Gay Marriage

Jem:
>Finally the population argument or unwanted life
>argument is not a big winner with me. I think we a
>really talking about the proper use and distribution
>of our planet's resources.

You respond to an argument that I did not make.

I said:
>It's teaching are *consistently* obscene and inhuman
>in that they foster an environment where there are way
>too many kids born to people who can ill afford them.

There is nothing in there about there being too many people for the world to feed or a planet lacking resources. There are areas of this world where right or wrong, possible or impossible, the people don't *have access* to the resources to raise a child in the healthy happy ways it deserves. There are people right here in Anytown USA who to their children do not display even a modicum of responsibility in obtaining and distributing available resources to their children.

I am not proposing not allowing this people to procreate, but I don't find the inflexible teaching of the catholic church to be well reasoned in any way in this regard.

>My good friend here in Sarasota makes the same points
>as you Turok and the funny thing is he was adopted from
>birth and had a happy child hood.

There are plenty of excellent examples of this and I am all for adoption. Unfortunately, for every happy adoption story there is, what? -- thousand of starving children in africa or countless unwanted children being "raised" in this country.

I'm sure that you and I agree how sad this fact it.

JB

 

rowenwood,
I know exactly who you are. Some fat teenager who thinks when he has a keyboard in his hands, he is god and the whole world gets to listen. You do not trade because you are too young and work at Burger King after school and spit in all the burgers. Your parents are divorced. And both of them have no time for you since they are dating other people. So you spew your venom on the internet.
You are very sad. I feel sorry for you.


MY REPLY: not a single guess is correct. Rather, I'm a 27 yr old semi-reclusive artist that has had a great amount of success in the arts. Not only do I feel godly or supernatural when I write, but also when I create and present my art. How would you feel if you walked into a modern art museum and cried joyously because you knew you created work that's better than many of the artworks before you, or how would you feel if you were offered a place to study at the best art school in the world?

Well my dear lesbian, or gay, or whoever you are. I'm not fat, to the contrary, I'm skinny. I'm 5'8, I weigh 132 pounds; my body is in near perfect condition because I work out five days per week, and overall I would rate my attractiveness a 7.9/10. In highschool I was selected to try out for a Levi Jeans ad; I didn't get the ad but the prom queen and many other gorgeous looking girls were in love with me throughout highschool.

Though I only started trading in July of 2003, I've earned about 80% trading small and micro cap biotech stocks. I've never, and never will, work in a burger joint or any other type of blue collar job. With one exception: for two months at the age of 19, I worked at circuit city as a salesman.

Bottom line: my ego isn't falsely exalted, or at least it doesn't seem to be. And something I wrote to you must be been very accurately damning.

 

I have the perfect solution for those who revel in rolling around in their own excrement.

The ignore button.

Oh, why did I not press it before, now the whole of ET is a nicer place without that pompous ass called rosenweird.

 

HAHAHA Rosenwierd I love it... Hes such an Ass Clown.
No wonder your a recluse. NO one wants to be around an Ass Clown like yourself.


I have seen a lot of Ass Clowns on here come and go and come back (Ahem Gordon), but you are by far the biggest Ass Clown yet. If your attitude is at all reflected in your your artwork, the collection should be torched, and the curator shot in the head.
:eek:

 

please don't hurt my feelings.

 

Actually, it's quite an apt example, Turock. Because it illustrates quite clearly that homosexually activity arises. With one fell swoop all that balderdash about the poor faggot having "no choice", about homosexuality being an immutable characteristic, is made to look, in your words, "amazingly stupid".

So, from there, we, as a society, have, or ought to have, I think, a choice about the kind of behaviors we'd like to influence in our youngsters. In my opinion, allowing gay marriages and allowing children to be raised by gay couples is a virtual guarantee we're going to see a rise in homosexual behavior.

 

DENNIS PRAGER




WARNING--THIS IS SERIOUS HARD CORE INFORMATION--- DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE EASILY OFFENDED OR HAVE A CLOSED MIND ( LIKE YOU GG) lol !






Societies that did not place boundaries around sexuality were stymied in their development. The subsequent dominance of the Western world can largely be attributed to the sexual revolution initiated by Judaism and later carried forward by Christianity.

