Every time you say “people say being gay isn’t natural, but [insert case of animal homosexuality here], which proves that it’s natural, and anyway we use [insert technology here] which isn’t natural” an angel gets lit on fire.
Okay, probably most of the Christian people who say “being gay isn’t natural” actually mean something along the lines of “being gay doesn’t exist in nature.” That is because most people don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to Catholic theology. (Also, every time they say that? Two angels.) (If they’re Catholic, anyway. Protestants can say any damnfool thing they like. Damn schismatics.)
“Being gay isn’t natural” is not actually a statement about nature, it’s a statement about natural law. Basically, St. Thomas Aquinas ripped off Aristotle’s idea of the telos, which is basically a thing that any given thing is supposed to do (for instance, knives are made for cutting). He argued that God made everything with a telos and that through reason we can discover the telos of things and then use them in accordance with the purpose God made them for. This is called the “natural law” because you can deduce it from nature, as opposed to the law God revealed.
Catholic theology of the body argues that the genitals have a twofold telos: the unitive purpose (i.e. the bonding of lawfully wedded spouses) and the procreative purpose (i.e. making babies). Every time you have sex, you have to fulfill both teloi, or it violates the natural law. It is, in most circumstances, impossible to have children from homosexual sex; therefore, homosexual sex is immoral. (This is also why the Catholic church opposes birth control. Now You Know ™.)
Now, there are lots of arguments you can make against this thought process, started with “the telos doesn’t actually exist” and moving on from there. “Gay animals exist” is not one of them. Now stop using it, because I have a flamethrower and those angels are fucking trembling.
Personally, I prefer the “what your god thinks has fuck-all to do with my life,” strand of argument.
But that aside, what I really hate about engaging with this is that you have to buy into the Naturalistic Fallacy to do so. Despite what all the crunchy-granola vegan hippies thronging around me in Berkeley think, “natural” doesn’t mean “better,” whether you’re talking about a scientific definition or the telos.
I for one embrace the unnatural. In a strictly natural world, I would not be able to function. There is, for example, a titanium slab screwed into my left shoulder. It was put there ten years ago when I broke my shoulder during an epileptic seizure. Every day, I take more “unnatural” drugs that keep me from having more seizures (at least when I remember to take the fucking things).
I always hated how quickly LGBT activists seized on the idea that sexual orientations are genetically determined. For years, it was treated not as a matter of scientific curiosity, but as a political truth essential to queer liberation. And by doing so, they implicitly admitted that for some reason, it matters whether you like fucking someone of the same sex because you made a choice to do so, or because some genetic switch got flipped.
I say long live the unnatural.
Well, no, the telos of a person includes not having a broken shoulder or seizures, so all that is totally okay under Natural Law, which is not the same thing as the naturalistic fallacy at all. They just both have the word “natural” in the title.
Arguably, the telos of the mouth is to eat, that of the lungs is to breath, that of the nose is to smell.
Thus, those who say that homosexuality is against nature because it doesn’t fulfill the genitals’ teloi are committing the very same sin, because they talk using their mouths, lungs, noses, in ways that don’t fulfill their respective teloi.
Amen, Ozy! =)
The deeper problem with telos is a need for, and belief in, objectivity. Absolutes. “The telos exists; there is an extent to which mortal minds can understand it, it’s just a matter of time.”
There are two problems with this:
1). A lot of the things people believe in are unfalsifiable: there is no test or proof that can prove them wrong
2). Reality is observer-oriented and therefore relative, not absolute. What is beauty, for example? The definition will vary from person to person; there is no absolute definition of beauty, there are only degrees of subjectivity.
Unfortunately, most people simply can’t handle this, ergo we have a bunch of people running around making decisions based on beliefs that can’t be proven false. ****ing wonderful. >.<
Although loads of people who don’t believe in God also use “that’s not natural” as an argument. I mean, most people in Sweden aren’t Christians (or muslims, Jews and so on). The vast majority are either atheists or some vague “maybe there’s something out there” kind (different surveys give slightly different numbers, but however you count, the ones who identify with some religion are a small minority). And still the “that’s natural” or “that’s not natural” gets thrown around A LOT. I guess most people are okay with homosexuals today, but trans people are still UNNATURAL in most people’s eyes, for instance.
