The Gay Agenda video blog: Why is poverty not a "gay issue"?

Okay, Nukely, I'm not as articulate as you but here is my take on that. I don't believe that "God" created gay people for an intellectual reason so much as I believe that nature created homosexuality in the animal kingdom (that includes homo sapiens) for a very real and logical purpose. If we could ever get our thinking back to the earth, the inner core of what makes all things what they are. Without going into the philosophy of it ad nauseum, the "reason" for gay people is to contribute to the diversity and intellectual resources, and the foundations of society without taking so heavily from it. (back to the cave for a minute- the gay hunters brought back meat for the tribe with no children of their own, the gay warriors fought to the death for the tribe without holding back for a family)

For example, gay people are responsible for adopting up to 30% of the adopted children in the nation. (I looked this up) That is a huge contribution to society.

The fact that gay people are earning less money, are treated as second class citizens, and are prohibited from the same considerations as the rest of society is a result of mass hysteria generated by organized religions over the last few hundreds of years and perpetrated by popular culture and hetero male dominated society. The side effect of this is poverty for many gay people.

You are so right in saying that we need to heal the greater community of mankind because that is where the true illness lies. When mankind is enlightened to the fact that ALL people in whatever way they are born are simply part of the diversity of nature and all that is, on this planet, then we have a hope of changing the lives of everyone for the better.

I say we take the warning labels off everything and let nature take it's course.

We, as citizens, need to be politically active in matters that range beyond just a narrow set of issues.

This is a two-way street by the way.  The conservatives are facing the same problem coming from the other direction.  The Religious Right's obsessive focus on opposing abortion and same-sex marriage to the point of not caring about anything else (like the economy or the war) has been having a negative impact on support for them, even amongst younger evangelical Christians who are branching out into issues like poverty and the environment.  The hazard that old-time conservatives like James Dobson are beginning to run into is that they are increasingly perceived as extremists who don't care about anything but a handful of "moral" issues.

Politically this same problem affects gays and in some cases threatens to marginalize the gay rights movement.  Politics is all about deal-making and give-and-take.  If we're there when it comes to our own issues, but gone when it comes to anything else, our ties to politicians weaken and become fragile.  They start wondering if we're really a political asset or a liability.

Now, you are completely misrepresenting my statements and in fact making false claims about what I actually did say.  I did not say that there should be no gay rights movement!

However, this goes back to the furious debates that were raging a few months ago about which Democratic presidential candidate supported same-sex marriage, which neither Clinton nor Obama does (at least not publicly).  My position was that taking a stance on either of them based on this issue was a pointless exercise.  None of the prospective candidates that supports same-sex marriage was going to win the nomination so as far as I was concerned the issue was off the table. The larger issue was picking the candidate most likely to be able to be the GOP in the actual election.

So in the case of this upcoming election same-sex marriage is not a direct issue.  It's indirect because the incoming president will likely fill several Supreme Court seats.  But none of them are going to wave a magic wand and legalize same-sex marriage (because Presidents can't make laws anyway).

Likewise, trumpeting same-sex marriage as an issue in this election, especially when it's not really on the table at the federal level for the moment, would only injure Obama in the battleground states.  And let me tell you Nukely, if McCain wins the presidency I would not be surpised to see conservatives appointees to the Supreme Court go out of their way to invalidate state same-sex marriages or at least reinforce federal refusal to acknowledge them.

There's no such thing as one-issue politics and anybody who thinks that there is is flat out naive.  Right now our movement, at least at a national level, needs to align with other progressive on issues besides just gay rights if we want to win in November and hopefully improve the political climate in this country after eight years of Bush. 

We also need to make damn sure that we are seen as an asset and not an albatross by the politicians we are trying to bend to our ideas because otherwise they won't do a damn thing for us.

Finally, the gay rights movement needs to stop spitting in the faces of single gay people and acting like we're beneath the notice of the movement except when they want us to send checks.  Just because we don't have partners that we're aching to marry doesn't mean we don't have concerns we want addressed.