This revolution consisted of forcing the sexual genie into the marital bottle. It ensured that sex no longer dominated society, heightened male-female love and sexuality (and thereby almost alone created the possibility of love and eroticism within marriage), and began the arduous task of elevating the status of women.

It is probably impossible for us, who live thousands of years after Judaism began this process, to perceive the extent to which undisciplined sex can dominate man's life and the life of society. Throughout the ancient world, and up to the recent past in many parts of the world, sexuality infused virtually all of society.

Human sexuality, especially male sexuality, is polymorphous, or utterly wild (far more so than animal sexuality). Men have had sex with women and with men; with little girls and young boys; with a single partner and in large groups; with total strangers and immediate family members; and with a variety of domesticated animals. They have achieved orgasm with inanimate objects such as leather, shoes, and other pieces of clothing, through urinating and defecating on each other (interested readers can see a photograph of the former at select art museums exhibiting the works of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe); by dressing in women's garments; by watching other human beings being tortured; by fondling children of either sex; by listening to a woman's disembodied voice (e.g., “phone sex”); and, of course, by looking at pictures of bodies or parts of bodies. There is little, animate or inanimate, that has not excited some men to orgasm. Of course, not all of these practices have been condoned by societies — parent-child incest and seducing another's man's wife have rarely been countenanced — but many have, and all illustrate what the unchanneled, or in Freudian terms, the “un-sublimated,” sex drive can lead to.

De-sexualizing God and religion

Among the consequences of the unchanneled sex drive is the sexualization of everything — including religion. Unless the sex drive is appropriately harnessed (not squelched — which leads to its own destructive consequences), higher religion could not have developed. Thus, the first thing Judaism did was to de-sexualize God: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” by his will, not through any sexual behavior. This was an utterly radical break with all other religions, and it alone changed human history. The gods of virtually all civilizations engaged in sexual relations. In the Near East, the Babylonian god Ishtar seduced a man, Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero. In Egyptian religion, the god Osiris had sexual relations with his sister, the goddess Isis, and she conceived the god Horus. In Canaan, El, the chief god, had sex with Asherah. In Hindu belief, the god Krishna was sexually active, having had many wives and pursuing Radha; the god Samba, son of Krishna, seduced mortal women and men. In Greek beliefs, Zeus married Hera, chased women, abducted the beautiful young male, Ganymede, and masturbated at other times; Poseidon married Amphitrite, pursued Demeter, and raped Tantalus. In Rome, the gods sexually pursued both men and women.

Given the sexual activity of the gods, it is not surprising that the religions themselves were replete with all forms of sexual activity. In the ancient Near Fast and elsewhere, virgins were deflowered by priests prior to engaging in relations with their husbands, and sacred or ritual prostitution was almost universal. Psychiatrist and sexual historian Norman Sussman describes the situation thus: “Male and female prostitutes, serving temporarily or permanently and performing heterosexual, homosexual oral-genital, bestial, and other forms of sexual activities, dispense their favors in behalf of the temple.” Throughout the ancient Near East, from very early times, anal intercourse formed a part of goddess worship. In ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan, annual ceremonial intercourse took place between the king and a priestess. Women prostitutes had intercourse with male worshippers in the sanctuaries and temples of ancient Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Cyprus, Corinth, Carthage, Sicily, Egypt, Libya, West Africa, and ancient and modern India. In ancient Israel itself, there were repeated attempts to re-introduce temple prostitution, resulting in repeated Jewish wars against cultic sex. The Bible records that the Judean king Asa “put away the qdeshim [temple male prostitutes] out of the land”; that his successor, Jehosaphat put away out of the land ...the remnant of the qdeshim that remained in the days of his father Asa”; and that later, King Josiah, in his religious reforms, “broke down the houses of the qdeshim.” In India until this century, certain Hindu cults have required intercourse between monks and nuns, and wives would have intercourse with priests who represent the god. Until it was made illegal in 1948, when India gained independence, Hindu temples in many parts of India had both women and boy prostitutes. In the fourteenth century, the Chinese found homosexual Tibetan religious rites practiced at the court of a Mongol emperor. In Sri Lanka through this century, Buddhist worship of the goddess Pattini has involved priests dressed as women, and the consort of the goddess is symbolically castrated.

