Is being gay an intrinsic or God given difference? Absolutely not. Faith and science are in agreement on this. The Founders are with me on this. Do I need to say what Jefferson said or what Washington did?
No they aren't. You don't get to make up science.
There is absolutely nothing biologically essential about the modern social construction of sexual orientation as it exists almost exclusively in Western societies.
Then why do LGBT folks show up in literally every society, including in nations that have literally condemned them to death?
If you're referring to Africa, then that's largely an outcome of colonialism.
People who take gay or lesbian as their identity are specific to the West largely because of a history of strange sexual restrictions. History is filled with people who do things that immediately lead Westerners to label them as "gay". Except nobody in ancient Greece or China or Persia or whatever identified as "gay".
It is entirely a modern Western phenomenon to take mundane sexual acts and turn them into the crux of one's identity and OMG YOU KNOW ITS THE NEW CIVIL RIGHTS WE NEED TO UNITE AS A PEOPLE.
Insofar as there is a "gay movement" in places like Africa and Middle East, this is largely a relic of Western colonial imposition. Africans very understandably view the "gay movement" as a Western colonial imposition. Of course, they fail to mention that their draconian bans on same-sex fun is also a product of Western colonial imposition (British anti-buggery laws to be specific). They are both different socially constructed sides of the same particularist coin - a strange sexual puritanism that once convulsed the West.
Yeah, no. That's completely inaccurate and if you actually think that, there's no point in talking to you.
I however will
It's from an old effort post
Society is shaped by those who hold authority. Many people held authority by virtue of having a penis. There will always be identification and demarcation along gender and sexual lines precisely a society based on serving the needs of heteronormative power model (and I make no apology for going all ‘feminist’ here) is the hegemony. The reason why sexuality is an issue for those who have a minority sexuality is because same sex acts were opposed by the hegemony. It didn’t matter whether you just liked casual same sex encounters or wanted to be able to be publically seen and safe with a romantic sexual partner for life. Everything on that spectrum was oppressed. If homosexual behaviour was not specifically excluded (or excluded by omission) in civil, social and religious structures and statutes then there wouldn’t be an LGBT identity as you know it today, because it wouldn’t be defined as a characteristic. There would never have been a black identity either because skin colour like sexual attraction would never be identified as a discernable characteristic. It’s not as if society divides along hair colour, though there are issues of ‘preference’ involved even in that. And of course this demarcation with proscribed gender roles and correct and incorrect sexual behaviour is perpetuated within certain understandings of religious revelation as being mandated by god and this can further perpetuate this.
If you say to someone that
heterosexuality is a construct, therefore deconstructing everything from marriage to an erection, you’ll be casually dismissed in various academic and scientific circles (as well as the local pub) because it doesn’t fit in with someone’s sexual-social experience. But if you say that homosexuality is a construct there are enough ‘bourgeois’ (to use that term) who have an issue with homosexuality that stems from religious, social, cultural and power structures to take note. Therefore the constructionists are essentially ‘useful idiots’ and the very playthings of the structures they so vehemently oppose. Why people are straight and do straight things like marry and have children or associated with that; cheat, divorce and abandon their children is of no real concern to anyone. Funny that. Perhaps it should be, but it’s not. You can’t engage people on that premise. However if you make the issue about the gays, then you can demonstrate your philosophical prowess to an audience that doesn’t give two sh-ts about Marxist theory because a predominantly straight audience really want to know why people don’t think and act like they do.
So we have the ‘constructionist’ camp; i.e the concept of sexual orientation was invented in the 19th Century mainly through medical discourse which constructed the heterosexual/homosexual dichotomy for bourgeois purposes (because everything, apparently, is a class struggle) This means that prior to this point homosexuality was characterised not by sense of identity but by sexual acts which were perceived as structures of power (with an active and passive role) This view is ideologically and in many ways politically grounded. You need to have your Marxist hat on. Despite the fact that most people don’t wear that hat, hasn’t deterred many constructionists within queer theory who in full Frankfurt School mode neglect to communicate that the primary focus is not necessarily to discover an accurate historical model but to foster a new social construct reflective of their political leanings. To them, the homosexual can’t simply ‘accept’ his or her groundings as a gay/LGBT because that is part of the heterosexual/homosexual dichotomy that is symptomatic of bourgeois capitalism. Instead they should, in effect be politicised into someone who questions all the concepts in the basket of the bourgeois, such as gender and heterosexuality and class therefore meaning that all these things (even men and women themselves) disappear as a class and are no longer subjects of oppression. If you de-stable heterosexuality then you eradicate homophobia (or so was the thinking) But once you start deconstructing something, therefore proving that it’s a construct, you start doing it with everything. It made no difference to them throwing both heterosexuality under a bus as throwing homosexuality under a bus. Even when LGBT academics do this and crawl up from underneath the wheels, they still realise (not that they assumed anything other than that) that they are sexually attracted to whom they are attracted to and therefore the whole experiment hasn’t really validated anything. Whatever the other sciences are up to at this time doesn’t concern them because academic bubbles are precisely that.
However constructionists also make a mistake in assuming that the ‘now’ is more entrenched and is therefore more relevant than the ‘then.’ What is considered ‘gay’ now might not be what is considered so in a hundred years’ time, or a new term is used that describes the social grouping or self-identification of those with non-heteronormative sexuality. Or they might simply do different things in an environment that is more open or more closed towards them. Therefore what is currently the ‘now’ will for the future be the ‘then’ and because what they did ‘then’ is not what they do ‘now’ so the ‘then’ is dismissed. The experiences of those in the past are dismissed and the new ‘now’ are told that their experiences are constructed. Which as you can see is deeply problematic.
In contrast to this you have ‘essentialists’ (which would be my own view) where both knowledge and practice are not constructed but are ‘discovered’ (for which you can at times read inherent) but subject to repression and then rediscovery through both history and experience. It emphasises continuity and the dichotomy of liberation/suppression to what was already there.
