Why Homosexuality is wrong from a secular perspective

[Charlemagne_II]

Baelor
**
I do not think it is shameful at all.**

Since you are speaking as an atheist, rather than as a Catholic, I would ask why you think sodomy is not shameful when most people think it is. What would be your answer?

 

[JABA]

I should of made the original post more simple and to the point.

1)Whether people like it or not, the primary function of sex is for procreation. If we did not need procreation, sex would not exist. Sex was not just created for pleasure. Procreation is never naturally possible between an animal and human, nor male and male, therefore any form of sexual relationship between them is disordered and unnatural. All these facts are based on biology, human anatomy and physiology and are irrelevant of religious beliefs. The justification for LGBT relationships is just based on shallow opinions which have nothing to do with anatomy, biology and physiology. Supporters of LGBT are all hypocrites as, if they justify LGBT relationships, they should also support, incest and other unnatural sexual relationships. Once you go outside the boundaries of the definition of what is an acceptable sexual relationship based on biology, anatomy and physiology, any form of sexual relationship can then be justified using an opinion, even beastiality.

1. If you are a male and find another male sexually attractive and want to express yourself sexually with them, you are having disordered sexual feelings.
   Why? All these are based on natural law, biology, anatomy and physiology
   a) Males and males cannot ever naturally procreate with each other. Read an anatomy text book why and looks at the pictures of the reproductive system.
   b) Males and males are not biologically compatible with each other. Male sperm cannot fertilize another male, as they have no ovum like females of the same species do.

This is just the way it is. Don’t blame the catholic church, as this this has nothing to do with religious beliefs and doctrines. This is just the way nature intended and we were created. Sure, people have the free will to pursue disordered sexual relationships, but don’t your dare say it’s normal or not disordered or ask for the same rights as people in natural sexual relationships. You are not the same, and never will be, as biology and natural law cannot be changed as they part of how we were created.

 

[mgreen77]

The justification for LGBT relationships is just based on shallow opinion… Supporters of LGBT are all hypocrites as, if they justify LGBT relationships…

I think you’re projecting your own viewpoint and assumptions onto them here.

You’re starting with the assumption that it’s something in need of justification, assuming it’s inherently immoral unless somehow excused. But if there’s nothing wrong or immoral about homosexuality, then there’s no need to “justify” anything.

 

[JABA]

I think you’re projecting your own viewpoint and assumptions onto them here.

1)You can’t deny that the justification and promotion of LGBT relationships is based on an opinion, not biological facts and natural law. Natural law, does not support LGBT.

1. LGBT supporters are hypocrites, as they support and promote only certain disordered sexual relations. If you support LGBT, than incest and other disordered sexual relations should also be supported. This is where the argument for LGBT is flawed. They want rights for certain sexual relations, but not all. Sexual relationships can only be justified according to natural law, not an opinion, like that used by the LGBT supporters.

Again this is just your opinion, like that used by the LGBT supporters. LGBT goes against natural law, biology, anatomy and physiology, therefore it is wrong and therefore it can make it immoral. Do you support incest too?

 

[buffalo]

DEFEATING “GAY” ARGUMENTS WITH SIMPLE LOGIC

 

[Birdpreacher]

1)You can’t deny that the justification and promotion of LGBT relationships is based on an opinion, not biological facts and natural law. Natural law, does not support LGBT.

I agree with you but this argument holds no weight outside of our Catholic Faith, where everyone is free to interprete Natural Law as they see fit.

1. LGBT supporters are hypocrites, as they support and promote only certain disordered sexual relations. If you support LGBT, than incest and other disordered sexual relations should also be supported. This is where the argument for LGBT is flawed. They want rights for certain sexual relations, but not all. Sexual relationships can only be justified according to natural law, not an opinion, like that used by the LGBT supporters.

Once again I agree with you, but I doubt you will ever get anyone who supports gay marriage to say that they support a “disordered sexual relationship”. That is just something our faith teaches thus it will have little persuasive effect on people outside our faith.