Judaism placed controls on sexual activity. It could no longer dominate religion and social life. It was to be sanctified — which in Hebrew means “separated” — from the world and placed in the home, in the bed of husband and wife. Judaism's restricting of sexual behavior was one of the essential elements that enabled society to progress. Along with ethical monotheism, the revolution begun by the Torah when it declared war on the sexual practices of the world wrought the most far-reaching changes in history.

Inventing homosexuality

The revolutionary nature of Judaism's prohibiting all forms of non-marital sex was nowhere more radical, more challenging to the prevailing assumptions of mankind, than with regard to homosexuality. Indeed, Judaism may be said to have invented the notion of homosexuality, for in the ancient world sexuality was not divided between heterosexuality and homosexuality. That division was the Bible's doing. Before the Bible, the world divided sexuality between penetrator (active partner) and penetrated (passive partner).

As Martha Nussbaum, professor of philosophy at Brown University, recently wrote, the ancients were no more concerned with people's gender preference than people today are with others' eating preferences:

Ancient categories of sexual experience differed considerably from our own... The central distinction in sexual morality was the distinction between active and passive roles. The gender of the object... is not in itself morally problematic. Boys and women are very often treated interchangeably as objects of [male] desire. What is socially important is to penetrate rather than to be penetrated. Sex is understood fundamentally not as interaction, but as a doing of some thing to someone...
Judaism changed all this. It rendered the “gender of the object” very “morally problematic”; it declared that no one is “interchangeable” sexually. And as a result, it ensured that sex would in fact be “fundamentally interaction” and not simply “a doing of something to someone”.

To appreciate the extent of the revolution wrought by Judaism's prohibiting homosexuality and demanding that all sexual interaction be male-female, it is first necessary to appreciate just how universally accepted, valued, and practiced homosexuality has been throughout the world.

The one continuous exception was Jewish civilization — and a thousand years later, Christian civilization. Other than the Jews, “none of the archaic civilizations prohibited homosexuality per se,” Dr. David E. Greenberg notes. It was Judaism alone that about 3,000 years ago declared homosexuality wrong.

And it said so in the most powerful and unambiguous language it could: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is an abomination.” “And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed an abomination.” It is Judaism's sexual morality, not homosexuality, that historically has been deviant.

Greenberg, whose The Construction of Homosexuality is the most thorough historical study of homosexuality ever written, summarizes the ubiquitous nature of homosexuality in these words: “With only a few exceptions, male homosexuality was not stigmatized or repressed so long as it conformed to norms regarding gender and the relative ages and statuses of the partners... The major exceptions to this acceptance seem to have arisen in two circumstances.” Both of these circumstances were Jewish.

Bible truth

The Hebrew Bible, in particular the Torah (The Five Books of Moses), has done more to civilize the world than any other book or idea in history. It is the Hebrew Bible that gave humanity such ideas as a universal, moral, loving God; ethical obligations to this God; the need for history to move forward to moral and spiritual redemption; the belief that history has meaning; and the notion




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they engage in homosexuality and the other offenses of the Canaanites: “You will be vomited out of the land” just as the non-Jews who practise these things were vomited out of the land. Again, as Greenberg notes, this threat “suggests that the offenses were considered serious indeed.”

Choose life

Judaism cannot make peace with homosexuality because homosexuality denies many of Judaism's most fundamental principles. It denies life, it denies God's expressed desire that men and women cohabit, and it denies the root structure that Judaism wishes for all mankind, the family.

If one can speak of Judaism's essence, it is contained in the Torah statement, “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse, and you shall choose life.” Judaism affirms whatever enhances life, and it opposes or separates whatever represents death. Thus, a Jewish priest (cohen) is to concern himself only with life. Perhaps alone among world religions, Judaism forbade its priests to come into contact with the dead. To cite some other examples, meat (death) is separated from milk (life); menstruation (death) is separated from sexual intercourse (life); carnivorous animals (death) are separated from vegetarian, kosher, animals (life). This is probably why the Torah juxtaposes child sacrifice with male homosexuality. Though they are not morally analogous, both represent death: one deprives children of life, the other prevents their having life. This parallelism is present in the Talmud: “He who does not engage in propagation of the race is as though he had shed blood.”

