I certainly hope this all backfires.

You adamantly assume that homosexuality has no non-physiological causes without having any familiarity whatsoever with claims to the contrary. Dismissal of unseen evidence isn’t very Sherlock Holmes.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#Biological_psychology

Still no protesting at the large black conservative churches in South Los Angeles.

/better to be safe than sorry.

I have not engaged in that debate here because I have not spent weeks and months researching a near-century of research that support the disorder hypothesis. The researchers on both sides of the argument need to gather and bullet-point their data so that average folks can understand what they are claiming and why.

Most average folks don’t know either side’s evidence. Those many decades of research aren’t everyday knowledge. Nobody ever explains why 13 members of the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of sexual disorders in its Diagnostics and Statistics Manual in 1973 (1), and the fact that it happened under intense lobbying from gay activists leads many to doubt that the decision was really a scientific one. Ironically, the architect of this decision disputes the immutability claim. (2)

People talk a lot about alleged physiological causes without presenting the evidence – but that is an issue separate from the *psychology* of homosexuality. Paranoid schizophrenia evidently has biological causes. (3) We assess its quality on psychology – what it does to emotions, attitudes and behaviors. Are gays more prone than the general population to detrimental psychological phenomena? One side says yes, another says no, both say they’ve got studies to back them up. Refer to my previous remark about bullet-pointing.

My first paragraph was a response to the myth you alluded to in comment #120, that treats “innate” and “consciously chosen” as the sole alternative explanations for the origins of homosexuality. I explained the third alternative, subconscious direction. Many on the side of the argument opposite yours often muddy the conversation by confusing behavior and orientation – people consciously choose to have sex with someone, but they don’t consciously choose attractions.

The third raises an entirely new topic, the motivation behind the gay marriage crusade. It speaks for itself.

(1) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,904053,00.html
(2) http://www.narth.com/docs/evidencefound.html
(3) http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/paranoid-schizophrenia/DS00862

As to your point about contracts, I wrote in an earlier post that the state shouldn’t be in the marriage business at all. It should only provide legal civil unions to consenting adults. Marriage with all its connotations and differing meanings should be the province of the church (or synagogue or mosque or…). Let them define them as they will. That would ensure freedom of religion along with separation of church and state.
I’d like to see a state proposition that offered the option of civil unions for homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. I suspect many people of both groups, given a choice, would choose the civil union option in lieu of the marriage license, and then (as they already do) have a private religious marriage ceremony.

Psychiatric researchers have never claimed that people consciously choose sexual orientation. Psychological disorders not rooted in biological causes (e.g. brain chemistry imbalance) are rooted in *subconscious* causes. People experience negative events, the subconscious self-defense mechanisms manifest themselves in the form of irrational attitudes that insulate the individual from dealing with those events. I think that most people instinctively know this but have difficulty putting it in the right words.

Of course, the instinctive response is, “But homosexuality isn’t a disorder.” People tell us that and don’t explain why. Thus, as I said in my earlier comment, the debate is stalled.

On another note…I find it interesting that SSM proponents reject compromises that create contracts with all benefits of marriage except for the name. People sense something Orwellian in a crusade to use the force of law to change the English language – and they’re not too far off the mark. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the government created Newspeak as an attempt to micromanage culture; Wikipedia sums the goal nicely: “[I]f something can’t be said, then it can’t be thought” (1). The goal is to remove from the word “marriage” its implicit connotation that heterosexuality is somehow better than homosexuality.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

Wow, this does seem more serious than I thought. So now it’s lynching.

Promoguy, I’m not saying that government’s refusal to acknowledge gay marriage is the equivalent of a lynching. I’m saying that Tom’s argument — which is the claim that if the majority of society wants to do something or prohibit something, it has the right to do so, regardless of the consequences to various individuals — I’m saying that that argument amounts to the claim that if the mob (society) wants to lynch some particular individual, it has the right to do so. If your rights can be violated any time the majority feels like it, then what you have are not rights but permissions that society can revoke at will.

Nor is anything fundamental changed if the mob first organizes a vote on the question and allows the intended victim to cast a ballot.