“Pointing to racial or cultural integration does not provide the answer to the question asked.” You must believe that “the nature of our humanity” allows one to be a racist or an oucast.

“You are mistaken to assume that mere disagreement with you means a lack of high regard for human dignity.” I didn’t say that.

“Arturo, you may feel that rejecting integration of the sexes…” What does intergration mean but that men and women need to learn respect/understanding/appreciatation of each other. I keep pointing out that a gay man doesn’t need to bed a woman to learn those things. You believe that a man can’t do so, without lusting for women. To a woman, a man’s friendship without feeling threatened by the type of men you feel all men should be, is a very rewarding thing.

“Arturo you have not shown how the various arrangements, if any, that F. Rottles mentioned were NOT sex segregative.” “You still haven’t explained how one-sexed arrangments, as per F. Rottles’s examples, are NOT sex segregative.”

What are you talking about? What did Rottles/God say that I need to answer to. But be warned, I don’t like your dishonest the way of argumentazion, and I’m loosing patience with this thread.

You still haven’t explained how one-sexed arrangments, as per F. Rottles’s examples, are NOT sex segregative. Instead you have continued to point outside of those arrangements.

Pointing to racial or cultural integration does not provide the answer to the question asked.

You are mistaken to assume that mere disagreement with you means a lack of high regard for human dignity. The actual disagreement has not been addressed by you. See the second paragraph in this comment.

The arrangements at issue are unjust when both sexes are not integrated. Where a both-sexed combo falls short of integrating well, or segregates instead, two men or two women do not even begin to integrate the sexes.

Arturo, you may feel that rejecting integration of the sexes is necessary for the well-being of two self-identified gay men, but whatever else it may be, their arrangements would not be sex-integrative. This is so obvious that I think you must be talking about some other topic altogether.

I believe I remember that discussion, if it is the one about homosexual abuse. But no doubt you have a different recollection than I do :)

I do recall building a rather wide scientific swath of information on the subject. And the best Michael could show was that gays (but not lesbians) are only slightly higher rate of abuse than unmarried heterosexual households. If I remember right, he claimed that it was the unsanctioned nature of both relationships that brought about the abuse, arguing that sanctioning the gay relationships in a marriage would help the case. And that is plausible. I think it is naive to assume that homosexuality or heterosexuality in and of itself prevents abuse. I see nothing about homosexuality, (in the actual data as opposed to Arturo’s wide eyed polyanna-ism) that makes it less prone to abuse than heterosexuality.

The information was so readily available that I can leave it as an exercise for the reader to inform themselves on that topic.

But it remains that Arturo didn’t answer Chairm’s point, is it not abuse if it happens between two males? Is it not abuse if it happens between a man and a woman? It is still abuse, and abuse is always abuse. It should be treated as abuse.

Arturo is claiming that integration is just a form of segregation and subjection, which is a rather churlish take. Patricia was more pragmatic, noting that there are many equal marriages. My opening comments above, I believe, have already addressed equality and integration.

More directly here, I will point out that lack of integration can itself be abuse. Consider the father who takes off and leaves the wife with the burden of raising their child, and working too. I am glad we live in a day with such opportunity for women to work and provide for such a circumstance, I hope we do more to equalize their status in society so they can. Yet it remains that the child will always be a second obligation and compete with the career opportunity.

A man can leave a pregnant woman, but what can a pregnant woman leave? The child itself. Hence dumpster babies for the most unfortunate, or orphanage. The freedom, the equality, only comes by neglecting their responsibility for the child — either one. Which is why I point out that equality only comes through serving out our responsibilities to the other gender, not by freedom from the same.

So we see that the nature of our humanity provides that lack of integration, the lack of fulfillment of commitment and obligation to the other sex, can be in and of itself abuse. It is negligence. The child is the product of their heterosexuality and integration, and so it commands that both take the responsibility or be accused of neglect.

I’ll leave it up to Arturo to show us the homosexual altruism, the reason that homosexuality somehow overcomes this basic tenent of our humanity. If the father stays, is that automatically abuse? If the father leaves isn’t that neglect? If the father leaves because he discovers he is homosexual, does that make it something less than neglect?

