"Convincing" someone with alchohol, or while drunk is otherwise known as rape. And no, being the victim of rape has nothing at all to do with being born one way or another.Phatscotty wrote:[ yeah, I know it wasn't a great example. However, I still think that the idea of "if it looks good, sleep with it" is impulse most of the time, and what a person thinks looks good is in the mind. A woman could be talked into a bisexual experience even though she has never thought of it or desired it, and has a good buzz going from alcohol, and I don't think that has anything to do with being born a certain way.
Phatscotty wrote: I understand there are probably some studies that have been done that show xyz, but I'm just saying a person can be born straight, and if they have someone telling them that gay is normal and showing them gay porn all the time at a very young age, and then being taught about gayness in school, they could turn gay.
I see, so it is your theory that simply hearing about people who are homosexual will somehow "turn" them?
Except... then you switch to "gay porn". NO school has any business showing kids porn. Sex ed does show biological diagrams that are definitely not porn. There IS evidence that some, particularly repeated exposure, to porn can impact sexuality in kids. That's one way pedophiles can operate, for example. BUT, let's be clear on a couple of things. Simply showing naked pictures, even seeing naked people does NOT lead to any kind of sexual attraction change (not worded well, but I am trying to stay away from words like abberration, etc.). If anything, constant exposure, such as in nudist coloneys, leads to a more normal/healthy attraction.. that is, less likely to have a major obsession, just normal "I like this person..". (such coloneys take EXTREME pains to protect their kids from anything close to pedophilia). What does matter is actualy porn. Not going to get into the definition, because it is culturally based. However, what it gets down to is that showing kids pictures that are not usually present, that they are told are "sexual" in some way, will elicit a response in some kids. Again, that is how pedophiles operate.
BUT... it is also how kids, particularly boys, in extreme religious groups ALSO become "perverts". There is a movement, for example, to consider even pictures that you might see on Redbook or Ladies Home Journal, never mind Cosmopolitan to be "porn". These parents are TEACHING their sons that it is perfectly normal for them to "react" to even such mild images. They are, plain and simply laying the ground for those boys to then blame women around them for "being too sexy" .. and therefore giving them permission to excuse bad behavior to women who "don't dress appropriately". There is nothing wrong with teaching modesty, but this is something else.
The point? The point is that KIDS do not need to see porn, but completely isolating them doesn't work, either, unless your whole intent is to ensure they never leave that very closed group... and I mean never. Because you let those men, raised to think that "any" show of skin in women is akin to "asking" for sex (even if the women themselves are not intending or aware of that message), go out in society they cause the rest of us normal people, particularly women HUGE problems!
BUT.. let's get back to the "knowing about homosexuality leads to homosexuality". IF that were true, then you would see a significant spike in the tendency to homosexuality among the children of homosexual couples. This is just not seen. There are now a fair contingent of children, now adults, who were raised by openly homosexual couples. They show no more of a tendency toward homosexuality than those raised by heterosexual couples. Repeat: Being raised by homosexuals, with all the exposure to the lifestyle that entails does not lead children to become homosexuals as adults. It does make the acceptance of any homosexual tendencies easier, when they do arise. In other words, it does not make kids more likely to be homosexual, but it makes them "healthier" about it if they are homosexual. (note.. there are other studies that look more specifically at the inheritance issue. This is much harder to track, because to be an unbiased study requires comparing children of openly homosexual people to children of those who were raised heterosexual, but who had one or more homosexual parents... and, then you almost have to stick to just adoptees, because people who get married or just have kids and then later decide to act upon their homosexuality represent a specific seperate set of issues).
SO... while there is a link to many types of changes to sexuality based on porn, (and the reverse, lack of exposure to the opposite sex), there is no link between just being open, honest and problems (of any type).
The NEXT question is at what point does this infringe upon a parent's rights? I can gaurantee that my above paragraphs about lack of exposure would result in a flurry of condemnation (might here, depending on who reads this) and objection. "BUT".. they will say, "parents have the RIGHT...". OK, fine. But why do you have the right to actively teach that aberration..that basically any exposure to women wearing the "wrong clothing", etc is going to lead to eroticism, is therefore wrong, women need to dress only in what that religion considers "modest". YET.. other parents have no right to even teach that homosexuality exists and that people who are homosexual don't secretly have sex with babies and so forth?
See, the real question here is not at all about whether homosexuality is OK or not. That is, as many have said a "religious"/belief question. The question for society is what is harmful. In that, the very conservatives actually have far less of a leg to stand upon than the so-called homosexualy "lobby". I have NEVER experienced or seen any kind of harm from homosexual couples. I have seen pedophiles of hetero and homo types on the news, but thankfully have never met them.. and they are not the point of this discussion. They are wrong, abberrant, need to be locked up.. etc. They are NOT what is referred to here by homosexuals.. they are specifically pedophiles who are attracted to children of their own gender, emphasis on pedophile, not the gender to which they are attracted! Anyway, I have NEVER experienced any harm from those. This includes several people I only learned were homosexual as an adult, people who were active in my churches growing up or with whom I was otherwise associated. I HAVE, however, very much experienced all sorts of problems from so-called men who were raised to plain and simply believe that women were objects, or simply that women are either supposed to dress to "please" or just the opposite, that women were supposed to dress only modestly and that if they did not, well.... they were not to be respected. NO man has to deal with that!
Of course, I know that I grew up in a time of major transition. I have gone from a time when girls were required to wear dresses to public school, when a teacher was nor rehired, simply because she was pregnant (there was talk of forcing her out early, but that, at least was considered going too far.. after all, most of us either had siblings "on the way" or knew other women who were having kids), to a time when women fighting fires and doing other physical labor has become more or less common. Such transition ALWAYS mean a lot of hardship and pain for those making the transitions. At the same time, because I have seen this transition, I can clearly see the differences in how people have come to be treated by the various groups.
If that is true, its only becuase there are far more straight people than homosexual.Phatscotty wrote:
I still think gay can be taught to someone who was born straight.
I think it's very difficult to teach a person born gay to be straight though.
What you are really saying is something I got into earlier. There is a possibility that not everyone is aligned "one way or the other". Some people may actually be bisexual. This would highly distort many studies. What might be happening, for example, in studies that show people can change gender is that these programs are having "success" with people who may have thought they were homosexual, but who are actually bisexual.
As I noted, the whole idea of bisexuality is a tad controversial. Is it that people are actually fundamentally attracted to both sexes or is it just that they allow themselves to "adapt"? I don't really want to get into that any more, becuase there just doesn't seem to be enough research to do more than pose the questions and... well, those questions can too readily spin off into something other than intelligent conversation.
But.. get back to the earlier continuum I spoke about, that is of physically mixed gender people. This is a plain physical fact. A link I just found said roughly 2% of infants are in some way hermaphrodites. Most of the time, the variations are minor and surgary is done early so that the children themselves may not even know that this happened. However, as much as we know for sure this physical mixing happens, and as much as we are learning that gender is tied to the brain and not just the body, it makes sense that such "mixing" might happen in the brain, as well.
Studies of hermaphroditic children lead to some of the strongest evidence that gender is in the brain, because there are more than a few times when children grow up and decide that the gender their parent's chose for them is just wrong. That is a given fact. Given that fact, it makes sense that there would be others who were seeming to be born with a single physical gender, but who might find their brains "say otherwise".
