Debunking (Almost) Every Argument Against Homosexuality
Gays rise up!🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
Turns out it’s pride month, and that it’s almost over. So let’s end the month with a bang (wink wink) and rebut (almost) every argument against homosexuality. (Though the depths of the human imagination knows no limit when it comes to making up bad arguments, so who knows what I am missing out there?) Obviously this isn’t a particularly controversial view anymore, but I thought it’d make a fun blog post. Anyways, let’s first see why we should have a presumption that it’s not wrong:
Homosexuality Isn’t Wrong
Most things are not intrinsically wrong. If you don’t have any particular reason to think something is intrinsically wrong, then you shouldn’t think so. What does homosexuality involve? Construed as the orientation itself, it involves the disposition to be attracted to same-sex or same-gender people, which, well, what’s supposed to be wrong with that? There doesn’t seem to be any obvious candidate.
Construed as the practice, it involves two people of the same sex or gender doing something that is obviously not wrong—and probably positively good—when done by infertile people of different sex or gender. Again, what the hell is supposed to be the big wrongmaker here? Hence, if anything, it seems like we should assume that it’s actually good!
We should be careful to distinguish two ways that a moral presumption like this can be overturned: 1) It turns out that extrinsic factors make it wrong, or 2) it turns out there is something intrinsically wrong with it. Doing (1) is pretty easy, relatively speaking. Pretty much anything can be wrong if the external circumstances are right, and if you find out that they are, then there the presumption goes!
For (2) it ain’t so easy, bucko! To overturn a presumption here, you need to actually do some moral theory, and tell us what feature of the thing is intrinsically wrong. This is gonna be a much bigger burden because the answer you give will also have implications in all kinds of other areas—unless you give so contrived and arbitrary an answer that it’s just obviously wrong on the face of it!
Hence, we should have a strong presumption that homosexuality isn’t intrinsically wrong. Unless these objections have anything to say, that is!
The Bible Says So!
I actually tackled this objection a while back, but I’ll give you the recap here: Every time you encounter a claim in the bible (or whatever text for that matter) you are faced with the antilogism:
The Bible says that X
If the Bible says that X, then it is true that X
It is false that X
In most cases this is fine. However, if you find yourself with an X where you have a strong presumption to doubt it, we get trouble! Here you will have to consider which of the three is most plausible.
What about when X is the wrongness of homosexuality? Obviously the idea isn’t here that it’s wrong due to contingent extrinsic features; hence denying 3 will require pretty unattractive changes to our moral theory (as we’ll see). Given inerrantism 2 is right out, and so now we are comparing 1 to 3. The thing is, texts have this amazing feature of not beaming perfectly precise propositions right into your head, and instead requiring interpretation. That means that we should consider how plausible it is that 1 might be denied through reinterpretation. Seeing as many non-stupid biblical scholars argue as much, it shouldn’t be too implausible, and so I think homosexuality wins. Go the gays!
Even if you’re not convinced here, though, trouble is that the bible apparently contains a lot of similarly implausible claims—e.g. that people should burn in hell forever, that women should be silent in church, that slaves should obey their masters, etc. You shouldn’t be certain that the bible is inerrant, even given Christianity, and once you substitute the disjunction of all these implausible claims in for X, it looks like you should maybe reject inerrantism. Either way, I don’t think you should conclude that homosexuality is wrong.
Something Something Natural Law
The idea here is that: Premise 1, Natural Law Theory is true. Premise 2, having say gex frustrates the natural end of the penis. Conclusion: No homosexuality.
The honorable (but sadly British)
(and to some extent bug-radical ) has made a valiant effort on this, and I pretty much agree with what he (they (them)) said. But let me say 4 things:Natural law sux
The things a natural lawyer will have to say to avoid egregious counterexamples will almost certainly also make homosexuality permissible. That is, it should allow things that use faculties for purposes other than their natural ones (like doing handstands or drinking soda), but it’s unclear why homosexual behavior wouldn’t fall into this category as well.
