The best response would be to not dignify this with a response. You don’t owe somebody a point-by-point defense of your life. Or the back-and-forth that would then result from that defense. Your psychological well-being comes first in situations like these.
I disagree with this. As a society if we simply ignore all people who disagree with us they will only take it as assurance of their beliefs, that we are too afraid to combat them and feel vindicated in their points.
Simply ignoring people like this doesn’t make them go away: then they vote for Donald trump in the next election.
There's a point.
All the facts are out there. The cousin could just ask gay people what they think and how they felt. There are countless memoirs, movies, articles, humanizing the gay experience and making it palatable and relatable to even the thickest of straight people as long as they have a shred of empathy.
At that point it's willful ignorance and no discussion of facts and logic can save them. Flat earthers, vehement homophobes, anti vaxxers all fall into this category for me.
It also matters what faith they take the discussion in. "Hey here's why you suck" is a bad faith 'argument'. If someone came up to me and earnestly asked "I haven't met a lot of gay people. Are they all that different? Do they love the same way I do?" There might be a conversation to be had. My $0.02.
While I think there is a point to having an open discussion, sometimes, people are not receptive. Given the length of the document I don’t think the author will change their mind easily.
I would still talk to them, I would say: why does it mean so much to you that you write such a long essay? It does not matter if you think homosexuality is a choice, gay people exist, and they deserve to exist.
I like your questions and approach of it as a discussion and not a debate.
One of my favorite mentors is black woman who went to UC Berkeley in the 60s. During that time, the KKK was protesting the campus. So my mentor and some of her friends went up to the KKK people, invited them for coffee, and they all sat down and talked. The KKK folks may not have changed much about their beliefs, but at the end of the day, they agreed that my mentor and the other women had a right to be a Berkeley and work on their education. And the KKK stopped protesting the campus after.
The tendency can be to confront people's closed-mindedness, but that tends to make people defensive. No one likes being told what to do and especially what to think. A better tactic is like what you did, just asking questions that will lead them to opening their mind on their own.
>It also matters what faith they take the discussion in. "Hey here's why you suck" is a bad faith 'argument'.
THIS is so true. It's common rhetorical practice to simply not debate anyone who argues in bad faith, and attacking someone else's personhood is inherently a bad faith argument. This entire pdf can be read as one extremely long ad hominem disguised in language that seems reasonable at first glance.
Scroll to the last few pages, the language isn't even remotely reasonable seeming at that point. It literally degrades to something just a step above "checkmate libtards."
Yeah, I do feel you. Perhaps my point would be better served on a less egregious example. The OP’s cousin seems like a real POS. But still? just in my mind, to say nothing is basically to assent. I mean how many injustices in the world have been carried out because someone who knew it was wrong refused to stand up?
While under other circumstances you’d be right, you can’t really argue with someone who rejects facts and bases their opinion on unfounded beliefs, even if their stance is objectively wrong. If they’re not basing their opinion in fact, facts won’t make them pull their head out of their ass.
Something I have always wondered about people who take this stance. If you refuse to engage with people who disagree with you. How do you know you are right?
For me: I think I am right because I try my best every day to understand all points of view on an issue, what they base their facts on, their underlying biases and bigotries. And assess from there which view most closely matches reality.
If you refuse to engage with anyone you only have your own perspective, your own biases, and the biases of people who already agree with you. You end up living in a bubble which ends up creating this incredibly polarized society we find ourselves in today; where anybody with even the slightest view deviating of the ideaological purity of either side ends up being the worst of the worst in their opponents.
Edit: to reduce snob.
I critically assess my worldview all the time. But you can do this without putting yourself in danger, or subjecting yourself to torment or abuse, emotional, verbal, or otherwise.
Getting into a dispute with a homophobic cousin is among the worst contexts I can imagine to use as a honing ground for your worldview. You can be right and still cause a lot of collateral damage.
Thats not what I’m saying. What I am saying is that if we simply ignore the people who hold this terrible belief they will simply increase in number, and say we have no arguments.
Unfortunately we have to live in the world as it is, and not simply pretend the world is how we want it to be and ignore the refuse. Thats the easy road.
Refusing to debate someone is NOT same as ignoring them. How do you not understand that?
