Jubbergun wrote:
I explained the rationale behind my assessment very clearly, maybe you "misread" it and missed what I had to say. I say it could just as easily be some form of grooming behavior, and given the nature of what's being groomed, such behavior is probably very necessary. That assessment is based off 3 minutes of youtube bullshit, basic knowledge of how nasty sex organs are on mammals, and the idea that animals act like animals and not people, so they're probably doing something that animals routinely do. Apes pick bugs off each, and birds eat pests off rhinos, the idea of one animal cleaning another is more plausible than the idea that they're gay for each.
You're right, I forgot about your extensive knowledge of how the phrase "genital slit" suggests that male dolphins have vaginas.
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Well, that's just convenient, isn't it? "My point is valid because this book says so. Ignore the obvious bias in the review in the link I posted about it, it's not important because it's not the book. Oh, you don't have the book readily available? That's just too bad, you'll have to take my word for it."
You know why I "seem to have decided that said evidence doesn't exist?" I've decided that because so far what you've submitted as "evidence" is terribly unconvincing.
I don't feel like digging through the literature to get you all of the citations. A quick search on "animal AND homosexual" in Web of Knowledge produces over 1500 possible results from the last 40 years or so (see
here) - I don't want to wade through those to pull out the relevant ones, and most of them would be behind paywalls for you anyways. Conveniently for both of us, they're summarized in the book I recommended to you. If you aren't actually interested then don't read it, but you can't pretend that it doesn't exist.
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Let's say, for the sake of argument and not because you've done anything to convince me, that animals do display homosexual behavior in nature. How do we know it's really "homosexual," other than the fact that it's two males? Do you think that an animal, driven by impulses and not by cognitive reasoning, stops to think about where they're sticking their wing-wang, or is it merely a matter of "hardcockmustgosomewherenow," and they're sticking their junk in whatever is available without any regard to what it is? Can you make a legitimate comparison between a human being limiting itself to sex with its own gender to an animal of any type simply seeking release in any manner possible? I think that is too apples and oranges a comparison to make.
I know animals display homosexual behavior in captivity (I grew up in a farming community), but under such conditions they are removed from their natural environment. It's the same as putting a person in prison. Would a prisoner engage in homosexual behavior if they could engage in heterosexual behavior? As you say, no one can (or should) say with certainty, but I believe the odds would favor heterosexuality over homosexuality. This was something that was discussed in a philosophy class I took as an elective a few years ago. There's an implication that human society is itself seriously flawed and unnatural if it creates/encourages/contributes to behaviors out of the norm.
This still has nothing to do with results of arguing that homosexuality should be embraced because some people want to excuse their behavior by arguing that they're "born that way."
Your Pal,
Jubber
I said "we can't say that animals are "gay" in the way humans are" in my first post in this thread. You were asking for evidence of homosexuality in nature ("I ask you to provide documentation of homosexuality in animals that actually occurs in nature"), and I provided evidence of same-sex sexual behaviour occurring in nature in an attempt to answer that question. If your view is that same-sex sexual activity between animals can't be "homosexuality", then you answered your own question before you asked it.