GOD'S FIRST DECLARATION about man (the human being generally, and the male specifically) is, “It is not good for man to be alone.” Now, presumably, in order to solve the problem of man's aloneness, God could have made another man or even a community of men. But instead God solved man's aloneness by creating one other person, a woman — not a man, not a few women, not a community of men and women. Man's solitude was not a function of his not being with other people; it was a function of his being without a woman. Of course, Judaism also holds that women need men. But both the Torah statement and Jewish law have been more adamant about men marrying than about women marrying. Judaism is worried about what happens to men and to society when men do not channel their passions into marriage. In this regard, the Torah and Judaism were highly prescient: the overwhelming majority of violent crimes are committed by unmarried men. Thus, male celibacy, a sacred state in many religions, is a sin in Judaism. In order to become fully human, male and female must join. In the words of Genesis, “God created the human ... male and female He created them.” The union of male and female is not merely some lovely ideal; it is the essence of the Jewish outlook on becoming human. To deny it is tantamount to denying a primary purpose of life.

Few Jews need to be informed of the centrality of family to Jewish life. Throughout their history, one of the Jews' most distinguishing characteristics has been their commitment to family life. To Judaism, the family — not the nation, and not the individual — is to be the fundamental unit, the building block of society. Thus, when God blesses Abraham He says, “Through you all the families of the earth will be blessed.”

The enemy of women

Yet another reason for Judaism's opposition to homosexuality is homosexuality's negative effect on women.

One of the most remarkable aspects of contemporary societies' acceptance of homosexuality is the lack of outcry from and on behalf of women. I say “outcry” because there is certainly much quiet crying by women over this issue, as heard in the frequent lament from single women that so many single men are gay. But the major reason for anyone concerned with women's equality to be concerned with homosexuality is the direct correlation between the prevalence of male homosexuality and the relegation of women to a low social role. The improvement of the condition of women has only occurred in Western civilization, the civilization least tolerant of homosexuality.

In societies where men sought out men for love and sex, women were relegated to society's periphery. Thus, for example, ancient Greece, which elevated homosexuality to an ideal, was characterized by “a misogynistic attitude,” in Norman Sussman's words. Homosexuality in ancient Greece, he writes, “was closely linked to an idealized concept of the man as the focus of intellectual and physical activities...The woman was seen as serving but two roles. As a wife, she ran the home. As a courtesan, she satisfied male sexual desires.” Classicist Eva Keuls describes Athens at its height of philosophical and artistic greatness as “a society dominated by men who sequester their wives and daughters, denigrate the female role in reproduction, erect monuments to the male genitalia, have sex with the sons of their peers...”

In medieval France, when men stressed male-male love, it “implied a corresponding lack of interest in women. In the Song of Roland, a French mini-epic given its final form in the late eleventh or twelfth century, women appear only as shadowy marginal figures: “The deepest signs of affection in the poem, as well as in similar ones appear in the love of man for man...” The women of Arab society, wherein male homosexuality has been widespread, remain in a notably low state in the modern world. This may be a coincidence, but common sense suggests a linkage. So, too, in traditional Chinese culture, the low state of women has been linked to widespread homosexuality. As a French physician reported from China in the nineteenth century, “Chinese women were such docile, homebound dullards that the men, like those of ancient Greece, sought courtesans and boys.”

While traditional Judaism is not as egalitarian as many late twentieth century Jews would like, it was Judaism — very much through its insistence on marriage and family and its rejection of infidelity and homosexuality — that initiated the process of elevating the status of women. While other cultures were writing homoerotic poetry, the Jews wrote the Song of Songs, one of the most beautiful poems depicting male-female sensual love ever written.

