Bennettresearch said:
Hi Flappy,
Since the replies I have given to you are about statements in other posts by you, I can see where others have missed it and it looks like I am picking on you. What they don't realize is that you drew first blood in the insult department
Where? Dude, you have been complaining from the very beginning of our discussions that I have been somehow rubbing my homosexuality in people's faces. This is an insult upon my character. Not everyone fits as neatly as you would like into your stereotypes.
and was so busy shotgunning your responnse
Shotgunning? What does this word mean?
that you presented nothing in the way of debate, only flack that was a total misunderstanding of what I said.
So you continually claim. Poor Brennet. Everyone just wants to push their views on him and just shoot him down and misunderstand him. Oh, poor, poor, misunderstood Brennet, quit using the confusion caused by your inability to clearly present your views to accuse others of intentionally trying to misrepresent you or attempting to shoot you down. It's so tired and lame.
So while you make think that you have acheived a reversal, we both know that you went over the line.
Huh? I dunno where. I've tried to stay polite, though I sometimes let my emotions on the issue get out of hand. You, however, have been overtly and purposefully offensive.
The animal kingdom is irrelevant. As humans we are higher beings and are expected to act as such.
How is it that being heterosexual makes one a higher being? How exactly does homosexuality make one a lower being? This is an easy statement to misread, so please clarify it.
The statement, by someone else, about a biblical dominion is the type of assumptions that get thrown out by defenders in this thread. I never said that or made that reference. Maybe we can make something clear here. You can't rightfully make bad assumptions and attacks on someone else and then claim some kind of victimhood.
What reason outside of your religious beliefs do you have for being anti-gay?
My challenge here is to quit representing yourself as a victim. I had bullies attack me in and out of school. Maybe I am more fortunate because I could stand up to them and fight back.
I have not at all tried to play the victim, as you say. Also, youre assuming that I have complained of an excessive amount of bullying, and the fact is that I have not. I stated quite clearly that I could hold my own, and this is at least partly due to an above average muscular development. Though I am not extraordinarily fit, I have never been overcome in a real fight. When I was young, the boys enjoyed doing a bit of playful wrestling every once in a while, and I proved myself capable of besting most of them, including a few of those who showed slightly more development than myself. Though I do react oddly to males in most situations, it seems to have no relevance to my ability to react similarly to others in social play. In my last post, I was purely aiming to explain why I seriously doubt that my sexual orientation is something that I consciously choose. The simple fact is that I do not. Whether this is genetic or due to something else, I do not know, but I do know that I had a fairly normal childhood aside from the usual amount of dysfunction, which cant really be helped. Also, try to understand that I didnt even fully realize what my sexual orientation was until after I had graduated high school. I only knew that I had an embarrassing tendency to react around boys in the same ways that the boys reacted around the girls, and I didnt really understand why. I was barely even aware of the huge controversy over homosexuality because it rarely came up around the school aside from us calling each other gay this and suchandsuch ***. Perhaps you are having some kind of difficulty understanding this because you have closed your mind to the possibility of a discreetly gay man. Well, here I am, and youre not about to wish me away. I do not fit the stereotypes that you have in mind, and I do not, as you claim, rub my sexual orientation in other peoples faces.
Again, referring to your accusations that Im playing victim. Perhaps you feel that Im doing this because Im trying to point out to you that I have a vested interest in homosexual marriage becoming a reality in the United States of America. Do you feel that you can refute this? You have no personal stake in the gay marriage debate at all. You gain nothing, and you lose nothing, either way. No amount of playing armchair sociologist will change this fact.
Everyone here has to quit assuming that any resistance is an anti-gay thing. I am clearly stating that regardless of how strongly you feel on the subject, Gay Marriage is a very major social change.
It will change nothing for you. Are you capable of providing a valid argument to the contrary? Nothing is going to be forced upon you.
If there wasn't any societal resistance to this change then there wouldn't be such a vehement defense coming from your side.
Once again, you're assuming that I am in a similar position to yourself. To you, this is an entirely intellectual issue, nothing that will ever effect you in any way that you will notice. Try to understand that my position in this is very different from yours. The gay community has a personal stake in this, and it is this fact that makes us so vehement on the issue.
This is what strikes someone who is not part of your movement, and you should be mindful to not be offensive because it does nothing for your cause.
You are the one being offensive and overtly insulting, Brennet.
Let's put it all in proper perspective. The majority of nuclear families view their unions as something that is sacred in society.
This is quite understandable, and I have no desire to take away or change their unions in any way.
The Gay movement is doing more to try and force them than to persuade them.
How is anything being forced upon them, Brennet? How is any change in how they go about their lives being forced upon them? Gay marriage would change things strictly for homosexuals.
Just as you don't want something forced on you, you have to be mindful not to force something on others.
Which you constantly accuse the gay community of doing. How so? Can you back this at all?
THis is where the debate lies. I have stated too many times that what you do or what you think you are is very much your own business and I practice what I preach when I don't force my values onto someone else.
In continually voting down attempts to give gay marriage the pass, you certainly do. It is an imposition of your will upon others that is directly detrimental to them and does nothing at all to change your existence.
It is not me that your are really fighting, it is society.
It is you that the gay community is fighting. The gay community is attempting to wipe people like you from existence through constant campaigning for their cause. They're constantly out there raising awareness of their cause, and they are slowly but surely bringing an increasing number of people to their side.
So please try and have some perspective in a debate and refrain from making accusations and try presenting your point.
I haven't the foggiest notion what accusations you are speaking of.
I would gladly discuss this topic further in another thread, but please attempt to stay to the topic. Do not attempt to fuse the more fuzzy issue of gay marriage with the question as to whether homosexuals can help which sex theyre attracted to or the issue as to whether or not homosexuality is already predetermined at birth.
The fact that homosexuality is present in nature is evidence enough that natural selection does not strictly eliminate homosexuality. In a primitive setting, children with two fathers would have an increased chance of prospering because males, being stronger, would be able to claim more territory and would be more able to defend them. Two mothers, in many parts of the animal kingdom, would be able to give very young offspring a greater chance of survival if one was semi-forcibly mated because there would be two sources of nutrition at any given time, and there may be natural conditions under which homosexuality being present would make the survival of the species more probable, making it illogical for the course of natural selection to eliminate it entirely. It is not something that we should assume wouldn't have a logical reason for occurring in nature. One big question is this: why are some humans, whether or not they are necessarily born as such, homosexual? What natural conditions would have created an occassional occurance of homosexuality? It seems to be natural because it seems to appear spontaneously. The fact is this: homosexuality seems to occur naturally, for one reason or another. Though not dominant, it does not appear to be unnatural. What makes it natural? Simply that it is there.