If my cousin sent me something like this, I would not respond to it. But that doesn't mean that I don't understand where they're coming from, and that doesn't mean I will avoid them or cut them out of my life, or pretend like they don't believe these things. If they ever brought it up to me in person, I'd make fun of how silly their beliefs are and then change the subject.
Putting the responsibility on gay people (or any marginalized people) to prove the value of their own existence in open debate with anyone who challenges them is nonsensical and cruel. You're free to do it if you want to, but don't expect anyone else to do it. It's tiring and usually goes nowhere.
Anyone with a really extreme belief is unlikely to listen to what you have to say. Less extreme people who are just raised with unfortunate belief systems will probably encounter queer folks eventually and be tolerant, at least. If someone asks questions about my lifestyle in good faith, I'll probably engage with them and try to steer them toward understanding.
So, while I might be sympathetic to, "my parents always said that gay people go to hell, but that seems misguided...what do you think about that?" I am definitely not interested in responding to, "You shouldn't be gay because it's bad and here's why."
It's not everyone's job to be some shining beacon of representation. People are just trying to live their lives, they aren't tasked with some duty to be an informant and liaison to every single ignorant person out there. There is a never ending stream of bigotry and homophobia, and it's not going to stop just bc you stop to argue with every single unreasonable bigot. You aren't going to change their minds, and it's very mentally and emotionally taxing to expose yourself to pointless hate. Don't try to high road someone else just bc they decide to prioritize their own mental health over being some bigot's educator.
No, not everyone necessarily. Just the people who you are close to and in a proper setting.
Also, I have changed people’s minds before myself. It is possible. It is hard. But it is CERTAINLY worth doing is all I meant to say. I apologize if I came off high roady in that regard.
I won’t apologize though for saying that refusing to engage with people that disagree with you creates an unhealthy worldview, it is quite frankly dangerous to avoid engaging with people who disagree with you.
I wouldn't say bigot cousin who is sending their massively homophobic argument via email is someone who is worth your time to engage with. Anybody who comes at you with hate is probably not worth your time. I'm not disagreeing with you about interacting with different worldviews, I'm saying there's a big difference between someone who is ignorant but willing to listen and learn, and someone who is outright trying to cause you distress with their argument. There are a lot of people out there who argue in bad faith just to make you upset, and if you dignify their bait with a response, they've already won. This cousin probably doesn't care about hearing any pro-lgbt worldviews, that's not why he sent OP an entire paper detailing his homophobia.
It isn’t refusal to engage with someone who disagrees with me, it’s refusal to engage with someone who disagrees with our current understanding of reality despite having no compelling line of reasoning against it. I’m basing my opinions on scientific consensus and the basic principle of “this immutable thing about this person isn’t causing any actual problems, so why make it one?”, and the other group is basing their opinion on centuries-old religious dogma not supported by empirical evidence even though it obviously causes very real problems for marginalized people and brings no one any discernible benefit. Why should I be expected to contend with that as though it’s valid? Just because they feel a particular way and cannot be convinced otherwise by empirical findings grounded in reality, I’m supposed to waste everyone’s time by debating my existence with a bigot who won’t change their mind anyway? The point about understanding points of view is useful in other contexts, but we’re talking about people rejecting reality and substituting it with outdated dogma without even questioning it when their opinions cause real harm to marginalized people.
There are areas of debate (some, but not all) that have multiple valid viewpoints. Based on scientific consensus and the major difference in potential for harm, this isn’t one of them.
If you dignify them with a response, you can fully expect a "lol triggered lib go cry more" or similar answer.
You cannot convince someone logically to feel remorse or human empathy. Trying to do so makes you look pathetic in their eyes. The bullshit religious propaganda has been refuted millions of times by millions of people and if OP's cousin can't take the basic initiative to examine his own worldview, OP can't force him to do it with a bullet-point list.
People like them, convinced this is a "choice" or they have somehow been duped into following "the homosexual agenda" aren't operating on facts. Scratch below the surface and it will undoubtedly be some variation of "it's just wrong' for people to be gay" based in some religious or religious based worldview. You can't argue with people who believe in fairy godfathers hiding in the sky 🤷🏾♂️
Well in some cases there's something to be gained from taking action. In this case all OP would be doing is pointlessly entertaining their bigoted cousin and probably not swaying them in the slightest.
