In God's name, how is it possible to be "less risk aware" of HIV, now than in the past? The lifestyles that propagate HIV have been dissected by media of all types, including homosexually-oriented and mainstream publications (and web sites, etc.).

Two possibilities:

(1) Gays know the risks and practice unsafe sex anyways;

(2) The drumbeat for safe-sex has, by incessant repetition, faded into the background, and the signal is longer heard. Been known to happen.

Bruce:

In 1980 we still had a culture that forthrightly told homosexuals they were aberrant. Today they've just chosen differently.

If what they do is perfectly normal then why would they take extra precautions?

Well, I would presume that even if it is not considered wrong, it is still known to be a good way to die young. I guess that is an instance of #1 that I outlined, above.

It's awfully tempting to conclude that civilization is the price men pay for women. If you aren't interested in the benefit, why pay the price?

Opera

203 partners

203 partners! That is Wilt the Stilt territory.

Bruce, the same can be said for tobacco awareness. Now that everyone admits to the health impacts of smoking, we still see a large proportion of young people taking it up. This is a major flaw in the social engineering paradigm, the assumption that people will act rationally in their long term self interest based on information that is presented to them. It isn't so, people accept risks as a price for following their immediate impulses.

Bruce: In San Francisco in the 1980's through mid-1990's, the local newspapers frequently reported rising homosexual infection and death rates. I always suspected that this revealed an editorial agenda to convince heterosexuals that 'everyone was at risk.' Now, there is little mention of infection rates. Apparently, it is no longer newsworthy. Or, I suspect, the editorial agenda has shifted. After all, with high infection rates persisting notwithstanding the vast sums of public money pumped into 'education,' its hard to argue that education works. A homosexual activist crowed several months ago that public health data showing several quarters of infection at 25% demonstrated that the disease had stabilized. Hooray! Can you imagine the Administration trumpeting success in fighting a communicable disease by embracing data that it had 'stabilized' by infecting 'only' one out of four Americans? Thus I subscribe to your point #1 -- the lead-in should properly be written that male homosexuals are less 'risk-averse' rather than less 'risk-aware.'

pchuck: Imagine a singles bar where the women are as promiscuous as the men. Where a little eye contact with a stanger and some chat-up leads directly to sex in the bar's bathroom (I won't begin to describe gay bathhouse behavior in a family blog). 203 partners is not extraordinary.

Well, being young and wanting to assert one's independence, it makes sense they're smoking.

What I'm surprised at is they can afford the price.

Opera? Opera is a good nap spoiled.

Fred, I hear you and I understand; however, we need to be shocked at 203 sex partners.

Many thanks for the follwups. I think Robert Duquette & Fred Jacobsen may be onto something. It's a demonstrated fact that people are scared of rare, novel risks (nuclear power, ALAR contaminated apples, or asteroid strikes), but blase about routine (though statistically far more likely) risks such as driving your car. Perhaps the very ubiquitousness of HIV has reduced its dread, a sort of positive feedback factor. Weird.

pchuck: 'We' (meaning you and I) don't need to be shocked. We are shocked. But we aren't the problem. Witness what happened when San Francisco health authorities tried to shut down the bathhouses in the mid-1980's. Didn't happen. The bathhouse owners convinced a court (IIRC) that the closure order was discriminatory, and besides, they were providing an important public health function by educating their patrons (in the form of flyers in the lobby recommending 'safe' sex). Now that is shocking!

Even if Orrin's right about how these people despise themselves -- and he isn't -- that is hardly helpful, is it?

People who drink and drive -- and are way more likely to die of it than a homosexual man is of sex -- are not thought, by me anyway, to despise themselves.

If you don't think alcoholics despise themselves you don't know any. The point is that once you accept that you can treat them, not throw up your hands and claim they've chosen differently.

Harry:

Perhaps more to the point, people aren't alchoholics because they despise themselves. Rather, they despise themselves because they are alchoholics.

Similarly, people aren't gay because they despise themselves.

Jeff:

Go to an AA meeting.

My Uncle John, who knew more about alcoholics without being one than any man I've ever met, said alcoholics drank because they were lonely. I didn't believe him when I was young, but I do now.