BUT come to think of it, I think most of these people may still have some kind of subconscious thelos idea. Like “nature” has laid down a purpose somehow, and we ought to follow that purpose. Or something.
It is, of course, difficult to determine what the telos of anything is (no doubt because, as you note, there’s no such thing), but there tends to be a strong correlation between what’s claimed to be the telos of something biological and its evolutionary purpose. The presence of homosexual behavior in such a wide variety of species counts as evidence that such behavior may well have an evolutionary purpose, and so might lead someone to think it could have a telos as well. So I’m not sure the animal examples are as irrelevant as you claim.
Exactly.
That may not be how they would put it, but it would be functionally equivalent to the telos Ozy describes.
I am almost sure you’re steelmanning and that most people who use the “being gay is unnatural” argument are Protestants who neither know nor care about Catholic theology, and who totally are using this argument in the “but monkeys don’t do it” sense.
Didn’t know about the concept of telos. Learn something every day. But yeah most people I have heard use it in an “appeal to nature” type of way. I have heard the “it’s not natural” arguement when I have spoken to other Muslims about homosexuality too. Which is weird because a lot of the classical Islamic legal discourse on same sex intercourse was roughly “it’s normal for some people to find men attractive but acting on it is prohibited”. But yeah most so called “religious” arguments are just based on hetero-squick.
Had one person pull an “it’s not natural” argument, then when I mentioned its prevelance in animals did a full 180 and said “well that’s why we are superior to animals, we don’t do the things they do”. With very little insight as to how little sense they were making. The mind is capable of incredible acrobatics sometimes.
Had one person pull an “it’s not natural” argument, then when I mentioned its prevelance in animals did a full 180 and said “well that’s why we are superior to animals, we don’t do the things they do”.
That’s not hetero-squick. That’s called “aggressive categorization:” putting things into arbitrary categories and then defending those categories.
So why is no one throwing a fit over the violation of Natural Law by infertile married people having sex (or for that matter, pregnant people continuing to have sex after conception)?
“Personally, I prefer the “what your god thinks has fuck-all to do with my life,” strand of argument.”
I get a little bit annoyed at this argument – it may be better against Protestants than against Catholics. To (at least some?) Catholics, moral laws and the nature of God are so entangled with the universe itself that referring to God demanding things doesn’t neccesarily make all that much sense.
But yeah. The thing that annoys me the MOST is when people confuse evolutionary implanted desires (You cannot escape the extremely adaptable, broad, varied set of preferences that evolution gave you, both innnately and through socialization that was long, long ago influenced by evolution,) modern-day pragamatic evolutioanry fitness-maximizing, and quasi-telos.
this isn’t much of a disincentive for me because most popular depictions of angels are unifyingly Annoying
however…
i did actually know most of the telos re: gentialia & etc, thanks to my catholic ex-boyfriend. still, always nice to have a refresher on the logic behind the policy….
You shouldn’t encourage the Natural Law argument though. If you can confuse the fuzzy-brained types (i.e. 99% of people) by shifting the definition of “natural” towards “the way it happens in nature”, all the better.
@Engineer Krause, oh God some of the evo psych crowd annoy me about that to no end. They can be worse than some scriptural literalists. So many telelogical just-so stories taken to be rational objective truth because they have sciency words and back up their often bigoted views.
@Gaius, YES! Knew there was a word for that. But yeah i meant the aggressive categorization is just a form of rationalisation for the underlying attitude of “i don’t understand / like it on a visceral level” rather than a serious religious argument.
Mori: IIRC, because it *looks* like it fulfills the procreative purpose, and also because you could theoretically procreate. (The Bible has multiple women getting pregnant after their periods stop, after all. God did it!
