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Politics : To be a Liberal,you have to believe that.....

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To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (979)	9/7/1999 11:25:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) of 6418

I appreciate the fact that we are able to discuss a sensitive and charged issue with intelligence and reason. I confess to an ambivalence about homosexual rights. I don't come at it from a religious basis at all -- what the Bible says about homosexuality is irrelevant to me. I look at it more from a societal basis. I will, I'm sure, put this very badly so please read sensitively and if it doesn't make sense, ask, don't assume I'm just stupid! <g> As I age, I am finding more and more that what we would call conservative societal beliefs and prejudices are often (not always, but often) rooted in what turn out to be some pretty sound psychological doctrines based on the survival of the society. I think for example of monogamy and of laws against divorce. These served to insure that children had the best opportunity of being cared for without becoming a burden on the community. (We are also finding out that children raised in two-parent households do better socially and in school than children raised in one parent families.) The strictures against divorce in general started to relax in broad concert with the increase in societal wealth which allowed economic support to be provided by an absent parent. Indeed, the increase in no fault divorce tracks fairly closely with increasingly strong child support laws. That was a digression, but not an irrelevant one. What I find interesting is that most societies have had taboos against homosexuality. Not all -- the Greeks were a notable exception. But most. My quite limited knowledge of anthropological sociology leads me to the belief that societies only develop significant taboos against practices which weaken and threaten the society. Why did so many societies develop such strong taboos against homosexuality? I don't know. But I don't dismiss such taboos as simple discrimination. I think those societies may have recognized something we haven't yet recognized. What, I don't yet know. Intellectually and rationally, I can make a strong case for civil rights based on sexual preference. But something doesn't feel right about it to me. It is unnatural. It violates a taboo that I feel without knowing its origin (but knowing that its origin is NOT in any religious scripture). I realize that this is not very comprehensible, and apologize for that, but I'm trying to work through things that I really don't understand. So be gentle with me, please!

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