A Slight Case of Overbombing – Why people do not choose to be gay.

I’ve just finished the third part of A Slight Case of Overbombing.

And yes. It is named after the Sisters of Mercy best-of.

Enjoy.

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

Part 3 is here.

A Slight Case of Overbombing Part 3 – Why people do not choose to be gay.

This is part 3.

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

So what is the federal government’s problem with gay marriage?

We have looked at the main reason given by pro-family groups and found it to be a complete load of crap, that is, that somehow, gay marriage is anti-family.

The Prime Minister is on record as having described marriage as being a sacred union between a man and a woman. And the Prime Minister, together with quite a few cabinet colleagues, would like to see it remain that way.

This is exacerbated by the Prime Minister’s thinking that children are required as a result of marriage. He was quoted in August 2003 as saying the following, “Marriage, as we understand it in our society, is about children, having children, raising them, providing for the survival of the species.”

Alright. I know a married couple who, after several years of not having children completely gave up.

By the PM’s thinking, this means that this couple should immediately divorce, as they will not be having or raising kids.

My parents-in-law have 2 children who have moved out of home. Should they immediately divorce as they are not having or raising children anymore?

And given that they are Catholic, would they find a priest willing to annul the marriage?

John Howard is only fooling himself if he seriously believes that this is the case.

More likely he has found another argument “against” gay marriage which is designed to distract from the real issue.

So what do we have that counts against gay marriage?

Anti-family? Bullshit.

Procreation required from marriage? Complete rubbish. Not to mention Stalinist – what if married couples don’t want to have kids?

There are no arguments that stand up.

We are left with no alternative, but to conclude this:

The federal government believe that gays should not have access to marriage rights/rites just because they are gay.

Which as we all know is a complete load of cobblers.

Fair enough. We’ll leave aside the small issue regarding the cowardice that federal government ministers display in not openly admitting to this, and look at some current affairs.

Normally, if an Australian wants to marry overseas, it is normal for the overseas marriages authority to request from the Australian mission certification that the citizen in question is in fact legally unmarried.

And it is also considered normal for the Australian mission, be it a Consulate-General, Embassy or High Commission to respond with the appropriate information.

Recently, the Australian Embassy to the Netherlands has been in the news after receiving orders from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) to not issue certification where the Australian citizen is looking to get hitched to a person of the same sex.

I’ve had a gutful of this. It is one thing to have a government which we (sadly) elected enforcing their morals on us, but to be enforcing it on the Dutch authorities, who quite frankly have no say is beyond the pale.

It is a DISGRACE!!!

What a freaking embarrassment. Here’s me telling some of my international mates that, “Oh no, the likes of the Rev Pat Robertson would never happen in Australia,” and here’s our elected government foisting their opinions on to the rest of the world.

I’m absolutely disgusted.

What is worse about this, is that not cooperating with a foreign power in the normal course of diplomacy (which arguably, this is) is normally highly questionable.

Alexander Downer has a lot to answer for.

And it just gets worse.

The Attorney-General’s department has told marriage celebrants to specifically ensure that they refer to the parties in sexually specific terms such as, “bride”, “groom”, “husband” and “wife”.

I mean, really, why not just tell celebrants that they have to include that bit about brides promising to “love honour and obey”?

Dikkii. You’re straight. Why are you so pissed off?

It’s very simple, dear reader.

This is a civil rights issue, pure and simple.

If the conservative right win out on this one, what is then going to stop them from saying that the “sacred union” that they refer to must be performed in a church, synagogue or mosque etc?

Before long, it might end up as, “marriage is a sacred union between a white man and a white woman performed in St Swithins Anglican Church, Campbelltown. To the exclusion of all others.”

Fight this kids. Fight this with all your fucking might.

A Slight Case of Overbombing Part 2 – Why people do not choose to be gay.

This is part 2.

Part one is here.

So we had two questions hanging over our heads.