Again this is just your opinion, like that used by the LGBT supporters. LGBT goes against natural law, biology, anatomy and physiology, therefore it is wrong and therefore it can make it immoral. Do you support incest too?

Oral Sex goes against natural law and we as CAtholics are still allowed to do it (that is not to completion for the male) Anyway the entire social instituion of marriage is a sham that is a far cry from our beloved sacrament. I see nothing sacred in the marriage of Kim Kardashian. I would argue that incest is technicly on the books in some states, take a look :

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

 

[mgreen77]

LGBT goes against natural law, biology, anatomy and physiology, therefore it is wrong and therefore it can make it immoral

This implies a directive, an assumption that sexual relations “should” only be for procreation. Many people reject that assumption, and so it doesn’t “go against” anything to them.

I’m not really trying to argue the morality of homosexuality with you, I’m just trying to point out that I don’t think “natural law” is going to convince a secularist that it’s immoral. Natural Law works well from a religious standpoint, since sex is seen as a being an inherently sacred act that should only be used for it’s “intended” purpose.

But if the sex act isn’t sacred to a secularist, Natural Law is pretty much irrelevant. You’d need to find some reason other than a “misuse” of the act, such as some horrible consequence, harm, exploitation of another, violence, etc.

 

[Dakota_Roberts]

Marriage between first cousins isn’t really incest, also there isn’t much harm unless basically your whole family is doing it à la Hapsburg

 

[Charlemagne_II]

mgreen

**But if the sex act isn’t sacred to a secularist, Natural Law is pretty much irrelevant. You’d need to find some reason other than a “misuse” of the act, such as some horrible consequence, harm, exploitation of another, violence, etc. **

A secularist who does not regard sex as sacred is also not going to regard any type of sex as sacred: for example, the sex act that produces babies.Such secularists probably don’t regard other things as sacred either, such as fidelity to one’s mate or heterosexual sex. Sex is the sacred cloth of life. Some people want to keep punching holes in the cloth without any regard for saving the cloth from defilement or destruction.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Birdpreacher

**Once again I agree with you, but I doubt you will ever get anyone who supports gay marriage to say that they support a “disordered sexual relationship”. That is just something our faith teaches thus it will have little persuasive effect on people outside our faith. **

It doesn’t matter whether you can get them to say they support a disordered sexual relationship. No doubt most people in a lunatic asylum do not believe they are in a disordered relationship with the world. But they are still in a disordered relationship with the world. And the world does not have to cow-tow to their idea of how the world should go.

 

[Baelor]

Since you are speaking as an atheist, rather than as a Catholic, I would ask why you think sodomy is not shameful when most people think it is. What would be your answer?

I do not care at all what other people think. Many people think Obama is a Muslim. He is obviously not. The ill-formed judgments of the hoi polloi are no concern of mine. Convince me that homosexuality is wrong on a secular basis. Argumenta ad numerum hardly qualify as proof. I believe it can be done, but this thread certainly has borne no intellectual fruit in that regard.

All these facts are based on biology, human anatomy and physiology and are irrelevant of religious beliefs.

I agree (both as a Catholic and “atheist”). That anything direct follows from this has not been compellingly presented.

Supporters of LGBT are all hypocrites as, if they justify LGBT relationships, they should also support, incest and other unnatural sexual relationships.

Not true; I already addressed this in an earlier post of mine. You cannot simply not respond to what I say and then repeat what you said earlier. I will, however, repeat what I said: Incest has genetic implications for offspring that homosexuality does not.

Why? All these are based on natural law, biology, anatomy and physiology

Natural law has not been established as correct in this thread and therefore is not admissible as proof.

This is just the way nature intended and we were created.

“Nature” cannot intend anything, and we were not created. Again, I point you in the direction of my previous posts, where I already addressed these specific claims (which have remain unchallenged, by the way).

1)You can’t deny that the justification and promotion of LGBT relationships is based on an opinion, not biological facts and natural law. Natural law, does not support LGBT.

Natural law does not exist.

LGBT supporters are hypocrites, as they support and promote only certain disordered sexual relationsIf you support LGBT, than incest and other disordered sexual relations should also be supported.

See above.

