runner, wait a second here:

Which are you saying -

a) Homosexuality has higher rates of disease because of the lifestyle (a point that can be argued)

or b) homosexual sex acts themselves are more likely to spread disease.

If it's b) then why is it heterosexual sex acts, with someone who has an STD, can spread it just as easily?

You can't support your prejudice when it flies in the face of medical fact.

'Fact.'

Are you aware of this word? You can argue point a). You can't actually argue point b). It's idiocy.

Can you clarify for me - are you actually trying to argue that sodomy itself is more likely to spread disease than heterosexual sex?

Either is capable of it, runner. If you're damning sodomy on the basis of disease spreading, you better damn heterosexual sex while you're at it.

Runners paranoia about sexual activity, appears to indicate his/her relationship life is one great sexual romp! There again it may be the opposite

katie0

I have objectified a class. That is true. This is also what religious people do, turning human aspirations into god. As Feurbach said, it is not god who creates man, but man who creates god.

In my defence, the Australian and other ruling classes can speak as one, often through their State (for example the criminalisation of homosexual activity in the 19th century, the support of the first and second imperialist world wars.)

On another point, it is not only religious fundamentalists who are dogmatic, unswerving in their faith, rigorously "applying" the old texts and so on. Some political sects exhibit the same trait.

I prefer Rosa Luxemburg and her injunction to doubt all.

I agree with Passy in that religious fundamentalists and certain political sects persecute homosexuality with equal vigour. Life as a gay person in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia was just as unsafe as Iran today - perhaps more so. As I said, that is because the rulers of those countries had particular, rigid ideas of how men and women are supposed to lead their lives. Homosexuality challenges these ideas.

I admire TurnLeftThenRight's attempts to present reasonable points when challenging homophobia. But you're on a hiding to nothing. All the literature on children coming out to their parents show that parents abandon their homophobic views after a profound emotional experience - not reasoned argument. They are put in a position of accepting their loved one or keeping their ideas and rejecting their child. Some people can be reached with reason alone but it is those parents (or siblings or even children) who seem set in their anti-gay ideas who can't be reached with rational argument. They need to learn that the undesirable "other" is part of their own family.

DavidJS

Interesting point about political sects in response to my post. I was thinking more about certain left groups whose whole modus operandi is to convert people to the revealed truth.

Of course Stalinism was very anti-gay and pro-procreation (with the order of Lenin going to women who had many children.) I guess the startig years of primitive capital accumulation (ie state capitalism) under Stalin required a massive increase in the workforce, at cheap cost - hence driving peasants off the land, using millions in slave labor, a low wage economy (eg cutting wages by fifty per cent in the 30s) and the motherhood and family fixation.

Some on the left have illusions in Cuba as being somehow socialist. My understanding is the stalinists there brutally suppress(ed??) gays, and may still do so.

It was the Bolsheviks, before the defeat of the revolution and the rise of Stalin, who de-criminalised homosexual activity (from memory.)

'Can't be reached with rational argument.' It is true that some people's homophobia is a deep-seated pathological condition. Such people need help.
But those who think that morality is decided by God and that his determinations are to be found in a sacred text can be reasoned with if they are willing to listen--at least that was my experience in 36 years of teaching university students. It is much easier if they are willing to examine the basis of their belief that moral truths ought to be (or are) determined by what is in the text. The Ghazali postion in Islamic theology and the similar Occamist position in Christian theology for example, that God determines by his unfettered will what good will be, that God actually makes morality--that position implies that God himself is neither good nor bad. Sincere religious people find this difficult, since it in turn implies that adoration and thanksgiving are absurd.

The idea that morality requires a non-moral foundation is harder to dislodge, although it is supect. (I don't think morality needs or can have one, any more than logic can or does.) But you can generally, in open discussion, show a person that they rely, and must rely, on moral positions which depend on their own judgements; that cannot be determined by the Bible or the Koran (or the Upanishads, or whatever).

A third weak point in the view is the belief that the text is a revelation by God, especially if it is supposed to be guaranteed in every detail. Examining the reasons that are given for this view generally exposes moral beliefs that are not based on the sacred texts.

Whether or not the contributors to ALO would be willing to engage in such a discussion, I do not know. It requires a good deal of patience and openness on both sides.