ray j willings said:Well said. I mean Maaaaaaaarten is just looking to score goals and insinuate that all gays are rapists. I think perhaps Maaaaaaaarten should seek some therapy to get a grip of his underlying and plain stupid fear that is obviously lurking in his mind.
What?!
Maybe you need to reread my post, I certainly never said anything like this. I didn't say anything like all gay men being rapists nor was I insinuating it at all. I merely stated that the sexual behaviour of dolphins is not relevant for arguing whether or not similar sexual behaviour in humans is moral or not.
This post by ray j willings illustrates the type of 'discrimination' I was talking about earlier. I mean, don't get me wrong, I don't have anything to complain about, I feel quite free to believe what I want and to act on my beliefs, so I wouldn't really call it discrimination myself. But the point is; all I did was engage with one specific argument concerning the moral discussion about homosexuality and suddenly I'm being accused of insinuating all gay men are rapists and there's apparently obviously fear lurking in my mind. These types of accusations at my address are absolutely ridiculous and unfounded. But you can see it frequently in western media (at least I see it frequently in the media of my own country); everybody who comes close to saying something negative about homosexuality is portrayed extremely negatively, as a narrow minded bigot, basically a racist and obviously motivated by irrational fear.......
Actually I really wouldn't call it discrimination, but rather intolerance. Some topics in the modern liberal west aren't up for discussion; that's how it feels sometimes. If you show a dissenting opinion on certain topics, especially if religion plays any role in it, you can count on some antagonizing and personal attacks. Fortunately it doesn't go further than that, so as I said, I certainly don't have a lot to complain about.
Fortunately there are also people who actually reply to the point and without unfounded personal attacks:
hrotha said:It's relevant because "it's unnatural" is one of the most common reasons given by the Christian right to justify their anti-gay discrimination.
Well, still, what is natural for one species doesn't have to be natural for another species. So it still doesn't seem like a very strong argument to me, but fair enough.
Also, one important distinction to me made here is whether these animals actually show homosexuality as a kind of sexual orientation as a kind of identity, similar to what we see in modern western culture, or whether they simply show homosexual behaviour. Obviously in animals and throughout human history it is a fact that there is homosexual behaviour. But I don't think anything like a homosexual orientation is necessarily proven in animals (though I'll happily admit that my knowledge about this topic is very limited, so please correct me if I'm wrong ) and to my knowledge the modern concept of (homo)sexual orientation as a kind of identity is profoundly absent in history up until the 19th century. It's always been quite striking to me that even in cultures where homosexual behaviour is considered perfectly acceptable (for instance in ancient Greece) they don't have a similar notion of a homosexual orientation similar to what we are being taught today at all. It's quite striking to me that this notion is to my knowledge completely absent up until 19th century western culture even though people claim nowadays that like ~5% of the people or even more are supposed to have this sexual orientation. So I do wonder whether it is really natural in the sense that a homosexual orientation is a kind of universal biologically determined phenomenon, or whether it is at least in part a social construct of modern western culture.
hrotha said:Unlike dolphin rape, however, dolphin (and human) homosexuality doesn't hurt anyone - on the contrary, it brings about happiness to the people involved. Hell, that must be as close to a definition of "morally right" as you can get.
Well, I'm not a hedonist at all, so I wouldn't really ascribe to this definition of what is morally right.