Poll: Can Gays & Lesbians alter their sexual orientation?

The Power of Marriage
By DAVID BROOKS


Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide. He or she is ripping the veil from all that is private and delicate in oneself, and pulverizing it in an assembly line of selfish sensations.

But marriage is the opposite. Marriage joins two people in a sacred bond. It demands that they make an exclusive commitment to each other and thereby takes two discrete individuals and turns them into kin.

Few of us work as hard at the vocation of marriage as we should. But marriage makes us better than we deserve to be. Even in the chores of daily life, married couples find themselves, over the years, coming closer together, fusing into one flesh. Married people who remain committed to each other find that they reorganize and deepen each other's lives. They may eventually come to the point when they can say to each other: "Love you? I am you."

Today marriage is in crisis. Nearly half of all marriages end in divorce. Worse, in some circles, marriage is not even expected. Men and women shack up for a while, produce children and then float off to shack up with someone else.

Marriage is in crisis because marriage, which relies on a culture of fidelity, is now asked to survive in a culture of contingency. Today, individual choice is held up as the highest value: choice of lifestyles, choice of identities, choice of cellphone rate plans. Freedom is a wonderful thing, but the culture of contingency means that the marriage bond, which is supposed to be a sacred vow till death do us part, is now more likely to be seen as an easily canceled contract.

Men are more likely to want to trade up, when a younger trophy wife comes along. Men and women are quicker to opt out of marriages, even marriages that are not fatally flawed, when their "needs" don't seem to be met at that moment.

Still, even in this time of crisis, every human being in the United States has the chance to move from the path of contingency to the path of marital fidelity ?- except homosexuals. Gays and lesbians are banned from marriage and forbidden to enter into this powerful and ennobling institution. A gay or lesbian couple may love each other as deeply as any two people, but when you meet a member of such a couple at a party, he or she then introduces you to a "partner," a word that reeks of contingency.
You would think that faced with this marriage crisis, we conservatives would do everything in our power to move as many people as possible from the path of contingency to the path of fidelity. But instead, many argue that gays must be banished from matrimony because gay marriage would weaken all marriage. A marriage is between a man and a woman, they say. It is women who domesticate men and make marriage work.

Well, if women really domesticated men, heterosexual marriage wouldn't be in crisis. In truth, it's moral commitment, renewed every day through faithfulness, that "domesticates" all people.

Some conservatives may have latched onto biological determinism (men are savages who need women to tame them) as a convenient way to oppose gay marriage. But in fact we are not animals whose lives are bounded by our flesh and by our gender. We're moral creatures with souls, endowed with the ability to make covenants, such as the one Ruth made with Naomi: "Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried."

The conservative course is not to banish gay people from making such commitments. It is to expect that they make such commitments. We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.

When liberals argue for gay marriage, they make it sound like a really good employee benefits plan. Or they frame it as a civil rights issue, like extending the right to vote.

Marriage is not voting. It's going to be up to conservatives to make the important, moral case for marriage, including gay marriage. Not making it means drifting further into the culture of contingency, which, when it comes to intimate and sacred relations, is an abomination.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/22/opinion/22BROO.html

For certain there are lots of guys who are 2's through 5's -- but you and EhBeth are really trying to make that seem almost pathalogical.

What everyone should do is to allow everyone else to have his/her own sexuality -- and allow that to be okay without all the judgements.

Maybe it's the people I choose to be friendly with - or they chose me - or something in between ... but ... I am having difficulty thinking of any 0's or 6's in my circle. My experience is with a world of 2's and 3's and 4's.

Frank Apisa wrote:

For certain there are lots of guys who are 2's through 5's -- but you and EhBeth are really trying to make that seem almost pathalogical.

What everyone should do is to allow everyone else to have his/her own sexuality -- and allow that to be okay without all the judgements.

Excuse me?
Frank, read what I said.

Quote:

Maybe it's the people I choose to be friendly with - or they chose me - or something in between ... but ... I am having difficulty thinking of any 0's or 6's in my circle. My experience is with a world of 2's and 3's and 4's.

I didn't say anything about judging people. I was commenting on my personal circle. There's nothing in there about people being TOO gay or TOO straight for me to consider them as friends. Sexuality is not on my list of things to evaluate people by.

There does seem to be a genetic basis for homosexuality, but it plays a relativly minor role.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dh93ge.html

Sodomizers tend to be sodomizers by nature, and so are presumably rarely changeable.

Those who like to be sodomized do so because they are addicted

(semen contains addictive chemicals capable of being absorbed well by the digestive system).

The sodomized can be changed in all likelihood, but it is difficult, akin to changing an alcoholic.

As for lesbians, I suspect that most of them are really confused bisexuals or perhaps have had bad experiences with males that make them underestimate their natural desires for males while simultaneously needing female support which they confuse for homosexuality.

I suspect pretty much all females have a (perfectly innocuous) capacity to feel erotic feelings for other females.

There does seem to be a genetic basis for homosexuality, but it plays a relativly minor role.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dh93ge.html


The study which you linked to turned out to be bogus, or at any rate not able to be replicated. I know the clamor surrounding the discovery that the gay gene study was bogus was not nearly as strong in the mostly gay media, but here is a link to that news story. Study Questions Gene Influence on Male Homosexuality

To those on this forum supporting sodomy: The purpose of sodomy is enslavement.

It is evil.

The well-meaning of you are just assuming that it is not.

I have decided it is evil because I have thought carefully about it.

You, I presume, are assuming it is not evil because you have the wrong sort of faith,

a faith that makes you assume things merely because other people say they are so.

The faith you require is the faith to doubt.

Think back to when you were a child. Would sodomy have appeared beautiful to you?

I think not.

It is disgusting.

Really, is there anything more disgusting?

Too many of you, you laugh at yourselves like nothing matters.

Well, let me tell you beauty matters and your own sense of the aesthetic matters.

But cowards, cowards are you for the most part--Still feeling the need perhaps to inwardly cowtow to the domineering ****-praising brats who you felt you had to appease in elementary and middle school.

Were this the nineteenth century the most of you would likely be against sodomy and innocuous lust both.

Now that we're here you're just as much pawns of prevailing fashion as you would have been then.

This is bad.

About sodomy people tend to be more conformist than anything else.

Accordingly, in a sense there is nothing worse or more dangerous for the majority to be in error about.