“Just this past weekend I was at the 30 year anniversary of a gay couple. There were about 30 people of at least 20 different faces/nationalities. Homosexuals are less racist than heterosexuals. It’s one of the really exciting things about being gay.”

I’m quoting by memory, since you delete my comments at your website.

http://dustinthelight.timshelarts.com/rays/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=4002

I also remember On Lawn in a debate with “michael” at familyscholars.org. It appears they don’t allow comments any longer and past comments have been erased. Too bad. On Lawn was relying on the bigots over at NARTH. Michael easily proved them liars. I imagine that your “very large age differences, educational differences, and economic differences within gay relationships” are not very large at all. To someone out to malign, yes, it would appear I “over-idealizing.”

Why don’t you guys get it? There is no danger of segregation, because gay men, naturally, do not segregate from the opposite sex. Straight men do, which is why your own obsession with defining people by their gender leads to segregation…everywhere but in bed.

Your mention of the stereoptyical gay-male and straight-female acquaintanceship (typically not a deep friendship) does not counter-balance the high prevalence of abuse in same-sex sexualized relationships (male or female).

The so-called egalitarianism of a male-only arrangement does not shine so brightly when one takes into account the high prevalence of very large age differences, educational differences, and economic differences within gay relationships. Nothing about “gayness” equalizes the discrepancies. And it sure does not provide an egalitarian model for the integration of men with women.

In your comments (here and elsewhere) Arturo, you over-idealize. Maybe you do so to over-compensate for the shortcomings of the gay identitly politics.

Marriage is far more egalitarian precisely because men and women are integrated at the most basic level of community. Segregating women from men is not an egalitarian solution for men or for women — not even for the men in the typical men-only arrangement which are far from egalitarian. Sameness does not equal integration. What’s there to integrate in a man-only arrangement? The two men, sure, but that does not integrate the sexes.

The identity of the person forms in his relations with other human beings. Not so focused on procreation, homosexuals have tended toward a more cosmopolitan identity, rather than a gender-centric identity. Gay people tend to be travelers and when they go to movies they’re not afraid or subtitles. As society has allowed them to not feel shame in their sexual attraction, they have found intimacy with someone of the same sex very rewarding, and now that has become part of their identity. It is silly to deny that a homosexual’s identity is not different, if their experience in the world is different. The gender-obsessed want to deny it, because they want to keep “male” and “female” more strictly defined, because they want to keep the genders segregated, and the male dominant.

What is so egregious that the claim reminds me so much of the white supremacist? It is the claim that they are made to not be integrated, they are different, they aren’t like the people who need to be integrated. The all-white school petitions the court for public funding and recognition, becuase their children cannot integrate with non-white children in any meaningfully academic way. The Rosie O’Donnels’ of the world answer their childs desires for a father with a rebuke that they are the type of person who cannot be with a male, and wants to be with another mommy. The Arturo’s of the world feel that someday the integrated home will be as good as his all-male headed household, and that is somehow the opposite of patriarchy?

Thats not unthinkable, people have thought it through the ages. I just don’t see it as an enlightened and humane position, let alone egalitarian.

I liked F. Rottles take on this…

The homosexual movement affirms that gender is a deeply important human category. Sexual orientation as a concept presumes that gender exists and is an important category for human relationships. It would be odd to presume that gender is all important to adult romantic relationships, yet retains no significance beyond that.

Yes, I think it is most dishonest for you to accuse others of noting the identity that comes with gender — as if it were a bad thing. It seems like a convenient stance to take when gender means something to people you wish it didn’t mean, but in the end when you wish to marginalize that gender identity it winds up marginalizing all humanity (especially homosexuality).

I’m not sure what you mean by “different” or even unthinkable. Perhaps I’m sensitive but that reads like a sarcastic attempt, something to avoid telling people the truth about your position. You are asking for an exception? Exception to what — exactly? What difference are you talking about and what exception do you wish to be given because of it?