If You Believe Homosexual Acts Are Immoral, Why Are You Labeled a "homophobe"?

And I demonstrated how your logic used was fallacious, though all you did was ignore it and repeat the same message. Restrictions made in laws should serve a legitimate state interest. It doesn't matter that a gay person can marry someone of the opposite sex just as a straight person can. This is not how equal protection works. The question is whether the restriction serves a legitimate state interest. Without this consideration, it would be too easy to craft laws that "pretend" to apply to everyone equally, yet in effect, they tend to disproportionately or entirely effect one subset of the population. This is why the courts consider the basis for the restriction. Your argument is irrelevant to this discussion. Continue to repeat it if you want, it doesn't matter because it will have no sway.

On a side note, this argument was briefly considered in one of the recent cases, and here's what they had to say about that:

 

In the states where same sex marriage is now legal, that is largely true. In the other states- it isn't.

 

Do you know the difference between the past and the present? First of all, your assessment of the past is horse crap. At the very worst, homosexuality has been treated as a misdemeanor when it became public, which wasn't often. Your viewing history through your hatred for America, not from any sense of reality or intellectual honesty.

And moreover, my point, which was lost on you because of your hate, is that today homosexuals are able to say they're gay without fear while in other countries they are hung in the streets when discovered. Yet there is a disproportionate amount of hate from you people toward one of the most tolerant nations on earth toward lifestyle choices. You're no different than the feminists who couldn't care less how women are treated in Muslim countries but are so sure that women are so OPRESSED in this country because taxpayers don't want to pay for contraception. You people have no sense of proportion and view the world through hate and emotion rather than logic and abstract. It's why it's impossible to have an intelligent discussion with you on this subject or any other.

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That's not true, but I'm not going around in circles with you because you truckle to ideology rather than truth. Have a nice day.

 

Hmm who is expressing hatred towards the United States? Certainly I am not. I am opposed to the homophobes who would deny homosexuals equal rights in the United States.

Frankly that is as if I were to complain that you hate the United States because of your opposition to equal rights for homosexuals.

But thanks for the comparison to feminists- they too ask for equal rights.

 

Big words coming from someone who didn't address my post either. But if stroking your ego makes you feel better about yourself, by all means.

Anyway, it's not not my fault you were asking the wrong criteria. Your question is whether or not homosexuality is innate, and to prove this, you wish to see evidence of a specific gene. Absence of such a discovery, in your mind, means there is no evidence, while you ignore other evidence given to you. I'm sorry, but your failure to either consider or understand the evidence given to you does not constitute a failure on our part to have it. The answer is complex and multifaceted. Some forms of homosexual behavior are certainly predominately or entirely cultural. Some have biological predispositions. We know both are true because of specific anecdotes, twin studies, and statistics. Although there is known to be a biological component, yes, questions remain as to the exact cause... The preponderance of evidence is pointing to epigenetic factors rather than specific genes, which is why there is a greater tendency for heritability, rather than a 100% correlation with a specific gene set. This should not be surprising, as virtually all characteristics of our body are a result of epigenetic factors rather than genetic factors (i.e. this is what causes the cells in your heart tissue to be different from the cells in your brain even though they have identical genetic material... factors which influence the expression of genes, rather than gene itself, are both heritable, and are less consistent than the genetic sequence itself.)

Anyway, I digress. I'll just sum it up by saying that I believe both sides are correct, that there is certainly cultural/environmental causes for homosexual behavior, while at the same time we know that there is a biological predisposition.

Really,

 

Hyperbole. Lol, who said I hated America? I'm just being critical of your statement that we should be "thankful". Imagine that you were punching me in the face over and over and over again, and then I finally punched back, causing you to stop. Should I be "thankful" to you? Oh, thank you for not punching me in the face any more. I'm willing to accept that my country is not perfect, not in the past nor in the present, but that doesn't mean I "hate" my country (and it also doesn't mean I don't acknowledge that other countries are far worse). I am perfectly aware of the difference between the past and present, I just resent your statement about being "thankful", and I am also aware of how history can repeat itself. We worked for what we got, thank you very much.

As for the the truth in history, go ahead, look it up, the punishment was death, castration and imprisonment in the USA. Yes, the fact that one parent was homosexual was a reason to strip custody rights. Yes, the police would often turn a blind eye to abuse, if they were not participating in it themselves. Or how about after WWII, as a fun example... where when it ended, those who were sent to concentration camps for being homosexual, after being "liberated" by the Allied forces, were sent back to prison to serve the remainder of their sentence.

