I have no idea where Jason PB got that idea from. A homosexual could only be excluded from natural reproduction by being exclusively homosexual. And once you get to tubing babies, the whole sexual orientation thing goes out the window anyway, except that (so far) you need a host mother for life support between conception and birth.
Having met several Catholic priests, and also Jason, I’d guess he would probably do a pretty reasonable job of the actual mechanics of priesthood, but I’d also guess that he has no real interest in doing so.
As to the hands-in-air screams of accusation, read the freakin’ post! I said I don’t know which way it would fall, and I also said that “conventional wisdom” by which if you want it unpacked a bit I intend to mean “this is the gist of the opinions that I have most often heard expressed” would tend to disfavour homosexuals (not that I would tend to disfavour homosexuals).
Jason, neither the first statement (an opinion) nor the second (an observation) accuses you or homosexuals in general of being child molesters. The phrase “could fall either way” means that I’m prepared to discover that exclusive heterosexuals molest more children per capita than exclusive homosexuals. Read it! Understand it! Believe it!
I am most definitely not going to be bullied into retracting an honestly held opinion, nor am I going to lie about what I’ve observed. I long ago gave up trying to please everyone, mainly because it’s literally impossible. I appreciate that you’re offended by what I wrote, and it saddens me that you should take it to heart so, but I did not write it to offend anyone. I believe that you’ve read meaning into it through your own fears and apprehensions which is not there.
I in turn find it really offensive that if I write anything but fulsome praise for homosexuals, somebody will jump on me for it. There is apparently no such thing as a neutral opinion. It is apparently not safe to disagree with the politically correct position or explore the issues except possibly in a protected forum, and that sucks. Not that I spend my life doing such things, but anomalous minefields like that really irritate me and I’m not going to spend my life tiptoeing around them.
As to the numbers on this and other fronts I’ll start believing some when I see repeatable studies not done by either people with a homosexual interest (like Simon LeVay, Dean Hamer, Michael Bailey and Richard Pillard) or people with a vested interest (real or percieved) in rubbishing homosexuals.
The most reliable numbers I’ve seen so far indicate about 2.5% homosexual males, about 1% exclusively so, and about 1.5% homosexual females, about 0.5% exclusively so. I’ve seen similar numbers from a variety of different, independent studies (e.g. Penn State University), including a couple of census runs which yielded much lower proportions but probably didn’t ask the questions very well. While I don’t regard them as any kind of Absolute Truth, I tend to give studies like the PSU one more credence than values an order of magnitude or so higher. Roughly the same ratios seem to hold for the USA, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.
Think about, for example, the number of actors portraying homosexuals in movies and on television and you’ll see that under-representation of your viewpoint is no more of a problem than under-representation of American society and values on Australian screens.
If you have some reliable numbers which disagree with those, please tell me about them.
James Purser, thank you for your clarification, which is absolutely correct (the official change seems to have happened in 1973); “clinical” wasn’t the best possible choice of word, “medical” might have been better. Homo|sexual == same|intercourse. Someone who willingly has sex with a member or members of the same gender is a homosexual, regardless of the age of the other participant, regardless of whether they also have sex with a member or members of the opposite gender, and regardless of whether they have any lifestyle markers (like “attends Stonewall or Connections regularly” or “is in a civil union with another member of the same gender”) to go with it.
Despite what I said about not spending my life dodging people’s pet peeves, this is the last post from me on the topic here this year, regardless of any responses. I’m sure I’m about to get flamed again by PLOA denizens who are sick of the topic, and I’d much rather use the space to talk about more interesting things anyway.
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