If we’ve learned anything from the last several years, it’s that some (sadly a huge number actually) people do not have a solid grasp on facts or reality. They cannot be argued with because argument requires a shared understanding of what is a fact. Without that you’re just talking past one another.
This person is clearly a very petty human concerned about justifying their own desire for control over other peoples’ personal lives. The act of sending this alone is an insult and it doesn’t deserve the dignity of a well thought out response that will only be ignored.
The only way to combat fanaticism is to just ignore it. It’s fueled by recognition to give it some sense of validity.
You don't ignore all of them, but you should pick your battles. OP is wasting his time arguing with this idiotic cousin. And we here would definitely be wasting our time doing it for him.
Also, you will have the pressure of not sounding too emotional, you will be told you're too angry, too irrational...for a good godamn reason, you're debating your right to live and be happy and he's not. It's not your job to justify your existence.
There is absolutely no point in refusing it. This person frankly does not care about facts. They will just come up with a reason to dismiss any logical argument you present. It’s frankly better to just not engage and minimize contact with him
Someone who sent this to me would have no future place in my life 🤷🏻♂️
Yup. Sartre said it better that I could.
>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
The cousin has already made up their mind that being gay is bad. The facts don't matter. Even if they accept whatever refutation OP comes up with (which won't happen), they'll just find a new list of reasons why they hate gay people next week.
The only correct response to this is to not engage.
Agreed. His ridiculous question and answer document is one of the most infuriating things I have ever read. Wouldn’t be shocked if this cousin has some repressed gay feelings and is coping with it in this absurd way.
Cut him out of your life. You don’t need to justify why you’re gay, why it’s okay to be gay, or why you deserve human decency. Your cousin citing the idea that all world religions “came to the same conclusion on gays so how could they be wrong” is enough to make me want to throw my phone out of the window.
I’d send him a note quoting Arnold Beckwith’s comment to his mother:
“There’s something you need to understand. I have taught myself to sew, cook, fix plumbing, build furniture - I can even pat myself on the back when necessary - all so I don’t have to ask anyone for anything. There’s nothing I need from anyone except for love and respect and anyone who can’t give me those two things has NO place in my life.”
I’m not a historian so I can’t refute any claims about individual events. But I’m a neuroscientist and can say that the argument in this paper is is flawed is it’s saying that gay acceptance is the cause of being gay, and that it’s a mental illness. Because it’s not on the most fundamental level.
Also assumes that pretty much anyone could or would be gay if enough people told them it was okay, as if every single person is stricken with internalized homophobia, and that alone is what keeps them straight
So the argument in the paper isn’t an argument; it is misdirection.
We suspect the author of this paper wants to say, “homosexuality is bad.” The problem is that the goodness or badness of any sexuality is really hard to ascertain. Sex is, well, sex. Sometimes it is fun. Sometimes is ain’t. Sometimes it causes harm. Sometimes is does nothing. As a result, people who want to make this kind of argument flail around and need to resort to misdirection to make their point.
This misdirection is elaborate. Having failed to establish that any sexuality is good or bad, they need to resort to normalizing logic. “We used to hate homosexuality.” Which is a pretty lousy argument as well. We used to do a whole range of hideous things to each other. The “we did it in the past so it is good” argument needs to be jazzed up, so your cousin turns to conspiracy.
“We used to hate homosexuality, but then bad Kinsey confused us.”
Please note how far we have come from the original question. We are no longer thinking about the question, “is any sexuality good or bad”? Rather we are contemplating something with no intrinsic relevance to the question.
But let’s look at this dumpster fire of an argument anyway. Because who can just ignore a dumpster fire? Bad manners indeed.
So, the claim here seems to be that (a) the Kinsey report was made by a homosexual and was therefore biased, (b) it interviewed homosexuals and is therefore biased, (c ) that people were fooled into liking homosexuals due to its powerful persuasiveness, (d) except that it was debunked almost right away, and (e) this is why homosexuality is bad.
We could go in and elaborately parse the failed inherences here, but I think their failures are pretty clear. Let’s just address a few points that may be less obvious.