But all that aside, often the most damaging thing was abandonment by family... LGBT, today, represent 20 to 40% of all homeless youth in America, the vast majority of which were either kicked out or abused by their parents. This is what I call the real tragedy. The history of legal discrimination merely supported what was, and continues to be, the more insidious tragedy of abandonment and all of the social, economic, physical and emotional tolls that come with it. This is what I'm more concerned about today.

 

Massive BS here. 10 years ago was 2004.

Can you find ANY examples of homosexuals being executed, jailed or castrated by state, local or the federal govt. for performing homosexual acts in the time period of say 1950 up to the date you claim (2004)?

Surely given the tone you adopted, there must be hundreds if not thousands of examples of this?

At a rate of one per week over 54 years you should be able to come up with at least 2500 examples or so.

 

Ha! I see your weak attempt to convince us the use of the word "homophobe" was just an unemotional attempt to be accurate didn't last long. It didnt't take long for you to revert back to its intended usage as a slur and personal attack.

Thanks for showing all of us you cannot be trusted, and proving what those of us wo oppose the gay bullying have been saying all along - gays dont want honesty or simple equality, they want domination and will do anything including lie to get it.

As to the rest, total BS. Show me the gay experience has been anything close to the black experience. Show me the plantations worked by gays who were kidnapped, beaten, and sold as property.

Show me the poverty and despair in the gay community resulting from centuries of mistreatment.

Show me the ghettos and slums filled with gays who were kept down by the gay Jim Crow.

You cant because none of that happened. All you have is a whining complaint that you can't get "married". So sad, cry me a river.

 

LOL- you 'insist' that I compare the discrimination of gays to the discrimination of African Americans? And ignore entirely everything i said.


Oh so you don't like me comparing bigotry to bigotry?

LOL- as if I care that you are outraged that I call them all what they are- bigotry.

"legitimately oppressed groups"- homosexuals in America were oppressed far more than Jews in America were ever oppressed. Homosexuals have been jailed for being homosexuals, they have been beaten for being homosexuals and they have been murdered for being homosexuals. Up until the 1960's all of those things happened with great regularity.

The 'gay lifestyle' is very much like the African American 'lifestyle' or the Jewish 'lifestyle' - there are those who can't stand it, and would discriminate against them because of their 'lifestyle'.

Bigotry is bigotry.

Not my problem you don't care about bigotry when it is directed towards homosexuals.

 

Ha ha! That's why lefties hate math...it always works against them.

 

You are the one trying to gain legitimacy by piggybacking on the backs of blacks. They have carried enough already, they dont need to carry wanna-be victims.

 

Oh so you don't like me comparing bigotry to bigotry?

LOL- as if I care that you are outraged that I call them all what they are- bigotry.

"legitimately oppressed groups"- homosexuals in America were oppressed far more than Jews in America were ever oppressed. Homosexuals have been jailed for being homosexuals, they have been beaten for being homosexuals and they have been murdered for being homosexuals. Up until the 1960's all of those things happened with great regularity.

The 'gay lifestyle' is very much like the African American 'lifestyle' or the Jewish 'lifestyle' - there are those who can't stand it, and would discriminate against them because of their 'lifestyle'.

Bigotry is bigotry.

Not my problem you don't care about bigotry when it is directed towards homosexuals.

 

I did not say how common it was for legal prosecution to go all the way through. If you want to find modern examples of arrests, they're easy to find... Besides the obvious example of Lawrence, people have even been arrested as recently as 2013 by police who, apparently, were not aware that the law in their state had been invalidated. Rather than face legal prosecution, what was far more common was "sting" operations. Gay bars would be raided, and often the "perpetrators" were only held for up to 24 hours and then released. Rather than to prosecute, idea was to elicit social justice by "outing" them, harassing them and making it publicly known that they were at a gay bar. These aspects of social justice and ostracism were far more prevalent in the latter half of the century.

 

all the folks who attack homosexual acts, seem to have no problem with straight couples engaging in oral sex, anal sex, and other acts of sodomy.

hypocrites.

 

The only thing that comes to my mind is when my Idaho senator was caught in an airport restroom sex sting soliciting sex with men. I have to wonder if it's cases like this that are cited as "being arrested for being gay" because the arrest wasn't for being gay, it was for soliciting sex in an airport restroom. If you started citing these alleged cases of arrests for being gay with valid links, I'm sure I can shoot them down one by one because the arrest was for something else, not being gay. It's a tireless task for me because you on the Left love to skew things and people like me are left with the errand of setting the record straight.