How the hell do we even determine the natural ends of our faculties, and how faculties are individuated? Maybe it’s supposed to be evolutionary, but then I guess it would be categorically wrong to, say, shave your legs since that’s contrary to the bug-detecting function. I take it it’s really supposed to be intuition-based, but then there are incredibly powerful intuitive counterexamples, due to the categorical nature of prohibitions natural law gives. Also, I find it intuitive enough that homosexual people could have homosexual sex as a natural end. It seems like it just happens to line up suspiciously well with Catholic doctrine.
I know, I know, very mature of me! There are a lot of weeds to get into here (cf. e.g. the above links if you don’t mind high blood-pressure), but I really do think this is a supremely implausible ethical theory, so I won’t say more here. Boohoo. Now onwards!
It’s Unnatural (but I’m not Catholic)
The argument here goes: Homosexuality is unnatural, therefore it is wrong. This is terrible on two counts: 1) There is nothing natural (nor unnatural), and 2) why in the world make that inference? Why think that something being unnatural would make it wrong? Lots of things are unnatural: Modern medicine, not dying of childbirth, being subscribed to Wonder and Aporia. Still, they’re all clearly very good!
This point is pretty old and labored, but it’s just incredibly obvious that whether or not something is natural doesn’t have any effect on its moral character.
It’s Disgusting
has previously argued that it’s a perfectly valid moral objection to something that it’s disgusting—including homosexuality. To corroborate, he cites a study that found indicators of disgust among people who were shown images of same-sex kissing, at the same level of conventionally disgusting things like maggots (regardless of their level of homophobia on paper)—and importantly didn’t find the same for mixed-sex kissing. This, he takes it, is a perfectly good reason to deem homosexual acts immoral (at least in public). There’s no point in disputing the empirical findings here, but I don’t think they have very large implications. It’s unclear what exactly is supposed to be doing the work here morally speaking. That is, it’s unclear whether the point is simply utilitarian in nature: two men kissing causes others to have unpleasant feelings, and having unpleasant feelings is bad. If so, then I think it is very weak. I mean, feeling a little disgust is barely any harm at all, and most of the time you can simply look away.
Or maybe it’s supposed to be some deeper problem with disgusting behavior that goes beyond the feelings it instills in others. To that I just respond: What? Why think that? What about eating boogers gives it some extra high degree of moral wrongness beyond what it would do to someone if they saw it? Maybe I’m just lost in the liberal sauce, but I really cannot bring myself to see what there is supposed to be here.
Either way, you also need to account for the harms going the other way. With most disgusting acts, there are easy alternatives. Are you eating with your mouth open? Just close it, you pig! Not much lost here. But if you’re a homosexual couple, there isn’t any alternative other than just not showing your love for each other while in public. This obviously isn’t any huge harm—you can do it when you get home or whatever—but it’s enough to make the difference. Especially over time, when you begin to internalize feelings of inadequacy and whatnot.
Consider an analogy: You have super disgusting hands, filled with warts and blisters. To make matters worse, you have a persistently itchy nose. As you could probably guess, this leaves you with a persistent dilemma while in public: Keep your hands in your pockets, sparing surrounding folk from the horrific sight of your vile hands, but leaving you with an itchy nose. Or you could scratch your nose every once in a while.
Although itching isn’t that bad, seeing something disgusting really isn’t that bad, and I think it’s obvious that it’s perfectly fine to scratch your nose, despite your horrid hands. And certainly others shouldn’t be telling you how disgusting your hands are, that you should keep them in your pockets, etc., etc. Mutatis mutandis for homosexuality.
Family Structures
This argument sort of puzzles me… The idea here is that homosexuality erodes the great nuclear family, making children worse off and corrupting our society. Hence homosexuality is wrong!
Well, firstly, as far as I can tell from a quick search, the idea that homosexual couples are worse for children is just wrong (though I have no expertise on this question). However, even if we grant all this, what the hell is the argument supposed to be from there?
