| At last someone else has made the point I find so glaringly obvious in the "gay" marriage debate: it is not the place of the state to sanction any RELIGIOUS institution like marriage. All the state should provide are civil unions no matter whether the relationship is heterosexual or homosexual - or non-sexual for that matter.
I am not a card carrying libertarian though I can sympathize with libertarianism to an extent. I part company with libertarians when they glorify corporate capitalism. Corporate capitalism can be as destructive of individual liberty as state socialism. It all depends on the circumstances of a particular individual. No civilization has yet existed that was not based on socialized slavery - and our contemporary corporate capitalist society is no exception. Ever and always societies contain both free and unfree individuals. All that changes are the modes of oppression and the percentage of the population/types of people who get the short end of the stick. Furthermore, the government is necessary as a countervailing power to corporations. Indeed corporations are de facto quasi-governmental bureaucracies exercising de facto political power over workers and consumers. Corporations can be oppressors as well as governments.
I do take exception to your comment:
"This entire business has become an issue only because collectivist types are seeking majority approval for sexual conduct which is not in keeping with evolutionary principals. The laws of nature and the laws of man are not the same."
This suggests that homosexual desire is unnatural. Moreover you are tacitly treating Darwinian selection as a normative principle - kind of a substitute for the "will of God" - in keeping with the currently fashionable ideology of what might be termed vulgar sociobiology. Neither position is tenable.
Homosexual desire plainly arises spontaneously among humans both civilized and primitive as well as among non-human primates and other animals. The popular fear that homosexuality is opposed to survival of the species is plainly unwarranted. The species has done just fine reproduction-wise in spite of the perennial existence of homosexuality. Indeed there must be some flaw even in the obvious Darwinian argument that homosexuality is individually maladaptive - if this were so then why hasn't homosexuality disappeared?
One possibility: the brain's hard-wired inchoate mechanisms for forming erotic attractions are incapable of differentiating sharply between male and female bodies anything near to 100% of the time. And once an initial attraction is formed (in early childhood) a neural pathway is set up which can be reinforced over time contributing eventually to adult sexual orientation (see "Neural Darwinism" by Gerald Edelman).
In any event homosexual desire seems to be a robustly perennial phenomenon which does not hinder the even more robustly perennial prevalence of heterosexual desire in human populations. The presence of an undercurrent of homosexual desires accompanying the prevailing heterosexual desires is what is natural (sometimes in the same individual, sometimes not) - not 100% heterosexual desire. Thus in any human population one may find some exclusive heterosexuals, a much smaller number of exclusive homosexuals and a sizable group of people who have both types of desire (though not to the same extent and not all the time).
What is truly unnatural (in the sense of going against the grain of spontaneous human development) is the social institution of a norm of 100% heterosexuality and companionate monogamous marriage!!!
The problem of homosexuality arises only because some people get the finicky notion in their head that nature should be other than it is. They set up an ideal Nature in place of real nature and decide that sex must serve the purpose of procreation in order to be "natural" - as if nature were governed by teleology. But purposes are not causes. And it's physical causality that governs the unfoldment of worldly events, not metaphysical "wills", Divine Providence or moralistic pontification.
The truth is that homosexual desire poses no threat to heterosexual desire. Indeed it often occurs in the same individuals. The modern notion of the (male) homosexual as a "third sex" - a kind of semi-female in a male body who is phallically impotent and exclusively passively homosexual as well as passive in interpersonal relations - is objectively wrong. Much - probably most - homosexual desire occurs in individuals who also possess heterosexual desire, albeit not to the same extent. And "masculinity" defined as aggressiveness, toughness etc. is independent of sexual orientation. The counterexamples to the homosexual=sissy hypothesis are legion. Alexander the Great is one famous example from history. According to Robin Lane Fox he fathered three or four children, had three wives, four mistresses, an egalitarian homosexual relationship with his comrade Hephaistion and an inegalitarian one with the eunuch Bagoas. And he wasn't exactly a wimp! Julius Caesar also comes to mind in this regard.
I suspect that the widespread belief in the third sex theory of homosexuality is the real foundation of current homophobia. Religious superstition is just a convenient rationalization for this.
In closing I can only hope that progress toward secularization continues. The task is far from done! Religion? Bah humbug! Just say no to superstition! |