Orrin thinks homosexuals should despise themselves. It does not follow that they do.

Harry:

Who despises themself more than the lonely man?

OJ:

That won't answer anything. You will need to do better than that to make the case that alcoholism doesn't affect people's self image.

The gays I know most certainly don't despise themselves. It follows that if they did, they would all be alcoholics. They are not.

gays indeed have far higher alcoholoism and drug abuse rates than the normal population.

oj is absolutley correct. The level of alcoholism, drug abuse and promiscuity among homosexuals dwarfs the amount by those with more "traditional" sexual tastes. These are simple facts.I know that reality needs to be ignored in the name of "equality" but equivocation is counter productive. The alcoholics I have known drove themselves to loneliness after alienating those closest. Alcoholism is merely a biological/psychological tendency which needs to be adressed and overcome. Much like obsessions with sex.

OJ:

Citation, please.

Besides, "far higher" could easily be justified by, say, 30% more alcoholism among gays than the general population. Which would equate to roughly 13% rate among gays, and could be easily explained by how much opprobrium families and churches heap upon gays.

Several gays I know were completely ostracized by their (very religious) families. That just might leave a mark.

You know, examples of ostracized youngsters can be found anywhere. Anecdotal evidence is meaningless except when it is used in support of Jeff's case.

I know a few religious families with gay youngsters who won't stop talking about the love they have for their child/brother/sister but have a very difficult time watching them behave in what they see as a sel-destructive manner. The gay children generally refuse to have anything to do with their partents/siblings unless they are willing to accept without question the child's "in your face" attitude and lifestyle. The scenes I've witnessed at family gatherings make it painfully obvious to this observer that the parents and siblings are the one's whose feelings are liable to be trashed rather than the poor suffering "gay" child. How's that for an anecdiote?

Worthless. Heartless.

I don't generalize about homosexuals for many reasons, chief among them I don't know, for sure, who is and who ain't.

But I know some individuals. They are as different as any other set of humans who happen to share just one trait.

Orrin also thinks atheists hate their fathers. Obviously not true, but he's formed his opinion and no amount of evidence is going to sway him.

Harry:

You pretend to sciencism but don't think you can generalize?

Tom:

Please be re-read my posts, I think you are misunderstanding the point I was trying to make. OJ throws around terms that sound like numbers, but don't mean anything, all the while neglecting any contribution various forms--and there are many--of ostracism may have.

The ostracized gays I knew could not possibly have disrupted any family function, since they wouldn't have been permitted to attend in the first place.

I presume those families you know had awful parents. According to OJ, that's how people become gay.

The profile of the vast majority of male homosexuals with whom I am familiar: early identification with their mothers and alienation from their fathers for various possible reasons. A result of circumstances rather than awful parenting, in general.

dysfunctional is the term Jeff was searching for, rather than awful. Though there's considerable overlap.

Tom:

The profile of all the male homosexuals I know: they were born that way.

The families of which you spoke were almost certainly neither awful, nor dysfunctional; since they appear friends of yours, my bet is that they are decent as it is possible for people to be.

Blaming parents for homosexuality makes as much sense as blaming them for cleft palate.

Cleft palate isn't a psychological condition.

Jeff-

We each have our anecdotes. Interesting statistic I recently came across, although I cannot cite the exact source and recommend caution in repeating it without substantiation, is the percentage of male homosexuals who were sexually abused by men before reaching puberty. In combination with the gay culture's fixation on youth, which is fairly blatant if one were to use gay publications as a guide, it would be logical to posit the possibility that there is a psychological component involved here. Up until very recently the cultural assumption was exactly that. I doubt that the the collective wisdom of civilization over centuries should be jettisoned as thoughtlessly as it is simply to satisfy the disciples of Alfred Kinsey and the ideologues of absolute equality.

OJ:

Neither is homosexuality, or Down's syndrome, or schizophrenia, or epilepsy. If it was as easy as you say to change one of the most fundamental components of human nature, then communism would have long since triumphed across the earth.