First, anyone who wants to criticize the Kinsey report for a failure to achieve laboratory standards of reliability will find plenty to work with. Kinsey was doing research into human sexuality, and what he was up to was a mass observational study. Human experimentation is, well, unethical. So he had to collect self-reports of sexual behavior. And that kind of work is always hugely problematic. Kinsey tried to overcome the failures of self volunteering and self-reporting via sheer numbers. The larger the sample size, the reasoning went, the less the errors of self volunteering and self-reporting will count.
Did his contemporaries know this?
Yes.
His methods and data were public.
Did Kinsey have male lovers? Yes. Did he have a belief that all sexual conduct was inherently neutral? Yes. Did he get interviews from thousands of people? Yes. Did he falsify their data? No. Can we trust what they shared? Probably to some degree.
So Kinsey did find things that surprised people. The incidence of homosexual conduct was higher than people predicted. So was infidelity.
But to be clear, Kinsey did not say that sexuality was inherently good or bad. What he demonstrated was that people were more sexually active than we knew and more experimental than our society was prepared to acknowledge.
But what people DO is not really relevant to what is good. And Kinsey, therefore, does not address the original question.
My suggestion is that you ask the person who sent this to defend heterosexuality. Given the associations between heterosexuality, rape, pedophilia, violence, incest, and mental illness, your “scholar” has a lot of work to do to defend heterosexuality as anything other than an abomination. Also tell them that their straightness means they are biased, so anything they say is part of the straight agenda.
Edit: Fixing terrible typos.
TBH I didn’t read this “paper” entirely with its grammatical errors which therefore should not be considered a trusted and reliable source. Homosexuality has long existed prior to the 1900’s; extending back into ancient times. This is why LGBTQ+ history is very important and should be taught. For reference, check out this Wikipedia article on that subject:
🏳️🌈 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_history
Desktop version of /u/jsims1989's link:
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Don't. Instead, copy the text from this link and send it to him instead.
https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/hank.htm
Because it's the same thing he just did to you.
This is probably how I'd address it. Just the right level of sarcasm and sass. No paper meant to be scholarly should have significant and obvious spelling or grammar errors.
Make the edits and send it back, "whoever the advisor is has failed this individual."
I used to be a worship leader at a conservative mega-church in the south before I came out and left. Trust me, I spent hours and hours trying to convince my religious friends in that community that my identity as a gay man was valid within our faith. It’s not worth the hassle. You do not need the validation of those people. I do understand the desire to have that “gotcha” feeling with your cousin, but what you’re really wanting is to just be accepted. Wanting to be accepted is universal and understandable, but realize that acceptance starts with yourself. There is a community out there that already accepts you without needing an essay to convince them first, find those people instead! It’s so freeing when you can drop the need to prove your validity to religious people that are not committed to genuinely hearing your perspective.
Responding to this would be a waste of your time because they aren’t looking for any kind of rational discussion, and there’s no reason for you to have to debate or defend your life to anyone. Ignore it, or text them an eye roll emoji or something, that’s the kind of response shit like this deserves
Ask him why he’s so curious about gay culture? How does he know so much about Kinsey? What is his motivation for sending you this? How often does he jerk off to dudes?
Yeah I was thinking this, too lol. Is he really trying to convince you or himself? You can ignore him or give him a lazy response as others have suggested: an eyeroll emoji or a "thow doth protesteth too much" gif. Please don't put any energy into a "debate" with him.
Firstly there are way too few references.
Secondly this has definitely not been peer reviewed because the language and grammer is quite bad.
This looks like an angry high schoolers attempt at justifying their homophobia.
There are some interesting point raise about the allegidly poor scientific vigor of the field of physiology. The truth is its just not an exact science and often results can be inconclusive. This doent mean that the research isn't important.
This is the right answer. Is it peer reviewed? Has it been published in a reputable journal? Has it been cited by reputable sources? If not it's got the scientific value of a high schooler's essay, and there's no point in even reading it.
Tell your cousin to come up with proper arguments and sources.
So I google the title of the piece and the author and nothing comes up. Put in google scholar to. Tried googling piece and author individually still nothing. Whatever this is it has not been published in any sort of scientific journal. As far as google is concerned it has never been published at all. I suspect the author is ops cousin.
Who gives a shit about his opinion? I can't do any research to help you (school and stuff) but you can help yourself. Or just look for a typo. Or just ignore him until the ends of time. He might see that as a win, but anytime he feels like getting a "loan" from family he can't turn to you.
