OJ, as you said below about smoking bans, it's just good manners. It's bad manners to call a coworker a flaming faggot or to suggest aloud that he should be castrated or stoned to death. Employment discrimination laws exist for the purpose of stamping out rude, coarse behavior like that (and of course, punishing employers that tolerate it and providing windfalls to important Democratic voting blocs).

But even if sodomy is disgusting and immoral, 95% of the public agrees that sodomites should be treated decently and civilly. Paring back employment discrimination law is easily portrayed as licensing rudeness, and hence won't happen, even by administrative regulation.

Random:

Are you under the impression that you could walk up to a fellow employee and shriek epithets at him with no consequence? Should the consequences be different depending on the orientation of that person? Everyone should be treated decently. Period.

Employers should be allowed to take a person's decency into consideration in hiring, firing, and promotion decisions.

The real question is whether the regulation exceeds the statutory authority. It may be surprising, but the law doesn't prohibit discrmination on the basis of sexual preference. The regulations are issue are the result of Clinton-era overreach and should be pared back to the statutory mandate.

Jim: Exactly.

OJ: Of course I couldn't walk up to a gay coworker and scream epithets at him. Nor could I express disapprobation of his protected conduct in polite and civil terms outside his hearing, nor could I subject his immoral conduct to discrimination in any way. (Much less could my deep-pocketed employer do so.) Either one will do as the basis for a "hostile work environment" lawsuit (and hence as a basis for firing me) and the law can't punish the one without punishing the other.

The law woiuldn't punish you for an at will employee, absent a cause of action, which means you're expressly protecting immorality.

OJ:

Where does God say it is immorality?

How does an employer know who's a homosexual? Does he have to watch the employee do the deed, or can he take his word for it?

Harry:

The point is that if you're fired you shouldn't be able to sue and say it was because you're gay. No one's going around hunting down homosexuals.

Well, actually, they are. My homosexual friend Jerry Canada was stoned to death by two Christians.

Probably not recently in an American workplace.

OJ:

Which, hunting them down, or stoning them to death?

I now know secularism is the root of all evil, but one nice side effect is that nowadays, the most people accept homosexuals for what they are: by and large, very decent people.

Rather, we accept them despite their problems, because we've no longer the moral courage to try helping them. Bad for us, worse for them.

Perhaps that is because most have finally discovered that, because God made gays, "helping them" is a fool's errand.

You don't propose counselling to cure, say, Down's syndrome, do you?

Down's syndrome isn't merely psychological.

Nor is homosexuality.

Jerry grew up in a strict Christian family, which rejected him, and whether his problem was psychological or not -- or even a problem or not -- that's raw.

This happened 10 years ago, and, no, it wasn't in a workplace. Jerry didn't have a job.

But your remarks sure put a narrow limit on the quality of Christian charity. You can have it, too.

Of course it is. It's overwhelmingly like the episode in your family where dysfunction and a missing Dad created atheism and homosexuality.

OJ:

I may have mentioned this before, but I am fairly well acquainted through my sister in law, the ideal family. He is head for the basketball team at a Jesuit university. No dysfunction, Dad fully involved.

Their son is quite effeminitely gay.

That caused them some grief early on. Until they came to the realization that they didn't make him that way, God did.

If your astonishingly stupid theory was correct, then, due to divorce rates over the last 40 years, we would be inundated with rising rates of homosexuality and atheism.

Not. As you have noted elsewhere, gays amount to, at most, about 2% of the population. Same as it ever was.

My wife was quite the tennis player in college. Oddly, an unseemingly portion of female athletes are lesbians. (I'm standing by for how a missing parent and dysfunction create a combination of pronounced athleticism and lesbianism)

One of her teammates was a lesbian from a very religious family. When she finally came out, her family ostracized her. At the public behest of their minister. Backed up by the congregation. Twenty years later, they still do.

Talk about putting narrow limits on the quality of Christian charity.

Hurting another human being is not an example of "Christain" behavior. If 90% of the male population is instinctually repelled by sex between men maybe it is naturally repellent.

Tom, my friend Jerry was terribly hurt by his family, and they justified their behavior by citing their Christianity.

Christianity is evil. Even the all-devouring secular state, which conquers all, could not save Jerry from the Christians.

I won't describe how he died, except that he was stoned. If you thought what happened in Fallujah this week was bad, well, Jerry got it worse from the Christians who killed him.

