I am stating “homosexuality is wrong” is a subjective statement …
In reading your posts, I think you make the broader claim:
There are no objectively valid and universally tenable moral standards or norms.
Such a denial undermines the whole notion of natural, human rights, and, even worse, lends support to a dogmatic declaration that might makes right.
In order to dismiss the particular claim on the morality of homosexual acts, it is reasonable to argue the dismissal of the broader, general claim first and then apply that argument to the particular.
The general claim, it seems to me, issues from Hume’s correct observation that a prescriptive conclusion cannot be validly drawn from premises that are entirely descriptive. However, it is possible to combine a prescriptive with a descriptive premise in order to argue for the truth of a prescriptive conclusion. That prescriptive premise must, of course, be a self-evident truth; for otherwise we would have to argue for it.
Starting with the self-evident truth that we ought to desire whatever is really good for us, and adding the descriptive truth that all human beings naturally desire or need, let’s say, knowledge (which is tantamount to saying that knowledge is really good for us), we reach the conclusion that we ought to seek or desire knowledge. This conclusion has prescriptive truth, based on the criterion that what it prescribes conforms to right desire, desire for something that we by nature need.
Does the want for pleasure override all other human needs? The hedonist makes the error of identifying the good with pleasure. Aristotle notes in his
Nicomachean Ethics that pleasure accompanies our activities but “the pleasure proper to a worthy activity is good and that proper to an unworthy activity is bad.” Is the homosexual act a worthy act?
To say that the
only good is pleasure is to say that wealth, health, friends, knowledge, and wisdom are not good. This error separates happiness from contentment. Such separation is quite possible to explain once we employ the distinction between needs and wants and between real and apparent goods.
Happiness can then be defined as a whole life enriched by the cumulative possession of all the real goods that every human being needs and by the satisfaction of those individual wants that result in obtaining apparent goods that are innocuous.
The pursuit of happiness, thus conceived, consists in the effort to discharge our moral obligation to seek whatever is really good for us and nothing else unless it is something, such as an innocuous apparent good, that does not interfere with our obtaining all the real goods we need.
Is the homosexual act innocuous, or does it reduce the probability or even deprive one or the other partner or the community of the human need to successfully reproduce? Is not that need to reproduce identical to the evolutionary goal of specie survival and flourishing? Yes and yes.
The argument shows that the homosexual act satisfies only a human want (pleasure) and does so by frustrating the human need to reproduce. As such, the act is immoral.