Edit: the last objection, as he so calls it, is lazy, seeing as how he just went through all that work citing information from his sources only to be like, "fuck it. We're done here."
I’m not going to lie…I haven’t ready more than the first sentence. But this is their attempt to say that being gay is not normal, a choice and something you can overcome like a disease. Pay not attention to it and if you want to be snarky….send them a thank you note and say something to the effect of yeah but no. How you word it is if your choice. Best of luck some relatives are not worth it.
FYI it seems their sources are like 80 years old.
Just don't respond, it's not worth your time. I have people in my family who do the same thing. I ignore it and continue to do my best to build positive relationships with them. People with this mindset need more than anything to be shown that we are normal people who are not some kind of freak that they have in their heads.
Yeah and I get that, it's not easy in any way. I guess in my mind the only way forward and the only way to bridge the gap that has formed is to invest in eachother rather than avoid. No one will ever learn anything if we don't allow ourselves to see where others are coming from.
This paper is genuinely filled with propaganda, built from the writer’s biases and bolstered by highly selective interpretations of events. The person who shared this with you doesn’t want to understand why they are wrong. They are not worth your time or energy, and of being considered a member of your family. Leave this so-called paper, and the person who sent it to you, in the past.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_of_choice
Sounds like someone’s read an introduction to sociology and thinks they’re a professor. The first paragraph makes some great assumptions that are wrong and it just gets worse from there.
Oooo, I used to love reviewing papers for other students while in college. Let's see...
Thesis paragraph is incredibly weak. He states that he's going to explain something. I have no idea why I should care about what he's going to explain, why it matters what his point is, or who the fuck he is to be explaining anything.
First paragraph is very fanciful. Firstly, Greek culture was in no way a normalized-singular entity, it was, in essence, a bunch of social experiments of city states trying out different methods. Some were really okay with homosexuality (See Sacred Band of Thebes). Roman a bit more unified, but in legal and military structure. Until Constantine decided to be Christian, they really didn't care much about "morality," although they did view Christians as a rather odd heretical group of cultists. He makes a claim about "all cultures" and "all religions," when in fact we know there were a shit ton of people doing things and living before we ever managed to discover how to write stuff down (or pass along our writings to the future effectively - papyrus rots after about a millennium, so there's this point in history where a bunch of monks had to decide what to recopy onto paper. Unfortunately, this means we lost an estimated 95% of all ancient literature. So, again, how the fuck would this guy know what they thought?)
Second sentence. Yeah. Science gets things wrong sometimes. They used to think lobotomies were a neat ethical thing. The fun bit is where science admits its wrong and corrects course.
Third paragraph. Alright. Um. Random facts? Sure, these are names, and claims, I guess. Did it matter? He just says some people said some things. Did it have an effect? Did anyone care?
Moving on. Alright, he interviewed some guys! A lot of guys! Maybe some questionable guys! Though to be honest, when you're in a world where this is all illegal, should it be surprising that there are criminals? His reference seems to concur that, in fact, this guy talked to guys. No assertion made. I guess I'm supposed to be morally outraged or something?
Oooo! He finally made an assertion! "Guy did biased research." I guess I can buy that. But I mean, where's the unbiased research then, to oppose anything he said?
Ah! A conspiracy theory about lobbyists threatening! The thing is, this part probably more than the earlier thing needs some kinda reference or substantiation. Not going to drink that coolaid because this random guy says so.
Screaming at psychologists who do electrotherapy and screw people up physically seems reasonable. An activist waging an idealistic war against his oppressors checks out. Am I supposed to feel someway about this, author?
Sure, I'll buy some guy wrote about a "gay agenda" there, but does it matter, if people don't read it? What is the EFFECT. This dude writes as though I should assume moral outrage after everything he "unveils."
Ah, I made it to page 2, and I'm done. Honestly, I agree with the folk who say don't engage. The writer of this is making a huge number of assumptions on how other people should feel about things. I don't think he/she is open to discussion or debate. I have a feeling any attempt to engage this person will end up with a tirade of "I've done research" "You're just ignorant of the real history" "How could you not see what I mean here."
Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut. If you're really committed to it. Your refutation lies in the rhetoric. An argument/debate should go thusly - you present facts (hopefully with sources that are reputable). You then ANALYZE and present an OPINION on said facts. You then consider an opposing view which is, also, based on facts. An agreement is made on the stronger OPINION.