1. Who chooses to be gay? And
2. What reason would one have to choose a gay lifestyle?

Let’s look at the first one.

We’ve seen that you need to be gay, bi, asexual or sexually unusual in order to choose to be straight.

But what would you be in order to be gay?

Obviously, then, it stands to reason that if you choose to be gay, you must therefore be straight, bi, asexual, or something else again. But you would not be gay?

The conjecture from idiots who support the concept of “sexual choice” over “sexual hardwiring” believe that we are all wired the same way and that we choose our sexuality.

Leaving aside the conundrum that straight people such as myself did not choose to be straight (I’m just not into blokes, that’s all), this site shows the two views, which it refers to as the extremes.

Personally, I think that these are the only two views – I don’t see much room for a grey area in between, which should give you all an idea how ridiculous this whole thing is.

Anyway, as you can see, homosexual behaviour is viewed by hardliners as being akin to alcoholism or drug addiction – something to be de-toxed out of.

Now this makes me mad.

The viewpoint of most reasonable people is that alcoholism and drug addiction require you to actually have tried the narcotic, first.

Then there’s a period of time that your body builds up a physical dependency.

When I first started lusting after females, I had not had a single intimate, let alone erotic encounter. Hardly comparable to a narcotics addiction, then is it?

OK then. So we’ll assume for argument purposes that someone (God, Gods, aliens, FSM, etc) hardwired us all as “straight”.

(For those of you who are gay and reading this, please do not get outraged. I have only ever read my mind, and thus it is the only assumption I can reasonably make. I know that it is not the case.)

This still leaves our second question – which may be paraphrased as, “What reason would a straight bloke have to choose to be gay?”

First of all – he would have to put up with the gay stigma.

Now I have worked with gay blokes and chicks over the years. One of my best mates is a gay bloke. One thing that they all have in common is that they all get massively discriminated against.

Or threatened. Abused. Bashed, even.

Why, I say why. Would someone who wasn’t gay, put themselves through this?

I cannot give an answer to that. Maybe someone else will.

Conservative Christians are one such group who believe that being gay is temptation from Satan, but we’re all really straight.

Tell this to my gay friends who claim to have never been attracted to the opposite sex in their life.

Anyway, you supposedly do a gay lifestyle in the same way that you do drugs or alcohol. Big deal, they say. You can change.

One group who believes that you choose your own sexuality is called Exodus International. Exodus believe that through the power of Christ, one can return to the straight life that God gave them.

What Exodus won’t tell you is that one of their founders ran off with a staffer in 1979, and are now “committed” in that awful, gay way where we can’t say “married”.

(In addition, their chairman was recently forced to resign over claims that he allegedly was in a gay bar flirting with patrons, recently)

Lets just use our sixth sense (common sense, natch) here and say, “Nup.”

So we know that no one chooses to be gay, and that there is no reason why anyone would choose to do so. That I can think of anyway.

So this brings us back to our original point:

What is the federal government’s problem with gay marriage?

We’ll look at this in our next post.

A Photon in the Darkness: A Field Guide to Quackery and Pseudoscience – Part Two

A Photon in the Darkness: A Field Guide to Quackery and Pseudoscience – Part Two

A Photon in the Darkness: A Field Guide to Quackery and Pseudoscience – Part One

A Photon in the Darkness: A Field Guide to Quackery and Pseudoscience – Part One

Part 2 to follow. Prometheus describes Q&P in extremely easy to understand terms. This info is presented like a biology text book.

Fundies Say the Darndest Things

Now this is an interesting little site - Fundies Say The Darndest Things - you have to admit, Christian 'mentalists are nothing if not creatively stupid.

This one is my current favourite - YOU MUST CLICK HERE!!

A Slight Case of Overbombing Part 1 – Why people do not choose to be gay.

This one is an absolutely crazy mad one. It will probably run to 3 parts, but I don’t know yet.

Our federal government just gets more and more reactionary. And eventually they get to that point where you have to ask, “What is the deal?”