)
I almost feel like you’re missing half of the situation here, Ozy. There’s the “unnatural = immoral” point you made, but also the more utilitarian, and arguably crueler, Protestant version that tries to ensure that everything a person does must be objectively “useful” in some way. And I suppose in this regard, being of one’s “greatest use” probably involves suffering and complete disregard for one’s personal happiness and well-being. From what I know of people who subscribe to this sort of religiously-inspired objectivism, whether they’re religious or not, they seem to have disdain for homosexuality (and anything not heteronormative, really) because it’s, above all, frivolous and impractical. Or so they like to say.
Ozy, you are way missing the point here. Setting aside the people who are in fact saying “it isn’t natural because animals don’t do it”, the “it isn’t natural” argument is an attempt to obscure the fact that the person is taking a religious argument (God’s natural order = hetero!) and tarting it up as an objective, secular argument. It is a deliberate obfuscation.
When you reply with What About Gay Penguins, you force them to drop the bullshit and admit that they aren’t really talking about what exists in the natural world; they’re making a religious argument, which is not only much weaker, but also pretty silly even if you buy the underlying validity of the faith. (Want to see a dude backpedal from telos so fast he sprains a muscle? Point out that logically, he should forever give up blowjobs.)
@Mythago:
It’s not about what’s natural, and it’s not even about God’s natural order.
What it is REALLY about is using a belief in God(‘s natural order) to justify arbitrary categories that they don’t have the courage to interrogate.
God is not the source of their feelings — their feelings came first. God is just something they use to DEFEND their feelings — which are not necessarily restricted to hetero-squick.
And how does this happen?
Some of them were never trained how to rigorously interrogate their assumptions. Others had the impulse to do so, but were never permitted to.
Bigotry. Poverty. A worship of simple-mindedness. THAT is what leads to using God as a justification for heteronormativity. “God’s natural order” is but a subset of this phenomenon.
@Gaius, sure, but I’m not even going that deep. Ozy is saying ‘but you’re missing their point!’ No, not missing their point, just forcing them to come out (ha ha) and admit what their point really is.
@Mythago:
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what their argument is, or what counter-argument you use.
Bottom line: it’s like arguing with a drunk. Never argue with a drunk; you can’t win. In this context, all arguments and counter-arguments have the exact same value: zero — regardless of whether or not you try to stuff them with a claim about the animal kingdom or a claim about the fact that they’re appealing to arbitrary categories based on faith in that which is unfalsifiable. You will never win. They will ALWAYS resist, even if they can’t draw on any rational arguments at all. You can utterly dismantle every argument they throw at you, and they’ll continue to resist. Their sanity depends on it.
The only way to deal with people like this is to ignore them where possible and get around them when it is not possible (or practical) to ignore them.
@Gaius: ah, but I’m not trying to win the argument, in the sense of “convincing them they are wrong”. You saw Thank You for Smoking, right? The scene where Naylor is explaining to his son why chocolate is better than vanilla, and his son says, yeah yeah, but you still aren’t convincing me? And Naylor smiles and nods toward the other people wandering around and says, but I’m not trying to convince you. I’m trying to convince them.
I know the doucheloaf isn’t going to change hir mind, because the real underlying argument is “GAY EW.” I’m pointing out to others listening that their arguments are bullshit, and pointing out to them that they can’t actually present a real argument for their point – which of course isn’t going to mean that they suddenly embrace social justice, but it’s surprising how badly people can get shaken up when they suddenly realize that their opinions are not actually based on Logic and Reason.
Ozy, if you haven’t read Andrew Sullivan’s “Virtually Normal”–check it out. He takes on the whole Aquinas argument directly. Benedict XVI, back when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, wrote the pastoral letter titled, “On the pastoral care of homosexual persons”–which marked the first time gay people had been called “homosexual persons” by the Church — as opposed to ‘people who perform homosexual acts’ — thus implying that sexuality was part of one’s whole self. Sullivan analyzes this, in depth, as well.. and he does it pretty impressively.