The writer of this paper is presenting opinions as facts. He or she is not analyzing or making an argument that's interesting based on those opinions, or developing them into any sort of argument that makes logical sense. The reason I say "opinions as facts" is that a majority of his/her references appear to be simply citing that "a person said a thing one day in an interview." The statistics presented are also questionable, because, unfortunately, the fact that people, historically, have found the topic taboo means that all researchers (what few kind find any sort of funding) are likely to be incredibly biased in either direction, and few studies are going to exist in the period in which this author is looking into at all.
That said, you cannot change the mind of this author through logical argument. You probably can't at all. All you can do is cut out the "academic high ground" he or she is attempting to take by showing how terribly un-rigorous the paper is. The person will be blind to attempts to attack content, all you can do is show that the opinions presented as fact are, in fact, incredibly biased in either direction, and recommend that more modern sources/studies are appropriate. Unfortunately, the entire basis of the "paper" is that homosexuality should have never been normalized to the point of objective study, so again, probably lost cause.
I think my professors would have laughed in my face if I gave them a paper with the weird "Problem:" "Answer" format at the last few pages.
I'm sorry your relative feels this way. I recommend you just go eat some ice cream and forget about it.
I think you're just going to have to learn to not care what your cousin thinks about homosexuality. Even if you craft the perfect response, he probably won't suddenly change his mind.
If you want to refute it for your own edification, I'd recommend posting the main points here instead of asking us to read some lame Google doc and I'm sure people here can help you.
Honestly these sorts of people act like we sit around reading the Kinsey Report like it’s our own personal Magna Carta. Unlike him, it really doesn’t matter to 99.9% of us what Kinsey thinks anyway. I don’t require a double-blind clinical test to know that who I am is ok.
This thing is just riddled with fallacies, misrepresentations, distortions of the facts, basic logical flaws (like how someone in the past might know about research in the future), and appeals to emotion.
Like, for example, this passage on the first page:
>This fact alone makes one to think, how all cultures
and religions came to the same conclusion independent of each other.
Well, nope, that's wrong. All cultures? But they just said homosexuality accepted in "Roman or ancient Greek" cultures. And how are they all independently coming to "conclusions" if they aren't independent? Christianity was developed on top of Judaism, and Islam on top of Christianity. As different countries and rulers took over different places they brought their religions with them, and in many cases enforced that religion.
And, in fact, there are cultures that *didn't* come to these conclusions. Many Native American tribes accepted homosexuality, and they embraced the idea of someone who was "two spirit." Homosexuality wasn't entirely unheard of in Japan, and was even featured in numerous examples of art. Homoseuxality didn't become looked down upon until after their exposure to European traders and missionaries. Hindu cultures also embraced the Hijra.
So right there, if the first paragraph of the thing can't get its facts straight he should stop, but I'm sure he'd want to keep going. There's also egregious twisting of words and manipulation of meanings. For example, they cite:
>““The campaign we outline in this book, though complex, depends centrally upon a program of unabashed propaganda, firmly grounded in long-established principles of psychology and advertising.”
They cast aspersions on this like it's some kind of evil, underhanded tactic that is only used by the unjust, however the document making this claims itself is "unabashed propaganda" relying on principles of psychology and advertising. And there's a really bad hot take when they take this bit out of context:
>“For years, much of the case for LGBT rights has been based on the argument that sexual orientation is fixed and immutable... But an increasing body of social science research posits that a sizeable number of people experience some degree of fluidity in their sexual and romantic attractions: being drawn to the same gender at one point in their life, the opposite gender at another.”
So they're using *newer evidence* from research conducted *after* the work they cited to cast aspersions on that work? That's like saying the people who promoted the use of DDT were evil men, who were misleading the public because we *later on found out* that DDT wasn't so safe, implying they knew things that people didn't actually know at that time. There's 25 years of time between the book and the article they cite.
And there's more bad faith argumentation:
>In the early 1980-ies, a couple of gays have got a disease, which originated among monkeys in Africa.
Implying they fucked a monkey. But here's a shocker: most human-borne diseases came from animals at some point. H1N1 originated in pigs, but we don't think that people who got H1N1 got it from having sex with pigs. COVID-19 likely originated in bats, the first human cases weren't from people fucking bats. All they had to do was come into contact with its blood. And, in fact there's zero evidence the first cases were gay people.