I will summarize the inherent logical flaw in your argument at this point. The schematic for your argument is as follows:

1. Sex is ordered toward procreation
2. Homosexuality is contrary to procreation
3. Therefore homosexual sexual intercourse is wrong

It should be very obvious that these statements do not follow. Both 1) and 2) are tenable, but 3) does not follow. The flaw comes in your assumption of natural law as extant and correct. The necessary schematic for your argument as it currently stands is as follows:

1. Natural law is correct
2. Sex is ordered toward procreation
3. Homosexuality is contrary to procreation
4. Therefore homosexual sexual intercourse is wrong

Your argument hinges on acceptance of natural law, but you have provided no reason for anyone who does not already believe in it to accept it as true. I have been saying this consistently in my posts, and others have echoed this sentiment, and still some of you are not listening? Why? Resolving the natural law issue is the only thing barring your argument from being correct, from my perspective.

Also, have you actually talked to atheists about this at all? The arguments you present (as has been mentioned) are framed in entirely religious dialog. They are not secular, they are Catholic without reference to God. Those two things are not the same thing.

It doesn’t matter whether you can get them to say they support a disordered sexual relationship. No doubt most people in a lunatic asylum do not believe they are in a disordered relationship with the world. But they are still in a disordered relationship with the world. And the world does not have to cow-tow to their idea of how the world should go.

Why are you even in this thread? Read the title: Why homosexuality is wrong from a secular perspective. Your posts not only do nothing to resolve the topics presented by the OP, they are actually counter-productive, since you refuse to consider the issue from a secular perspective, which is the full and only purpose of this thread. If you are unwilling or unable to engage in this thought experiment, fine, but please leave, since this thread is getting confusing with so many people having so many conversations at once.

 

[Serious]

I do not care at all what other people think.

My friend, you are unique and wonderful! You are the first person I have seen around here, who understands how the atheist mind works, and can argue accordingly. If only there would be others as clear-minded as you.

 

[DeoSalvatoreMeo]

Homosexual intercourse is unnatural. That’s not a theological statement, it’s a biological fact. I’m sure if someone could fit the male member into an ear, someone would try it. That would be unnatural, too. Just because it fits into an orifice doesn’t mean it belongs there.

 

[Christine85]

I would say a secular basis of argument is that it is not biologically natural, and therefore disordered.

 

[Poof]

tech.mit.edu/V124/N5/kolasinski.5c.html

The Secular Case Against Gay Marriage

ADAM KOLASINSKI
The debate over whether the state ought to recognize gay marriages has thus far focused on the issue as one of civil rights. Such a treatment is erroneous because state recognition of marriage is not a universal right. States regulate marriage in many ways besides denying men the right to marry men, and women the right to marry women. Roughly half of all states prohibit first cousins from marrying, and all prohibit marriage of closer blood relatives, even if the individuals being married are sterile. In all states, it is illegal to attempt to marry more than one person, or even to pass off more than one person as one’s spouse. Some states restrict the marriage of people suffering from syphilis or other venereal diseases. Homosexuals, therefore, are not the only people to be denied the right to marry the person of their choosing.

I do not claim that all of these other types of couples restricted from marrying are equivalent to homosexual couples. I only bring them up to illustrate that marriage is heavily regulated, and for good reason. When a state recognizes a marriage, it bestows upon the couple certain benefits which are costly to both the state and other individuals. Collecting a deceased spouse’s social security, claiming an extra tax exemption for a spouse, and having the right to be covered under a spouse’s health insurance policy are just a few examples of the costly benefits associated with marriage. In a sense, a married couple receives a subsidy. Why? Because a marriage between two unrelated heterosexuals is likely to result in a family with children, and propagation of society is a compelling state interest. For this reason, states have, in varying degrees, restricted from marriage couples unlikely to produce children.

