[Avodah] Clear Thinking About Male Homosexuals

[Zev Sero]

On 22/02/2012 1:17 AM, T613K at aol.com wrote:
> I believe that the reason this isn't included in the 7 mitzvos has to
> do with the technical difficulty of determining for sure who is one's
> father or who is one's daughter.

Impossible.  One of the six arayos forbidden to bnei noach is one's
father's (ex-)wife.  She is of course no easier to identify than one's
daughter.  There's also clearly no instinctive revulsion against
marrying one's elderly father's pretty young widow, and yet she is
forbidden, while one's daughter and one's paternal half-sister, who
are blood relatives, are permitted.  Nor is there a greater revulsion
against marrying one's maternal half-sister than one's paternal one,
and yet the former is forbidden and the latter permitted.


> And probably homosexual acts are in this category of something that
> people in every society instinctively feel is wrong -- if not morally
> wrong, then at any rate unnatural.

Can you name a few non-Biblical societies that had any problem with it?

On the contrary, Chazal assume that it's so normal among nochrim that
all nochrim, even small boys, are automatically suspected of it.  That's
why one of the 18 gezeros Beis Shammai rammed through when they had a
temporary majority was to treat all nochrim as zovim from the day they
are born, in order to discourage yehudim from allowing their sons to play
with their nochri age-mates.  Chazal also praise the Parsim for not
elevating their same-sex relationships to the public status of marriage,
as the Mitzrim and Kenaanim did; this assumes that their homosexual
practises are in themselves perfectly natural and understandable.


> But if you /are/ going to talk about evolutionary advantage, you do
> have to answer this question:  what possible evolutionary or survival
>  advantage could there be in certain people being genetically
> homosexual?  One would think that such a trait would long since have
> died out.

There are many traits that are suicidal for the individual but carry
an evolutionary advantage for the gene line.  One example is the
recklessness of teenagers; this provides the tribe with soldiers willing
to die for it, and thus sacrifice their own progeny.  A tribe without
such people will not be able to defend itself as well, and will die out.
The "uncle effect" is theorised to work in the same way.  Men without
progeny of their own to provide for, provide extra support for their
nephews, cousins, etc., and thus give the tribe an evolutionary advantage
over a tribe where every man is busy providing for his own progeny alone.


-- 
Zev Sero        "Natural resources are not finite in any meaningful
zev at sero.name    economic sense, mind-boggling though this assertion
                  may be. The stocks of them are not fixed but rather
		 are expanding through human ingenuity."
		                            - Julian Simon