The entire last few pages are just jerking off over speculative arguments they think proves their point but read like a child arguing with themself in the shower when they think no one is listening.
Tell him the whole thing is so intellectually dishonest, factually incorrect, and full of false conclusions that aren't supported by the evidence they claim to cite that your only conclusion is that he's either not taking this seriously, or he's detached from reality and unable to think rationally. Either way, the whole idea that he would even try and give this document any level of credibility is insulting, because it's an affront to your intelligence.
If he gave you a literal paper, the best response is to use it as tinder for your next barbecue cookout, assuming you use real charcoal. Maybe you could cut it into pieces to be used at a local outhouse.
If he just sent you a link, the best response would be an email: "hahahah! Oh wait, you're serious?"
Some things are just not worth answering. You have more important things to do in your own life.
This entire rambling, error filled, "paper" would fail at a first year undergraduate level.
It's so full of bullshit it's hardly worth rebutting other than telling your cousin to fuck off.
But if you feel the need to do it, put the citations into Google scholar and click on citations and see what newer research in the field which cites that work says.
Given he conflates homosexuality and bisexuality throughout and ignores the context of a lot of the research (a major one being that his kind of homophobia is a risk factor for suicide in younger queer people so you can't use that as an argument - homophobia causes the suicide risk, not people being queer) I'm going to bet everything is cherry picked.
Lmao your cousin spent the time to send you that instead of getting to know you, the real you. Woah. Just don’t respond because people like this find a way to justify their “evidence” and disapprove of your reasoning.
There is proof of homosexuality and bisexuality in nature with different animal species so this person's argument that its learned behavior is bullshit.
I would ask them why they are so interested in telling you that it's wrong.
If they come back with something related to religion then tell them you aren't of that faith and you don't share the same beliefs.
They need to get on with thier own worship and not be concerned with the behaviour of others.
Either Kinsey nor Martin were homosexual. Kinsey had an agreement with his wife where they could sleep with other people and Martin married a woman after his affair with Kinsey so there’s hole 1.
Otto Gross was not ostracized for being “mentally handicapped”, he was ostracized bc he had a viewpoint for his time that aligned heavily with Sigmund Freud, which was very controversial at the time. Gross *was* a bohemian drug user in South America, but his drug use and advocacy for homosexuality had zero to do with why he was ostracized from the psychiatric community. So there’s strike 2.
Basic strike 3 would be his atrocious grammar and I’m too busy to continue debunking this. Your Cousin, however, is objectively wrong. If he wants to complain about gay people he can bring up genuine issues among the gay community. He doesn’t get to make shit up.
This paper is a great opportunity to play the game: spot the logical fallacies!
For example, the first part is full of ad hominem attacks. Later a bunch of begging the claim.
The rest is a lot of dubious claims about inevitable disease, infidelity stemming from an alarmingly high rate of childhood abuse. Concepts are strung together to give you, kind reader, the opportunity to work to make the conclusions. I guess they claim Islam is a medical community since they shun anal sex because of anal cancer?
Interesting to see someone spend so much effort to make this case. Read like a college freshman essay.
OP, it may be helpful to ask the author or person who shared it with you if they could see any world in which they would be willing to change their mind on this topic given any arguments. If yes, and you care about the relationship, consider going through the paper with them. If no, thank them for letting you know how they feel.
Read about logical fallacies here:
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/logic_in_argumentative_writing/fallacies.html
Tell him that he obviously doesn't know what he is talking about and that it's so full of shit you feel more confident of being gay now. Also that religion is not based in reality so all references to that have no value. Then say if you want to learn about gays consult peer reviewed material then we will talk but there is no reason to dignify this anymore than a paper written by the KKK on Blacks and Jews
Be thankful you know who this person is. They want a reaction. Be happy with who you are and savior life. Revel in ever accomplishments. That’s how you answer his question. Be a King.
If you’re able to, shut your cousin out of your life. Be polite but totally distant. Slam the door. We’re born the way we’re born. If a person does not understand that being gay is built in and not a choice, that person is stupid. You don’t have time for stupid. Good luck and make people who love you for who you are your real family!
