The nature of humankind does not place biological facts in contradiction with human reason. The truth is not self-refuting, of course. I think your comments both A) imply that biological and empirical facts, as you’d relay them, contradict, at least, what human beings are meant to do and B) these facts are in harmony with what we are meant to do.

In short, you appear to want it both ways. I think that has misled you to mischaracterize Catholic teaching on human sexual morality as somehow setting revelation in conflict with reason and discernment. It is the type of error that can open the door to a fuller understanding of Catholicism. There is a knock at the door and you can choose to answer it. Or not — yet at least.

It is common for such people to conflate the behavior and the sexual attraction and the gay identity. They rarely, if ever, distinguish between homosexuality and gay identity.

In this discussion, right before your eyes, Boonton asserted that “gay animals” are a valid argument just the way that the young man did — “it exists in the natural world” (read non-human world) because the inverse had been used as an argument (invalid as moral argument). Boonton gotmuddled, sure, but the claim was made for a valid argument from “gay animals”.

Apparently you think along those lines for you referred to homosexual behavior to imply a sexual oriental or sexual identity among non-humans as “empirical fact” inferred from behavior that animals exhibit “occassionaly or even exclusively”.

Is gay identity one and the same as homosexual behavior? Perhaps gay is the socio-political euphemism for what you had in mind while writing your comments.

Dr Mills referred to “changeable forms of sexuality, with heterosexuality only one of many options.” That does invoke the basis for the moralism regarding the good of human homosexuality.

It is very like the implications of your last few comments about “reasons of evolution and adaptation” and regarding what you suspect is not a justifiable distinction between what humans are meant to do (ought statements of morality based on human reason) and what might be expected (by psychiatrist and psychologist, you said overly inclusively) in the usual course of things.

Whether this or that behavior is part of creation is not the substantive issue. Also you…

It should be noted that only certain Christians believe in the Fall. Catholics, of course, do believe in it. The Eastern Orthodox (to oversimplify) don’t. Jews don’t. So the Catholic view of natural law and “who we really are and how we ought to act” is based on a religious view of “nature” that is not universally agreed upon. It is unverifiable and depends on religious faith, and consequently—although the Catholic Church claims moral truths are discoverable through reason alone—the Catholic view of human nature is not a matter of reason but of revelation. To the extent that the Fall influences Catholic reasoning on sexual morality, to that same extent those who do not believe in the Fall have reason to disagree with the Catholic Church’s moral conclusions.

Why yes. Humans are not only animals that have souls(debatable, but I think that the best explanation for a lot of human quirks), humans are animals that have cultures. Do not try to co-opt that “social construct” meme as if there was a distinction between culture and “naturalness” or as if culture could be bent at will.

Is there some biological basis for the fact that most of the sexual behavior we see in non-human primates is heterosexual? It would seem to be obviously the case. Now, is the fact that human beings, as primates, also engage in predominantly heterosexual behavior in no way biologically based in some similar way to the way it is biologically based in non-human primates? Is sexuality for non-human primates and sexuality for human primates completely different? Do male chimps respond sexually to female chimps for some reason wholly different than the reason men respond sexually to women?

Now one might ask the same question about homosexual behavior among non-human primates and humans. Are they two entirely different phenomena? Do non-human primates engage in homosexual behavior for reasons of evolution and adaption, an do humans engage in homosexual behavior because the Fall distorted something in human nature? Or is sexual behavior in humans and non-human primates at least partially attributable to similar biology between close relatives on the evolutionary tree?

Note that this is not an argument that if animals engage in homosexual behavior, it is moral for humans to do the same. It is a suggestion that humans share much in common with non-human primates, and it seems to me that it is highly unlikely that non-human-primate homosexuality and human homosexuality are two entirely unrelated phenomenon.

My point about the “invention” of sexual orientation is to highlight the cultural nature of the concept

I don’t see how you’re supporting this. Suppose I say that lobsters are prone to demonstrate aggression towards each other. Is that a ‘cultural observation’? when we see lobsters fight each other, clawing off their eyes and such are we supposed to claim that’s not aggression, maybe that’s just their way of shaking hands and saying ‘hello’?

That is incorrect. It would be a cultural bias to say that lobsters are ‘mean’ to each other. We really have no idea what, if anything, is ‘going on’ inside a lobster’s head. But we can describe lobsters as aggressive towards each other relative to other species who are less so. That’s simply objective observation.

By your reasoning gravity would also be a concept with a ‘cultural nature’ as there was something about Newton’s England that caused him to put so much effort into describing it in mathematically abstract terms. That may be true but it has nothing to do with the fact that gravity exists whether or not culture is able to ‘see it’ for what it is.

Devinicus,

If you read everything in the post and the linked articles, nobody is talking about “gay animals” but you and other critics of Dr. Brett Mills. I quote agree that the notion of a “gay animal” is ridiculous. But the idea of animals that engage in homosexual behavior occasionally or even exclusively is not ridiculous. It’s simply a fact.

It makes sense to look to animals for clues to what’s natural _for those animals_. But we are not those animals.

Indeed. See this essay. It points out just how many models there are to choose from. Humans are mammals. But not just mammals – primates. But not just primates, old world primates. But not just old world primates – apes. But not just apes – great apes. But of the great apes, we’re most closely related to the two varieties of chimpanzees.

And yet our social organization and lifestyle closely resembles bird societies in several important respects.

Depending on the details of lifestyle and biology, animals range from exclusively homosexual (e.g. whiptail lizards) to promiscuous among all genders (e.g. bonobo chimps) to monagamous (e.g. chimpanzees).

Where the ‘argument from gay animals’ has some purchase, though, is that it makes the point – provides an ‘existence proof’ – that homosexuality can ‘make sense’ in some circumstances. The question is whether such circumstances ever obtain among humans.

My point about the “invention” of sexual orientation is to highlight the cultural nature of the concept. I have no position on whether sexual orientation is “real” or not — although one could do worse than read David Halperin’s work on the subject. In that animals do not have culture, and I am pretty sure they don’t have identity in the human sense, they do not have sexual orientation. This is something which we (or at least some of “we”) foist upon animals to make our own cultural, social and political arguments.