There are some studies that deal with idea of what the point of sex and procreation as we know it (to take half of our genome and half of somebody else's) is from an evolutionary biology POV.

It was provoked by the thought that the point of evolution is that every organism has the desire to pass on their own DNA, so where does the advantage lie in it to mix up its own genes with the genes of another being. 

There are certain salamanders of which only female exists and who procreate by self-cloning more or less, without sex. Because of this every sponanteous mutation is passed on immediately for all offspring of this strand forever till another spontaneous mutation occurs. The theory is that sex (the mixing of two genomes) might help to make mutations and variations slower and to have them only stick around if they are indeed a very great advantage. Or to give a good gene the chance to be spread around more. 

Whatever the reason, sex is the form of procreation that evolution decided was the most advantageous. The whole idea of evolution is based on the idea that evolution only works because organisms have the desire to pass on their genes and for the majority of living organisms sex is the only way to do that. So from that POV exclusive homosexuality does not make sense. Since sex is the only way we know how to procreate so far, straight sex has to happen for evolution to work. 

To me the much more interesting question is not why it should be natural to be attracted to the opposite sex, but why there is an opposite sex in the first place. Two individuals engage in gene exchange, one part of the population carries the young ones, one doesn't. That's how the idea of having different sexes comes into being, and we refer to the one who carries as being female and the one who doesn't as male. But why is it that way? Why not just have one sex and have all members of a population be capable of bearing young ones? Wouldn't that be more practical? Like they engage in sex and afterwards they flip a coin about who is gonna be carrying the baby or both always carry a baby after a gene exchange? Yet very few species exist that have only one sex (like the aforementioned salamanders) and those use asexual procreation rather than in mixing their genes with other members of their population. 

Still, why even have parts of the population not capable of bearing children? One idea of course was that maybe its point is for the non pregnant party to protect the pregnant party while it is in a vulnerable state. Except that there are countless examples of species in nature where that isn't the case. Where the father doesn't stick around, where the father actually lets the female do all the food gathering, where the male partner doesn't engage in anything except battling other males and its whole body is honed for that purpose rather than any useful one. 

Maybe that is why we have sexes in the first place. One part of the population uses their physical resources to create reproductive organs capable of carrying a child, the other part uses up their resources to create weapons and strenght designed so the more robust genes can beat out the less robust genes by keeping the carries of those genes away from the females. 

But I have strayed off topic. I reccomend Richard Dawkins book The Ancestor's Tale, particular his chapter on the salamanders that are capable of asexual procreation. 

The "insistence that heterosexuality is "natural" and perfection itself," Anthony, where do you get that idea? Obviously EVERYTHING in nature is "natural," including homosexual love.

From a biological standpoint, an organism that reproduces is one that survives. Sexual reproduction is how most species perpetuate. If a member of a species is uninterested in sex to reproduce, or not attracted to the opposite sex, it stands to reason that that individual's genes will not be transmitted into the species.

Sex is a pleasurable activity, because why? We assume again that individuals who have pleasure while procreating will be the ones who do it, and do it more often, and therefore their genes will be transmitted to the gene pool. That would explain situational homosexual sexual activity, or even humping the leg of a couch, but it doesn't explain homosexual love, or life-long parings.

"But the studied ultilitarianism of capitailist culture demands a "tangible result" -- ie. an offspring for barter purposes." I don't even know what that is suppose to means or what the hell it has to do with this topic. Are you suggesting every scientific venture is a study in capitaliism?

Of the many possible 'reasons', allow me to present two: 1 "that's the way it is, now stop asking questions." that's the reaspm your mom might give you, 2 "There is a specific advantage to a species to have homosexual members". Granted there are other possibilites. Granted, possibility number 1 may be the pest answer but a little difficult to determine. Possibility 2. interests me because there has been a lot of scientific observation into natural selection.

