Since I am very busy these days, I decided to post an essay I wrote some months ago, hopefully we can have some good discussions soon and I can finish what I started on animal liberation too .Sorry for all the delays.I post it in three parts; being a bad reader , long materials seem too formiable for me to start.

Homosexuality(part 1)

Homosexuality has been stigmatized for centuries. Considering the homosexuality an aberration from the right path and treating it as an abomination mainly because of religious instructions, have forced homosexuals to hide their sexual orientation for centuries. Even when they finally felt they could let others know about it, they were troubled by others expecting them to change . It is annoying for most of them when people including their parents and psychiatrists look at their sexual orientation as a temporary aberration or as a phase they are going through. Peter Tatchell explains:
Some people do find that homosexuality is restricted to a limited period of their lives, such as in teenage experimentation or a brief mid-life affair. For these men and women, queer sex is a genuinely transient encounter.
But that is not the experience of most lesbians and gays whose same sex attraction feels eternal and lasts a lifetime. (35)
Society in this way has made it hard for them to deal with their problem. As we can clearly feel in this quotation, at least there is a certain group of gay people who has the conviction that any kind of change is impossible and I believe it is mostly the result of the way they have been treated all the time. No wonder they have embraced biological findings of the recent years. These findings try to tell us that there is a biological reason behind homosexuality. As discussed in The Biological Basis of Homosexuality, evidence has been found that shows the differences between brain, fingerprints and genes of homosexuals and straight people and the article emphasizes at the end that “ research has shown that sexual orientation certainly has biological links”. If homosexual behavior is an innate characteristic and not a choice, why homosexuals should be ashamed of telling everybody about it and why should they do anything to change it? These findings have resulted in homosexuality being what these people are as it was how they were acting before. My feeling is that we are too confused about the whole issue that we don’t know what we are doing; we draw hasty conclusions from scientific findings and don’t have a consistent approach in educating gay people. I believe there are some certain facts that are totally neglected here. There are things that can be wrong about the validity of these findings, and I will try to show some of them, but my focal point is to explain that we cannot draw the conclusion that being gay is a moral thing because of these findings and that we are doing a big disservice to ourselves by doing so. Though I have my own religious views about it, I will try to avoid any religious opinion as the basis of my argument, but since religion is intermingled with our lives, this can never be done completely.(posted by Farid)




Posted:Tuesday, April 08, 2003 |