aegix drakan said:
Honestly, I don't understand what all the freakin' hate is about. People are turned on by what turns them on!
This one's actually pretty simple to answer.
Societies form on the basis that there's a "norm" to follow, something, usually a set of actions and beliefs, that marks you as being one of the fold, part of the pack or whatever other group analogy you could think of. Norms pave ways for laws, morals and general all-around order and efficiency. Take the Torah, for instance. It wasn't made as a religious tool, not at its onset. The initial Ten Commandments were pretty basic survival tips for an oppressed minority. Things just got out of control once the actual "being oppressed" part of oppression got removed from the equation, and basic survival guidelines turned into hard-lined religious tenets.
In North America and much of the Western world, the statistical norm is still heterosexuality. Anyone with half a brain and who can acknowledge the fact that societies have some breathing room will have no problems at all with LGBT individuals being part of the fold. The very concept I've talked about needs to disappear in the 21st century, because I'd like to think human beings have sufficiently progressed to allow us to understand that there's more to living than being part of a biologically compatible pairing - but the statistical norm isn't something that's broken down all that easily.
People fear what they can't or don't understand, and plenty of right-wing religious movements foster a complete misunderstanding of what it means to be LGBT. All they're thinking about is that making crotch dumplings is a biological imperative, when we're about seven billion on the planet and can't seem to be able to adequately rear or feed just about two thirds of them. Factually, us *not* having kids would actually be a very good thing, for a generation or two. Of course, it'd be an economic disaster, but the planet could certainly do with having a good little chunk of its burden removed. I've always found the Creationists and Pro-Lifers from our neck of the woods hypocrites, considering how the average birth rate in Western countries is about 1.5 children per family.
The short of it is that for some unexplainable reason, lots of people feel threatened by homosexuality. It may or may not be a case of hormonal imbalance and yes, I hate saying this, but being gay could very well be an indication of something being biologically "wrong" with you. A few studies have suggested that nicotine use during pregnancy could mess with the way the fetus' gender is differentiated, exposing an initially male child to higher estrogen levels and vice versa. It's nothing but a theory, but it seems pretty sound to me.
Is that something you'd have any control over, though? Of course not. Does it make you a bad person or a subhuman? Obviously not.
In short, there's nothing to be understood, honestly. Every single change in the social tissue always brings its lot of chaos to the table. The smart ones shrug when they see an LGBT person, the paranoid idiots clamor on about Christian values being in jeopardy and unsaved kids being in danger of catching "the gay".
My take on things is that we should leave the issue stew for a few decades more. Let us find a cure for AIDS first, or actually come across an autoimmune population from whom we could develop some kind of blood serum. Then we'll sort of settle in, the exact same way everyone calmed down in the decades that followed African Americans gaining equal rights.
Eventually, being LGBT will become part of the norm, and the raging hate-mongers are going to change their tune. They'll find a new scapegoat to bash on, and society will have earned a new standard-bearer for the definition of risqué relationships.
you are 31 shades of awesome for this post, have a cookie and an internet, for you gave me some of my faith in humanity back
