I'm in the midst of my first debate on Debate.org. I didn't make it easy on myself, taking such a hard to defend proposition. But I hope it will help my ability to intellectual empathize, and help me exert control over ideas instead of let them control me.
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I suspect my work it cut out for me on this one. History hasn't been on my side of this debate, and it has me defending two separate propositions. Still, I think my perspective is unique, because I'm not religious, or conservative; and I don't come at this with the kind of dogmatic certainty of others who have debated from my position. So hopefully you can forget about all those people on "my side", and just evaluate me by my word. Because the world doesn't always look the way we think it does.
I almost didn't take this debate because because of the second half, "...and unnatural." Because the two, "moral, and "natural" don't necessarily need to go together. I'm not even sure if they usually go together. Natural things aren't good and manmade things aren't bad. Malaria is natural, aspirin isn't. But I donate to fight malaria, and I was extraordinarily thankful for aspirin when I tore the cartilage in my left knee.
Basically, while I will argue that being gay is unnatural, it is not because it serves my argument that it is wrong. They're independent propositions.
IS BEING GAY NATURAL?
It's perfectly clear that nature has homosexual sex. I've had a dog. The dog tried to have sex with another male dog. Done deal. I lose. Right? But then I did a little reading, and without any word tricks or weird premises... yeah, being gay is not natural.
My dog will have sex with another male dog, but he will also have sex with my leg, or a teddy bear, or a shoe. That doesn't make my dog gay, or teddy-sexual, or a shoe-sexual. It means he has a natural proclivity towards straight sex, but he also has sex with other things sometimes. That's something I can't say about human gay people. These people have sex with the same gender at the exclusion of other genders. My dog doesn't do that. My dog doesn't reject sex with opposite genders. And as far as I can tell no animal in the natural world is "gay" in the same sense of the word as when we use it to describe gay humans.
There's a strong evolutionary biological reason to not expect gay animals to be a thing. Gayness is terribly unfit to survive. I used to reject this argument and say, "okay fine, it's a byproduct of evolution." But I didn't fully understand how evolution works.
What did I miss? Byproducts of evolution are fine, they happen all the time, but not if they MERCILESSLY CUT AGAINST FITNESS. As far as nature is concerned, being a homosexual is no different from being sterilized. You need to understand how quickly evolution would have weeded out any inherent biological basis for homosexuality.
So why do so many gay people insist that it's fully biological? I suspect it was to fight the fundamentalists. It's not enough for gay rights people to say that the fundamentalists don't have good enough reasons. Instead they feel like they have to prove that there's no possible way it can be immoral. And if it's fully biological, then it's not a choice, only choices can be immoral, so homosexuality can't be immoral. Just like it can't be immoral to have blood type A or be a certain ethnicity.
So that makes it a politically convenient belief. What's wrong with it. Well nobody knows where they got there sexual orientation through sheer introspection. That's just not the kind of thing introspection can tell you. You don't know how you got the way you are. None of us do. Why do you think we even debate nature vs. nurture, if we can all just think to ourselves and come up with an answer? You, being you, doesn't make you an expert on how you became you.
But just because it's unnatural, that doesn't make it wrong. So onto the next part...
IS BEING GAY IMMORAL?
It is excruciatingly difficult to argue for any moral proposition without getting lost in complicated and controversial moral philosophy.. I've read philosophy for many years and as far as I can tell, no comprehensive moral philosophy has been decided on. I'm also not going to construct a moral philosophy from scratch and then use it to prove being gay is wrong. I will take the premise that almost everyone else takes, moral intuitionism.
But unlike the most dogmatic of moral intuitionists, I notice a problem. People don't like this, but I think it's clear enough for anyone who pays attention to understand. WE DON'T HAVE THE SAME MORAL INTUITIONS. Conservatives especially, have a strong moral sense of disgust against homosexuality.
To demonstrate this, let me tell you a story.