Granted, these restrictions are not absolute. A small minority of married couples are infertile. However, excluding sterile couples from marriage, in all but the most obvious cases such as those of blood relatives, would be costly. Few people who are sterile know it, and fertility tests are too expensive and burdensome to mandate. One might argue that the exclusion of blood relatives from marriage is only necessary to prevent the conception of genetically defective children, but blood relatives cannot marry even if they undergo sterilization. Some couples who marry plan not to have children, but without mind-reading technology, excluding them is impossible. Elderly couples can marry, but such cases are so rare that it is simply not worth the effort to restrict them. The marriage laws, therefore, ensure, albeit imperfectly, that the vast majority of couples who do get the benefits of marriage are those who bear children.

Homosexual relationships do nothing to serve the state interest of propagating society, so there is no reason for the state to grant them the costly benefits of marriage, unless they serve some other state interest. The burden of proof, therefore, is on the advocates of gay marriage to show what state interest these marriages serve. Thus far, this burden has not been met.

One may argue that lesbians are capable of procreating via artificial insemination, so the state does have an interest in recognizing lesbian marriages, but a lesbian’s sexual relationship, committed or not, has no bearing on her ability to reproduce. Perhaps it may serve a state interest to recognize gay marriages to make it easier for gay couples to adopt. However, there is ample evidence (see, for example, David Popenoe’s Life Without Father) that children need both a male and female parent for proper development. Unfortunately, small sample sizes and other methodological problems make it impossible to draw conclusions from studies that directly examine the effects of gay parenting. However, the empirically verified common wisdom about the importance of a mother and father in a child’s development should give advocates of gay adoption pause. The differences between men and women extend beyond anatomy, so it is essential for a child to be nurtured by parents of both sexes if a child is to learn to function in a society made up of both sexes. Is it wise to have a social policy that encourages family arrangements that deny children such essentials? Gays are not necessarily bad parents, nor will they necessarily make their children gay, but they cannot provide a set of parents that includes both a male and a female.

Some have compared the prohibition of homosexual marriage to the prohibition of interracial marriage. This analogy fails because fertility does not depend on race, making race irrelevant to the state’s interest in marriage. By contrast, homosexuality is highly relevant because it precludes procreation.

Some argue that homosexual marriages serve a state interest because they enable gays to live in committed relationships. However, there is nothing stopping homosexuals from living in such relationships today. Advocates of gay marriage claim gay couples need marriage in order to have hospital visitation and inheritance rights, but they can easily obtain these rights by writing a living will and having each partner designate the other as trustee and heir. There is nothing stopping gay couples from signing a joint lease or owning a house jointly, as many single straight people do with roommates. The only benefits of marriage from which homosexual couples are restricted are those that are costly to the state and society.

Continued…

 

[Poof]

Some argue that the link between marriage and procreation is not as strong as it once was, and they are correct. Until recently, the primary purpose of marriage, in every society around the world, has been procreation. In the 20th century, Western societies have downplayed the procreative aspect of marriage, much to our detriment. As a result, the happiness of the parties to the marriage, rather than the good of the children or the social order, has become its primary end, with disastrous consequences. When married persons care more about themselves than their responsibilities to their children and society, they become more willing to abandon these responsibilities, leading to broken homes, a plummeting birthrate, and countless other social pathologies that have become rampant over the last 40 years. Homosexual marriage is not the cause for any of these pathologies, but it will exacerbate them, as the granting of marital benefits to a category of sexual relationships that are necessarily sterile can only widen the separation between marriage and procreation.

The biggest danger homosexual civil marriage presents is the enshrining into law the notion that sexual love, regardless of its fecundity, is the sole criterion for marriage. If the state must recognize a marriage of two men simply because they love one another, upon what basis can it deny marital recognition to a group of two men and three women, for example, or a sterile brother and sister who claim to love each other? Homosexual activists protest that they only want all couples treated equally. But why is sexual love between two people more worthy of state sanction than love between three, or five? When the purpose of marriage is procreation, the answer is obvious. If sexual love becomes the primary purpose, the restriction of marriage to couples loses its logical basis, leading to marital chaos.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Baelor
**
Why are you even in this thread? Read the title: Why homosexuality is wrong from a secular perspective. **

That is what I have been doing. I never mentioned the Church or the Bible. Are you confusing me with someone else?