When are Christians going to take responsibility for their sins?

Killing innocent people is Christian behavior? Obsessions of any kind are harmful. Simply identifying oneself as Christian is meaningless. I know, Harry, that the exceptional proves the rule, to your way of thinking but be reasonable. Human beings are, for the most part, prone to evil. I know a young child who was raped and beaten by a homosexual. I know other homosexually inclined guys who I consider friends and pleasant dinner companions. If Christianity teaches anything it teaches love for your fellow man as a child of God.You know, loving the sinner while hating the sin. The distortions of Christ's messasge over the centuries by fallen men have to this day not changed the essentials. The evil you see in the faith is simply the evil of man. As a secular/humanist type, that possibility should give you pause.

"If 90% of the male population is instinctually repelled by sex between men maybe it is naturally repellent."

Actually, it is closer to 98%. Your assertion is circular, and amounts to nothing more than saying it is natural to be repelled by what one finds repellant.

The mistake is imposing immorality upon a category of sex, regardless of the context within which the act takes place. However, that assertion of context independent immorality might require a little questioning if one concluded homosexuality is innate.

Because if it is, then God intended it that way and maybe, just maybe, homosexuality isn't always sinful. Just like heterosexuality can be, but isn't always, sinful.

Oh, one other thing. Insisting on family dysfunction as the cause of homosexuality imposes a huge burden of guilt upon the parents of gays. One should be pretty sure of one's ground before accusing two of the nicest, and sincerely religious, people I know of turning someone into a homosexual.

Jeff:

Why shouldn't that which is repellant be banned?

Parents have been screwing up their kids since the Garden.

Jeff-I suppose the logic is circular to a degree, but no more than yours, i.e., the tendency exists so it is natural and beyond judgement. The one little difference with my position is the 90% (98%)repellent factor helping in determining "natural".

Tom:

Is Down's syndrome natural?

Male brains are wired differently from female brains. All humans start life on the female template, including the brain. There is no such thing as a natural process that is completely binary and deterministic. Why should the transformation of the female brain template to the male be any different?

OJ:

This is the least dysfunctional family you could ever hope to know--they are straight up your alley. So their son's homosexuality holes your argument below the water line, and repeating it only serves to repeat an implicit insult.

Why shouldn't that which is repellant be banned? Because banning things makes for bad habits on the part of the banners, and enemies out of the banned.

If you are going to make enemies, you probably ought to have a point. Your mere repellance isn't one.

Jeff-

I meant "natural" in the sense of natural law. The brain wiring hypothesis is nice but one of many. No parents, I would imagine, wish to raise their children to be homosexuals for obvious reasons. A parent's love for a child goes beyond mere sexuality. The theory of dysfunction and arrested sexual development does have a degree of statistical support so the best answer might be "we just don't know the cause". Human history and the near universality of the taboo against homosexuality may have some validity. My personal experience suggests a degree of developmental dysfunction is fairly common.

Tom:

There is no such thing as natural law.

My personal experience is that they are born that way. And to the extent first-hand experience is at all meaningful, virtually all gays say the same.

But who the heck are they to know?

Jeff:

You believe there's no such thing, yet, oddly enough, you concede the natural repulsion towards certain acts.

OJ:

Please read what I write. I conceded only the perfect circularity of someone else's logic.

Heck, most people are naturally repulsed by snakes. Does that make snakes a violation of natural law, or immoral?

Have you ever seen uncorrected cleft palate? Pretty repulsive. Also completely natural. And it has nothing to do with morality.

Sorry--wrong on that last. Some religions find cleft palate a sign one is marked by the devil.

Jeff:

We kill snakes, don't we?

Only if we want to be overrun with rats.

I watched two young homosexuals during their blossoming years, as they were in my daughter's drama group.

All these easy generalities fall apart. There is Bradley's research showing some sort of autoimmune cause, but that doesn't explain the first boy, who was an only child.

Nor does it explain the second, who was an eighth son. But the seventh was as obviously straight as were the first six.

But Orrin's proposal of dysfunctional families is equally wrong. The first boy, only childn, was indeed the victim, perhaps, of a smothering, lonely and --- this may be relevant -- obnoxiously Christian mother.

But the other came from an intact and loving family of nine children, all the rest of whom (including the one daughter) were conventionally straight.

For a person who claims to profess a religion of love, Orrin finds it very easy to read certain people out of the circle.

What does love have to do with tolerating immoral behavior?