Tom:

That statistic may well be completely correct, but without further information, it is context free. In order to put it in context, one would also need to know the percentage of male heterosexuals suffering pre-puberty abuse.

Here are just some reasons to think at least some homosexuality is inborn:

1. There is no such thing as a deterministic biological process
2. In all mammals, all festuses start gestation with the female form
3. In all mammals, statistically normal female brain wiring is different from statistically normal brain wiring
4. In humans at least, and probably all mammals, the gender phenotype does not always match the genotype--there are XY women, for instance, and instances where external gentialia change at puberty, and other instances where the external genitalia is more or less ambiguous. (see non-deterministic processes, above)

Therefore, the position you are taking is one of the following:

that unique to all of nature, and the contrary undeniable evidence elsewhere the processes behind brain development are binary and deterministic

or

the left is completely correct, and gender is merely a social construct.

Additionally, you should factor in a host of secondary behaviors that society just doesn't teach people. For one example, take a look at how women, and a great many gay men, place their hands on their hips--thumbs forward. Compare that to all the straight men I know--fingers forward. One could add to that blink rates, hand motions, verbal inflections, etc.

Taken as a group, those behaviors are called effeminate, and can't be explained by abuse.

I cannot generalize about homosexuals, Orrin, because I don't know who's who.

Even then, I'd be hesitant.

To get this away -- but not too far away -- from a touchy point, think of fetishes.

Nobody is ever going to make me believe that there's a gene for shoe fetish. On the other hand, it's common enough that it seems likely that there is some predisposing factor that allows it to develop.

I don't see people ascribing shoe fetishism to too much/little mother's love etc.

I claim to not know very much about homosexuals and next to nothing about how they come to be; but I claim to know as much as you do.

Jeff:

Communism is genetic?

Jeff-

Effeminate mannerisms may be behavior learned as a result of identification with mother rather than father. Pre-pubescent sexual abuse could, logically, have devestaing effects on a boys image of himself and his view of men.

I am confused regarding your characterization of biological process as non-deterministic. Purely biological process would seem to be the epitomy of "determinism" since all physical human traits are in fact determined by genetics. If you mean that behavior is not driven by conscious choice but purely driven by genetics or you make no distinction between the physical and the psychological, or what I might call spiritual sides of man, then you are approaching the logical conclusion of materialism: there is no such thing as right or wrong, only survival and the immediate satisfaction of ones' drives and desires.

OJ:

How could you have misread what I said so badly?

In order for Communism to work, human nature has to be malleable. According to you, and the Bible, and a whole bloody lot of common sense, it isn't. Yet you don't mind attributing a massive change in a fundamental component of human nature to any number of external influences.

I didn't realize you are a closet commie.

Tom:

Your characterization of processes is mistaken. To take a simple case, building a car is the result of various processes, yet even with something as simple, relatively speaking, as a car, the results are not identical. A process is deterministic if the results of multiple trials are invariant. Very few processes are deterministic--what goes on in a computer is one of the few examples I can think of off hand, ignoring Microsoft.

Building a human is a process, yet even given identical blueprints (as with identical twins), the results are not exactly the same, because the processes are not deterministic. Genes are the basis for human traits, but there is a whole heck of a lot between basis and result.

For instance, there is no gene for cleft palate. Keep in mind also the divergence between ambiguous genitalia and very unambiguous genes. Those are both the result of non-deterministic processes.

And I said nothing about behavior being driven by genetics, only that female brains are distinctly different from male brains, as are a whole raft of behavior patterns that are just as innate to gender as physical secondary sexual characteristics.

If you wish to contest that, then you are agreeing with the left that human nature is playdough for progressives, making you the materialist.

Brains have to make the conversion from the female starting point to the male result. Given the myriad examples of other gestational processes that don't produce results matching the genotype, on what basis would you argue that brain wiring wouldn't also suffer similar problems?

Yeah, Tom, genetics is not the sole determinant of physical characters. Development -- influenced by environmental factors -- counts, too, as Jeff says.

As a Darwinist you're forced to believe there's some material advantage to every asinine behavior, including shoe fetishes. It's why we find y'all so amusing.