"But you're not going to sit there and tell me every time straights (do it) they're doing it to procreate cause that's a lie and everyone knows it. Even scientists." No I wasn't even talking about that. We all know that people and animals do it for pleasure. I just explained the advantage of that. What we don't know is why two cobs would rather build a nest around a rock and roost together than procreate and roost with a female. I don't have to make "excuses" for hetro sex nor create a "reason" for gay love. I would be interested to know the origins, just as I am interested to know the origins of the planets, or the origins of the universe. Perhaps that's the "studied ultilitarianism of capitailist culture" coming through in me?

It seems that some species where the male doesn't participate in upbringing or protecting the mother or children, like Giraffes, are species with few predators or where food is not scarce. For most species, the pregnant female needs either protection or food for rearing young. Also some species that mature quickly and reproduce abundantly, like rodents, are less urgent about the care of the young.

I know that salamanders are capable of regenerating lost limbs, but I have never heard of a species that self-clones. Certain worms are hermaphroditic, but are only able to reproduce in one way at any given time, so a worm in "male mode" will mate with one in "female mode."

I believe the earliest organisms to reproduce sexually were plants. Algae is actually a clone, like the salamanders you mention.

I wasn't aware that cloning had an advantage over sexual reproduction in terms of diversity. I would guess that diversity is rarer amongst clones and I always thought it was a disadvantage because of that. All life forms on the planet almost died twice (suffocation) because of a lack of diversity. I believe that sexual reproduction was a key survival mechanism at both junctures.

Nobody knows why sex is pleasurable to us. It certainly doesn't seem to be that way for all animals while for some others like the infamous bonobo monkeys use it for all kinds of social interaction. 

Again, I was talking about sex/procreation through sex in the actract sense of exchanging of genes. And procreation is necessary. And mostly the only ways accessible to the living species we know feature gene exchange which is achieved through sex. Evolutionary theory is pretty much defined around the idea that everything, from one-celled organisms, to plants, to Elephants want to pass on their genes with whatever means and that it is what kicked evolution into gear in the first place. That doesn't mean that this is the truth or that evolution is the truth, but that is the best explanation that biologists have found so far. Again, remember that evolution was introduced long before we had anything like DNA. It came about because it explained fossils of intermediary stages and explained perfectly the behavior of many male animals that is there to impress females either with strenght (fighting the rivals) or with beauty (colorful feathers for example). Hence the theory of the essential drive to spread around ones genes. 

(It should be noted that Dawkins is not some rightwing nut. Just the opposite. He is one of the new atheists and the author of The God Delusion and the book I mentioned is a general narration of evolution, the important stages, the way to prove it, and some unsettling ideas of whether there can be evolutionary explantions for things like racism, which if found in some species of grasshoppers which could procreate with another strand of grasshoppers and create fertile offspring, but don't do so unless forced to. And Dawkins doesn't support any of these findings from a moral POV. The book is not a political piece, just his declaration or love for the theory of evolution and all its findings )

Hence the talk above about exclusive homosexuality. Everybody can have as much fun with their bodyparts as they want, but within the idea of evolution the passing on of genes has to happen at some point within the population (and the tool that was given to most animal species including us uses male/female interaction for that rather than asexual reproduction), regardless of what one does with the rest of ones time. And since evolution again goes back to the idea of organisms coming instilled with the desire to make it happen. 

It's not about what is right or wrong morally, but what could homosexuality mean from an evolution theory POV, how does it fit with the current scientific interpretation of evolution? Even if we were to assume that homosexuality is a dead end from an evolutionary POV, why would nature continue to produce homosexuality in every single generation? The whole idea of evolution is that nothing happens per accident or rather that accidents are quickly disposed of. If homosexuality really was useless then it would have died out in the gene pool (again, presuming it is gene related; I thought the latest findings seemed to consider something related to hormones within the womb during an important phase of development the most promising option?).

(for the record, I was always confused about the arguments of natural and unnatural, if sex for fun or bonding is unnatural, well, so are plumbing, antibiotics and not leaving handicapped children in the woods to die; the whole point of civilisation is to get BEYOND what just nature dictates us)