So go right ahead, start providing your "proof".

 

Yes, Hitler attempted that, as did Stalin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, and the Taliban, and the North Korean 'beloved leader' is still doing that. It always works out splendidly - does it not?

 

You can cut-and-paste all you want, it just makes you look desperate.

Blacks and Jews don't have to repeatedly bleat their case because they have a true civil rights history.

 

for some people discrimination against homosexuals is fine and dandy.

 

setting the record straight. - i see the pun there.

Lets start off with Lawrence.

On September 17, 1998, John Lawrence,[10][11] a gay 55-year-old medical technologist, was hosting two gay acquaintances, Tyron Garner,[12] age 31, and Robert Eubanks,[13] 40, at his apartment on the outskirts of Houston. Lawrence and Eubanks had been friends for more than 20 years. Garner and Eubanks had a tempestuous on-again off-again romantic relationship since 1990. Lacking transportation home, the couple were preparing to spend the night. Eubanks, who had been drinking heavily, left to purchase a soda from a nearby vending machine. Apparently outraged that Lawrence had been flirting with Garner, he called police and reported "a black male going crazy with a gun" at Lawrence's apartment.[14]

Four Harris County sheriff's deputies responded within minutes and Eubanks pointed them to the apartment. They entered the unlocked apartment toward 11 p.m. with their weapons drawn. In accordance with police procedures, the first to arrive, Joseph Quinn, took the lead both in approaching the scene and in later determining what charges to bring, if any. He later reported seeing Lawrence and Garner having anal sex in the bedroom. A second officer reported seeing them engaged in oral sex, and two others did not report seeing the pair having sex. Lawrence did not acquiesce to the police. Instead he repeatedly challenged the police for entering his home. Quinn had discretionary authority to charge them for a variety of offenses and then to arrest them or not. When Quinn considered charging them with having sex in violation of state law, he had to get an Assistant District Attorney to check to the statutes to be certain they covered sexual activity inside a residence. He was told that Texas's anti-sodomy statute, the "Homosexual Conduct" law, made it a Class C misdemeanor if someone "engages in deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex".[15] The statute, Chapter 21, Sec. 21.06 of the Texas Penal Code, had been adopted in 1973 when the state revised its criminal code to end its proscription on heterosexual anal and oral intercourse.[16]

Quinn decided to arrest Lawrence and Garner and charge them with having "deviate sex". In the opinion of the author of the most detailed account of the arrests, Quinn's decision was likely driven by Lawrence's verbal abuse, along with some combination of Quinn's negative response to homosexuality, the fact that Lawrence was white and Garner was black, and the false gun report.[17] In the separate arrest reports he filed for each, he wrote that he had seen the arrestee "engaged in deviate sexual conduct namely, anal sex, with another man".[17]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas

I used wiki as a short cut, but you can go to the actual Supreme Court decision if you want it.

Recent cases in Lousiana
http://theadvocate.com/home/6580728-125/gays-in-baton-rouge-arrested

An undercover East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff’s deputy was staking out Manchac Park about 10 a.m. one day this month when a slow-moving sedan pulling into the parking lot caught his attention. The deputy parked alongside the 65-year-old driver and, after denying being a cop, began a casual conversation that was electronically monitored by a backup team nearby.

As the two men moved their chat to a picnic table, the deputy propositioned his target with “some drinks and some fun” back at his place, later inquiring whether the man had any condoms, according to court records. After following the deputy to a nearby apartment, the man was handcuffed and booked into Parish Prison on a single count of attempted crime against nature.

There had been no sex-for-money deal between the two. The men did not agree to have sex in the park, a public place. And the count against the man was based on a part of Louisiana’s anti-sodomy law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court a decade ago.

The July 18 arrest is among at least a dozen cases since 2011 in which a Sheriff’s Office task force used the unenforceable law to ensnare men who merely discussed or agreed to have consensual sex with an undercover agent, an investigation by The Advocate has found.

District Attorney Hillar Moore III said his office refused to prosecute each one of the cases because his assistants found no crime had occurred. After inquiries from the newspaper last week, he arranged to meet with Sheriff’s Office investigators to discuss the implications of the Supreme Court ruling.

Casey Rayborn Hicks, a Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman, denied that investigators had been misapplying the anti-sodomy law, which remains among the state’s criminal statutes.