A final reason for opposition to homosexuality is the homosexual “lifestyle.” While it is possible for male homosexuals to live lives of fidelity comparable to those of heterosexual males, it is usually not the case. While the typical lesbian has had fewer than ten “lovers,” the typical male homosexual in America has had over 500. In general, neither homosexuals nor heterosexuals confront the fact that it is this male homosexual lifestyle, more than the specific homosexual act, that disturbs most people. This is probably why less attention is paid to female homosexuality. When male sexuality is not controlled, the consequences are considerably more destructive than when female sexuality is not controlled. Men rape. Women do not. Men, not women, engage in fetishes. Men are more frequently consumed by their sex drive, and wander from sex partner to sex partner. Men, not women, are sexually sadistic. The indiscriminate sex that characterizes

 

much of male homosexual life represents the antithesis of Judaism's goal of elevating human life from the animal-like to the Godlike.

The Jewish sexual ideal

Judaism has a sexual ideal — marital sex. All other forms of sexual behavior, though not equally wrong, deviate from that ideal. The further they deviate, the stronger Judaism's antipathy to that behavior. Thus, there are varying degrees of sexual wrongs. There is, one could say, a continuum of wrong which goes from premarital sex, to celibacy, to adultery, and on to homosexuality, incest, and bestiality. We can better understand why Judaism rejects homosexuality if we first understand its attitudes toward these other unacceptable practices. For example, normative Judaism forcefully rejects the claim that never marrying is an equally valid lifestyle to marriage. Judaism states that a life without marrying is a less holy, less complete, and a less Jewish life. Thus, only a married man was allowed to be a high priest, and only a man who had children could sit as a judge on the Jewish supreme court, the Sanhedrin. To put it in modern terms, while an unmarried rabbi can be the spiritual leader of a congregation, he would be dismissed by almost any congregation if he publicly argued that remaining single were as Jewishly valid a way of life as marriage. Despite all this, no Jew could argue that single Jews must be ostracized from Jewish communal life. Single Jews are to be loved and included in Jewish family, social, and religious life.

These attitudes toward not marrying should help clarify Judaism's attitude toward homosexuality. First, homosexuality contradicts the Jewish ideal. Second, it cannot be held to be equally valid. Third, those publicly committed to it may not serve as public Jewish role models. But fourth, homosexuals must be included in Jewish communal life and loved as fellow human beings and as Jews. Still, we cannot open the Jewish door to non-marital sex. For once one argues that any non-marital form of sexual behavior is the moral equal of marital sex, the door is opened to all other forms of sexual expression. If consensual homosexual activity is valid, why not consensual incest between adults? Why is sex between an adult brother and sister more objectionable than sex between two adult men? If a couple agrees, why not allow consensual adultery? Once non-marital sex is validated, how can we draw any line? Why shouldn't gay liberation be followed by incest liberation?

Accepting homosexuality as the social, moral, or religious equivalent of heterosexuality would constitute the first modern assault on the extremely hard won, millennia-old battle for a family-based, sexually monogamous society. While it is labeled as “progress,” the acceptance of homosexuality would not be new at all.

Again, Judaism's sexual ideals, especially its opposition to homosexuality, rendered Jews different from the earliest times to the present. As early as the second century B.C., Jewish writers were noting the vast differences between Jewish sexual and family life and that of their non-Jewish neighbors. In the Syballine Oracles, written by an Egyptian Jew probably between 163 and 45 B.C., the author compared Jews to the other nations: The Jews “are mindful of holy wedlock, and they do not engage in impious intercourse with male children, as do Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Romans, specious Greece and many nations of others, Persians and Galatians and all Asia.” And in our times. sex historian Amo Karlen wrote that according to the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, “Homosexuality was phenomenally rare among Orthodox Jews.”

Moral and psychological questions

To all the arguments offered against homosexuality the most frequent response is: But homosexuals have no choice. To many people this claim is so emotionally powerful that no further reflection seems necessary. How can we oppose actions that people have not chosen? The question is much more instructive when posed in a more specific way: Is homosexuality biologically programmed from birth, or is it socially and psychologically induced? There is clearly no one answer that accounts for all

 

Quote from rowenwood:

"I'm 5'8, I weigh 132 pounds"


It's ok...now we understand. Don't worry, many people suffer from SMSP complex (Short Man Small Penis Complex). It more common than you know. Do you also drive a Camaro?