Readers will know that over the past two years, there has been a move by several jurisdictions around the world to have gay marriage legalised.

Most people would, of course, say, “Why not? What’s wrong with that?”

This writer is about to get married, and so this rings a bell with him. That is, myself.

(My word, this talking about oneself in the third person can get confusing).

The point that I have steered away from, is that the Australian federal government, has for those of you who don’t know, shored up the legislation regarding marriage so that it specifically refers to marriage as being a Union between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others.

Mmm. Now if this isn’t homophobic discrimination, I don’t know what is.

First of all, let’s look at the underlying issue. Gay men and women would like to get married to each other.

In some bizarre conclusion, the federal government, headed up by the socially progressive PM John Howard and his equally small-l liberal Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock have concluded that gay marriage is “anti-family”.

Anti-family?? What drugs are they smoking?? And where can I get some??

The whole thing about gay marriage that I thought would appeal to the increasingly conservative Einsteins in Canberra, is that marriage is supposed to encourage a monogamous family unit, which is about as family as you can get.

OK. So we can safely say that the anti-family line is outright bullshit. The government is certainly pandering to groups that claim to be “pro-family”, however, the family issue with regards to this is clearly a red herring.

This position is unacceptable to gay Australia, and quite rightly so. But I don’t think that the government fully comprehends the implications of what they’ve done.

Take a hypothetical gay couple who have decided that they wish to get married. We’ll call them Chuck and Randy. They now do not have that choice, unless they marry someone from the opposite sex. This is unacceptable to them, as they are in love with each other.

If they have a civil “commitment ceremony”, this is not considered, in the eyes of the law, anyway, to be the same as a wedding between a man and a woman. This leads to all sorts of problems with regards to things like estate planning, child adoption, tax, superannuation, name changing etc.

Chuck and Randy are pretty much screwed, unless they can do some tricky legal manoeuvring.

And all because they are pre-disposed towards members of the same sex.

Now it is generally agreed these days that most of the evidence suggests that gay humans are genetically blueprinted to be gay.

There are still idiots out there who believe that one chooses their sexual preference.

Let’s run with this.

Do you remember when YOU chose your sexual preference?

I don’t remember. I don’t remember because I DIDN’T GET TO CHOOSE. I WAS ALWAYS ATTRACTED TO WOMEN, AND I WAS NEVER ATTRACTED TO MEN.

This speaks volumes for the minority of people who believe that one’s sexuality is a matter of choice. Logic dictates that anyone who chose to be straight falls into one of the following camps (an unintentional pun, but I think I’ll let that one slide, hee hee):

1. The obvious conclusion is that they are clearly bisexual. This is just common sense – if you are mentally saying, “I will only chase chicks, and not blokes, even though I am also attracted to them,” well, you bat for both teams, sunshine. There is no other conclusion that you can arrive at.

2. On closer inspection, however, another possibility presents itself. Once upon a time, people who were gay were heavily discriminated against. Oh, wait a minute, they still are. Anyway, if you were a chick who was into chicks, and you were terrified that you would be marginalised (which sadly still happens), you might make a conscious decision to pursue a relationship with a bloke. In other words, you are gay and you are choosing to be straight.

3. Lastly there are a few people out there for whom options A or B do not present themselves. Given the logical impossibility of a straight person choosing to be straight, let’s say that you don’t harbour a sexual attraction to either men, or women. For simplicity’s (and countless other’s) sake, we’ll also assume that you aren’t into animals, kiddies, ashtrays, fire hydrants, etc. By choosing to pursue a trans-Platonic relationship with someone from the opposite sex, you are pretty much denying the fact that you are asexual, bub.

So, those who chose to be straight are clearly gay, bi or “a”.

Which begs the question – what must you be if you choose to be gay?

And given that people usually choose to be straight in order to avoid harassment, persecution, violence, bigotry, stigma, etc, what reason would one have to choose a gay lifestyle?

We’ll look into these in our next instalment.