Or are you just plain confused?

 

[Dale_M]

Homosexual intercourse is unnatural: that’s not a theological statement, it’s a biological fact.

Your argument is the same assumption which underlies the first post in this thread. That sex necessarily has procreation as a final end.

I don’t think that assumption can be empirically proven in primates and humans. We know that bonobos often use sex to ease social tensions between two individuals. This is a behavior not unknown to human couples. And there are numerous human cultures where multiple concurrent sexual relationships are used to cement social ties and equalize the distribution of resources.

Homosexuality could also (note: could) be an evolutionary safety valve. Non-reproductive members of a social group can aid the survival of the group by adding resources without adding to the demand for resources.

My point is that there are alternative explanations which are as valid as the assumption you made.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Dale

And homosexuality could (note: could) be an evolutionary safety valve. Non-reproductive members of a social group could aid the survival of the group by adding resources without adding to the demand for resources.

You can be a non-reproductive member of society … “adding resources without adding to the demand for resources” … without being a sodomite. Lots of people do it.

**That sex necessarily has procreation as a final end. **

Reproduction is the final end of sex. If it were not, there would be no one alive with whom to have sex. The pleasures of the bed are the means to that end. The pleasures are not designed by nature to be ends in themselves. That is why the hedonists are so bent on defending abortion. It’s an “easy” correction to a mistake in their pleasure-seeking. They think nothing of taking a life since pleasure is more important to them than life. Sometimes they take their own lives; eating, smoking, drinking, and drugging themselves to death in the vain pursuit of pleasure rather than to live and prosper.

 

[Baelor]

I would say a secular basis of argument is that it is not biologically natural, and therefore disordered.

That is not a complete argument; see my posts above.

That is what I have been doing. I never mentioned the Church or the Bible. Are you confusing me with someone else?

Nor have you mentioned anything productive. Let us go through your posts:

Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Jefferson (none of them Catholics) could easily see the violation of the natural order in sodomy.

I reasonably responded that “Plato said so” is not a reasonable argument, nor is “it is common sense.” Common sense is explicable. You did not explain how it is common sense. All you do is post vague statements that still rely on religious assumptions.

Because it is hurtful … not only physically but psychologically and spiritually.

“Spiritual” and “secular” are mutually exclusive.

And it is shameful. Can you think of anything shameful that is not also hurtful and immoral?

Shame is generally a religious concept in this regard. If you disagree, please point me in the direction of any prominent atheist philosopher/moralist who uses shame as an argument for the (im)morality of an action. Furthermore, this is not even an argument. You simply assert that it is shameful, and is therefore immoral? What kind of reasoning is that? Flawed, in case anyone is not sure.

Do you think secularists have no shame or morals? Do you know a secularist who freely admits to masturbating? And I suppose if he did, it would be because he has no morals or shame.

Circular reasoning with religious overtones, specifically the “shame.”

Since you are speaking as an atheist, rather than as a Catholic, I would ask why you think sodomy is not shameful when most people think it is. What would be your answer?

Not secular reasoning, or reasoning at all, for that matter.

A secularist who does not regard sex as sacred

“Sacred” is not even something that anything can be for a secularist. Therefore you are using a religious basis for your argument.

Or are you just plain confused?

No, you are. I will summarize what I have just done, so you understand. I have gone through each of your prior posts, and demonstrated how they fall into one of two categories:

1. Religious reasoning, which has absolutely no place at all in this thread, per the title
2. Reasoning that is so bad it does not even qualify as a contribution to the thread at all, because it literally amounts to you asserting that homosexual sex is wrong as proof that homosexual sex is wrong.

If you are incapable of grasping the nature of your presence in this thread, please stop posting so those of us who are actually interested in contributing may do so without distraction. If you do in fact understand, alter your posts accordingly, or leave for the above reason.

You can be a non-reproductive member of society … “adding resources without adding to the demand for resources” … without being a sodomite. Lots of people do it.

Does not matter, because this has nothing to do with the morality of homosexual sex.

Reproduction is the final end of sex.

Does not matter. The “final end” need not be followed if it exists at all.