I was walking with my conservative friend of mine. We didn't argue politics a lot, but from what I could gather he would justify his, for lack of a better word, homophobia with the bible; you know, Old Testament stuff - Man should not lay with another man - Leviticus - etc. Whatever the bible says about being gay isn't the point.
The point is that while he and I were walking, we saw a man greet another guy at Starbucks, and they kissed passionately, like they hadn't seen each other in a while. My friend couldn't help but blurt out, "ew, that's just wrong." And he knew I was with him and that I wouldn't share his feeling. But he couldn't help himself. He had an instinctive repulsion toward what he had just seen.
I found myself thinking about that a lot, and after struggling over my intellectual honesty, I had to admit some things.
First, the bible justification thing was an excuse. He started with moral feelings toward homosexuality and reverse engineered a rationale for it. I found out that psychologists call this motivated reasoning. Our intuition is in charge, and then we make up reasons for why it was right afterward.
Second, "just wrong" is a feeling we assign to many different aspects of human life. The "Just" in "just wrong" connotes that it's not normal wrong, like the kind of wrong that has to do with harming another person. Instead, just wrong irritates our moral sensitivities in other ways.
Third, I thought some things were "just wrong" too. A man sleeping with his sister is "just wrong". When I thought about that proposition, I kept catching myself rationalizing for why I'm REALLY just concerned with harm. What if the man's sister gets pregnant with a disabled baby? So I adjust the hypothetical to control for problem. Suppose he's sterile and she's infertile, NOW is it okay for a man to sleep with his sister? No matter how I changed the scenario, I could not shake this moral ickiness I associated with a man sleeping with his sister.
Or a family that eats their dead family dog for dinner.
Or any form of beastiality (so long as the animal consents)
Another voice in my head yells, "but homosexuality isn't like those things!" But that's the thing, I'm not sure it isn't. The people who have moral feelings about being gay are projecting the same kind of moral disgust that I have with other examples of "just wrong". I'm stuck arguing that my feelings are better than their feelings, which is dumb. Our moral intuitions are just different.
So how do we decide what really is wrong? Well, I think step 1 is we need to be humble and not selfishly and dogmatically shout that our moral intuitions are superior to others. Alternatively, we should think like a community about moral intuitions. Like the story of the blind men and the elephant. They each touch a different part of the elephant an interpret it as different things, but together through community and conversation, they figure out what animal they're touching.
So I think we need to realize that across the world and in time's past, the idea that homosexuality is sin has been prevalent. The prevalence of this view has lead to the unjust persecution of gay people. Please, remember that there's a vast middle ground between "unworthy of persecution" and "right". It is exactly the magnitude of homosexual oppression in history demonstrates how strong and popular anti-gay moral feelings have been.
It's like 10 blind men feel the trunk of the elephant and tell us it's a trunk, and we completely ignore them because we don't feel the same thing.
CONCLUSION:
I know I'm wordy, so I want to consolidate my argument here:
Being gay is unnatural:
- Nature means occurring in nature in contrast to being human specific.
- Homosexual acts occur among animals, but homosexuals do not. (1)
-The difference is that homosexuals perform exclusively or primarily homosexual acts.
- The suggestion that gay people know where they got their sexual orientation is not serious. You do not know how your biology works through sheer introspection
-Homosexuality is effectively the sterilization of the individual. Evolution would never let that biological trait persist for millions of years.
Being gay is wrong:
-We don't feel like being gay is wrong, but individual moral reasoning are flawed (2)
-Instead, we need to look around the world and throughout history to find which moral feelings are robust
-Around the world anti-gay moral feelings are still prevalent (3)
-History of gay persecution demonstrates how frequent and strong moral feelings against homosexuality have been common
I hope I've been clear concerning my position in this debate. In the next section of the debate, I plan on dealing with the ancient greece example my opponent brought up, because it is wildly at odds with the claim that homosexuality is natural.
Good luck and have a nice day :)
1) https://books.google.ca...
2) https://www.sciencedirect.com...
3) http://www.pewglobal.org...