“This is a law that is currently on the Louisiana books, and the sheriff is charged with enforcing the laws passed by our Louisiana Legislature,” Hicks said. “Whether the law is valid is something for the courts to determine, but the sheriff will enforce the laws that are enacted.”

Moore noted that public sex acts and the solicitation of “unnatural carnal copulation” for money remain illegal. But those elements were lacking from these 12 cases, and most of the men were arrested after agreeing to have sex away from the park at a private residence.

 

Here's the problem. When asked to demonstrate a trend you claim of homosexuals being persecuted, imprisoned, and even executed for being gay, you come up short. In fact, you come up desperate.

You came up with two cases, one of them a 16 year old case that we're all well aware of that caused the striking down of Texas's sodomy laws and by extension all such laws across the nation. The second was a case where sex was propositioned and agreed to in a public setting. Though the arrest was made, the DA refused to prosecute and the sheriff's department apologized.

Compare this to Nigeria where gays are actually being rounded up and imprisoned

Compare this to Saudi Arabia where gays are hanged by the neck in public view on a regular basis.

This is the frustration Americans have with the extreme Left to which you belong. You calumniate America as this horrible, racist, bigoted, homophobic country and nothing could be further from the truth. Such a viewpoint exists apart from an informed understanding of real oppression that happens all over the world where gays are in hiding fearing for their very lives. They should be so lucky to live in a country where they can have their own cable channel, march in gay pride parades, and be open about their sexual inclination.

You all remind me of the phrase "nor were they thankful" taken from Romans Chapter 1 describing the wicked of the final days. None of you are thankful. None of you talk about what a great country this is and how fortunate you are to live here. All of the tolerance this country has is lost on you because you restlessly look for any perceived disparity to further your warped view that America is this evil place full of hate and bigotry. It's you, the feminists, the race hustlers, you all do it and it pisses people off because America is a good country full of good people who don't care what kind of life you decide to live. This post of yours demonstrates exactly what I'm talking about, the "proof" not measuring up to the hype by which you fling invectives at this great nation.

Shame on you.

 

Here is what you claimed:

If you started citing these alleged cases of arrests for being gay with valid links, I'm sure I can shoot them down one by one because the arrest was for something else, not being gay. It's a tireless task for me because you on the Left love to skew things and people like me are left with the errand of setting the record straight.

So I provided two specific instances, covering 13 actual cases of arrests of men for 'being gay'. Is this a huge amount- of course not. Luckily most such laws have been eliminated and usually are not enforced anymore- this is a good thing.

I am absolutely glad we are not Nigeria or Saudi Arabia or Russia for that matter. Not that I think we should measure the United States by how badly other countries are behaving.

Really don't project your own narrow point of view on Americans. I am very glad to live in America- we are better than most of the world. Since the 1960's most of the legal discrimination and oppression towards homosexuals has been eliminated. This is a good thing.

Look in the mirror for your answers. I love America, and it is a good country full of good people, despite the efforts of some of the homophobes here on PF to paint it otherwise.

And of course nowhere have I 'flung' invectives at the United States. This is just purely your imagination.

Oh please- shame on you.

 

SFJEFF

You basically said you had numerous examples of gay people being "castrated & executed" by government officials in modern times.

Instead what you have are a couple of cases that are so rare that they routinely make "believe it or not" stories about them in which homosexuals got some minor problems from overzealous LEOs enforcing a law so obscure that no one cares anymore.

Face it, no one in the U.S. federal, state, or local govt. in modern America has been murdering or castrating homosexuals as a part of a governmental policy.

Face it again. For a so called "persecuted minority" homosexuals have not been treated badly.

 

For the same reason that if you believe interracial acts are immoral, you are labeled a racist.

 

^That makes not the least bit of sense except that homosexuals love to glom their cause on to past racial issues as though the two were remotely alike.

 

I think you are confusing me with someone else. I haven't made any such claims.

Have homosexuals been discriminated against? Yes. Was there systemic discrimination in some areas- yes- the U.S. military was a very good example, that has essentially been eliminated- all a good thing.

The 1950's were the heyday of persecution against homosexuals- it was wrapped up in McCarthism- hundreds were fired from the State Department for suspicion of being gay. Meanwhile in major cities like New York, there was systematic police abuse of homosexuals that did not end until the 1960's.

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And for the same reason that if you believe that Jews are morally corrupt, you are labeled an anti-semite.