's irrelevent, but I believe gays and lesbians are seperate issues as opposed to something that should be addressed together. Just as there are specific "women's issues" that exist seperatly from those affecting men. Saying that the genders can be put together here is a political move when like a lot of things you wind up dealing with two fairly differant situations).
However, you ARE correct that being gay is not a lifestyle choice, as much as the gay rights movement fears it, we know it's a medical (not entirely psychological) condition. Simply put for people to have any kind of sexual arousal they need to transmit and receive chemical signals. This is why you can castrate people by removing parts of their sex organs. These chemicals interact with the brain (and we don't fully understand how the brain works) and ultimatly cause one's personality and drives to be built around what the body is telling it it's needs are.
Someone who is homosexual is reacting to the chemical signals of their own gender, basically their receptors are broken, and this influances the brain and how they think.
One important thing to remember is that while the body influances the brain, the same can happen in reverse. This is why psychlogical conditions (various kinds of insanity) can have profound physical effects in addition to behavioral ones. What's more everyone's DNA includes the information for both genders. One thing that you might remember from science classes is that in cases where a species is endangered animals have been recorded as undergoing gender reversal in order to reproduce and keep the species alive. This was used in "Juraasic Park" as one of the problems they faced, you might remember a pregnant dinosaur with the handlers going "OMG, how, they are all men" and then (at least in the books) a very strong "Nature finds a way" arguement about how it was foolish to think the population could be controlled. It's not common, but it does happen.
Also, as you might guess from the above, animals have also displayed homosexual behavior, but this is not surprising because a lot of the same diseases and medical conditions that afflict people also affect animals. If a human's sex receptors can respond to the wrong signals, so can those of animals.
The point of the above is actually that one of the reasons why psychology has been able to influance sexuality (causing the belief that it's a psychological problem) is that if you force enough trauma on someone to fire up deep survival insticts, the body and mind will adapt to whatever it needs to do to survive. It's not something that can be controlled, and results are uncommon (especially if you don't know what your doing exactly) but the same basic thing has caused split personalities and the like with people adapting to horrendous situations. This is why old school "torture psychology" did effectively treat homosexuality, but also can't reliably duplicate the results.
A more well known example of the same basic thing is hypnosis, brainwashing, and mental deprogramming. Simply put someone who understand how to influance the mind nowadays can totally alter who a person is, including their sexual orientation. Then again such people can also make other people think they are dogs. You see this demonstrated on a low-end scale in magic shows where a hypnotist will make guys from the audience do ridiculous things, but then have no memory of it. Techniques exist for doing that kind of thing permanantly.
The overall point here being that homosexuality is a medical condition, with actual physical causes (you can't have any kind of sex drive without the equipment, and unusual sex drives are it malfunctioning). Everybody pretty much knows this nowadays, but few people put the information together in their heads for political reasons, and "gay is a choice" is one of the arguements made to try and hold off any kind of massive societal resolution on the subject when it comes to dealing with gays. Like anyone who has their brain adapted to something, the feel there is nothing wroung with them, do not want to be cured, and are afraid that if the condition CAN be cured (which it can) people are going to force the treatment.
Given my initial statements, you can guess where I lean here. Typically though the gay arguements tend to revolve around people who point out the things I did wanting to chemically castrate them all or something, which is hardly the case.