It’s not like homosexuals are stealing the wives from our poor straight men! If gay people didn’t form couples (or triples or what have you), they’d mostly just be single. From what I can see there are literally no externalities here, and the question is entirely whether the homosexual people themselves are better off by living out their sexuality—which they obviously are!
At best we get the conclusion that homosexual couples should not have children, since that is a group that might be affected beyond the gay people themselves. Yet we even that we don’t get! Homosexual couples will get children through two general means: Adopting a child that already exists, or having a child that would not otherwise have existed—the same as for straight couples, though the relative frequencies will differ.
Neither of these are bad! The life of a child will likely improve once it is adopted. And since there are generally more children up for adoption than are adopted, any couple adopting a child will be better than nothing.
And if you think that having happy children is good (as you should) then the latter option is also obviously good! Actually, even if you don’t, you should think that straight couples are much worse than gay ones, as they are much more likely to bring new children into existence. Either way, there is no good argument here!
Disease
Finally, I don’t know if anyone seriously makes this argument, but for completeness let’s address it. Engaging in gay sex (especially for men) carries a higher risk of contracting STI’s than sex between straight people. Hence homosexual sex poses a public health risk (even if small).
By implication, however, it would be wrong to lick toilet seats; for straight people to have anal sex (as far as I can tell, the risk is roughly the same here); not to use condoms, even if on other contraceptives, as that also increases the risk of disease, etc. I mean, I guess it is slightly more immoral, as it takes up health care resources and whatnot, but as always we have to consider the other side as well. I take it that gay sex is pretty awesome if you’re into it! That basically closes the case, it seems.
Playing football also comes with some risk of breaking your leg or whatever, yet obviously that isn’t sufficient to make it immoral to play—even if you’re particularly terrible at it, so that you carry a substantial risk of injury every time you play.
This seems to be the pattern for every argument we have considered. So long as the argument doesn’t turn on accepting a (to my mind) incredibly strange normative ethics, the moral infractions raised are so tiny that applied to any ordinary activity, they’re clearly insufficient to make us consider them immoral—and especially because the benefits definitely outweigh whatever force there is.
I doubt I will have convinced anyone who wasn’t already. But this is simply because I barely think anyone reading this will not have already agreed.
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This completely misunderstands natural law, the “intrinsically wrong (evil)” bit, not the bit where the author rejects an enduring ethical framework because it makes him feel icky. We should ask what is sex for? It's for two things: making babies and uniting the people doing it. It's for both of those things at the same time, not just one or the other. So, if a sexual act is in principle opposed to either of these ends, it's intrinsically evil. In principle is the keyword here.
There's a throwaway line in there about infertile/sterile couples, but it doesn't even steelman the sterile couples objection. The objection here is that sterile couples are just as permanently incapable of conception as are homosexual couples, thus we ought to conclude from the principle given above that sterile couples are doing something wrong when they copulate.
But the problem is that heterosexual, sterile couples are in principle capable of reproduction. They are impeded by a defect: sterility, but this doesn't change the fact that it is true that man+woman=baby. This is unlike the homosexual couple. It is not the fact, and no one would agree, that man+man=baby, nor that woman+woman=baby (and thus, with a bit of humor, we conclude by the law of identity that man+woman is not equal to man+man nor to woman+woman).
To prove that this is the right way to think about it, we could consider a hypothetical case: a sterile couple where the husband is unable to produce sperm. He's colloquially shooting blanks. Say that pharmacists research and develop a pill that addresses whatever causes his testicles to malfunction, and now he can produce sperm. We would expect that his wife will get pregnant now, assuming no other infertility factors exist, no? Yet if the same were true of a homosexual man, we would not expect that taking the pill designed to remove this sterility/infertility would result in the impregnation of his male sexual partner, since we know that in principle two men cannot reproduce.
It’s dysfunctional.
The function of sexual organs is sexual reproduction.
Homosexuality is like binging and purging and then eating your vomit because you like the taste.