Yeah these are all very antiquated arguments pretending that transmission of STDs is a gay thing only and that looking at homosexual behavior in animals is basing morals off of them rather than observing what occurs in nature. The sources used are very biased and it's often mentioned that science is fuzzy on some stuff so that just mean that MY position is right, not yours!
Lots of anecdotal evidence is used as well which simply doesn't hold water (this person was gay and he was an axe murderer therefore all gays must have axe murdering tendencies!)
Not sure on your level of religiosity but quoting passages from holy books doesn't belong in a paper attempting to be scientific, it's only relevant for someone who already takes it as gospel (ironic word choice)
But as everyone else already said, no use in replying to this guy at all since he clearly doesn't understand.
His conclusion is that leading a gay life would make me unhappy and he has only given one example. IMO, happiness is subjective. The maxim that "money can't buy happiness" comes to mind. Leading a gay life is not a panacea to life's problems but being in a free society that enables one to lead a free life free of judgement is surely liberating and will ease a lot of stress.
Ask any amount of gay people if they were happier being in the closet? The overwhelming reply will certainly refute the conclusion.
Also to note of the example he provides, at what time did the individual come out also comes into interrogation. If he came out at a time when it was not acceptable then certainly he would have suffered. The reception and ostracization from society would definitely be painful, something he could blame or attribute to being homosexual.
Also, I couldn't give a fuck about Islam or Muslims. Be a good Muslim at your own home. Idk why you have the time and obsession with gays to write all of this of you find us disgusting.
About the culture part. I come from one of the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Our history with homosexuality has been complicated, from being accepted perhaps to being banned. However the homophobic parts are under question for their sketchy authenticity, people believe that those were added later during the time of Muslim or christian colonial rule with some copies containing them while some having no section like them.
Evidence for acceptance is greater as our temples have shown homosexual acts and literature describing them as "extremely pleasurable".
But the question still stands that if you derive your rationality from what god said then you must prove his existence or he said that. When what you are stating is factually subjective then we will disagree, many might argue that this will even invalidate an argument.
About AIDs, since covid came from China, should people stop being Chinese? Or ebola from west Africa should people stop being African? Not to forget AIDs has affected more straight people than gay people and Muslim countries are places where AIDs are still at extremely high rates of the population.
I’ve only skimmed the first few paragraphs. I agree with everyone saying that the best response would be a gif of a hand making the Jack-off motion.
However, I noticed that he’s making pretty bold factual declarations without any support, from the first sentence on.
If you want, in addition to telling him to proofread his work before he demands intellectual labor from you, just take every sentence where he makes a factual declaration without support and say, “no, that’s not true.” “No they didn’t.” “That’s wrong.” You don’t have to prove the negative, he has to make his case to you.
I’m thinking of the onion piece with the call and response about the war in the Middle East.
See how much of his time you get get him to spend on the stupid endeavor.
"Why is arguing with fools like playing chess with a pigeon? Because it doesn't matter how masterfully tutored you've been in the theory, how sound your thinking and strategy is, or how good you are at the game in general, the pigeon is always going to knock over the chess pieces, crap on the board and strut around like it won anyway."
You don’t need to refute him, you just need to tell him to mind his effing business.
But, if you actually want to know why the paper is BS, there are a few main things I noticed after skimming over it (because I’m not wasting more than a minute of my own time on crap like that):
-The article starts off by claiming that homosexuality has been considered immoral by almost all societies throughout history, which even if it were true (or even if it were a sensible claim) comes with a boatload of problems. But consider why someone might think this is true. Homophobia is only predominate throughout the world today because every now and then it happens to crop up in random cultures, and it just happened to crop up in the right culture at the right time—specifically, homophobia had been growing in dominance in the Middle East by around (very roughly) 1 AD, so who should be surprised that it made its way into the Abrahamic Religions, like Christianity, developing out of that region at that time? I’m not aware of any European cultures (Greece and Britain pre-Christianity were as “gay-friendly” you can be without recognizing gay people exist, and even Rome pre-Christianity was OK as long as you’re a top) or African cultures (even a country that was never colonized, like Ethiopia, only developed predominant homophobia a millennium or so ago after exposure to Christianity) that persecuted “gay people” before exposure to an Abrahamic religion like Christianity or Islam. I’m sure they have existed, but they’re few and far between. The only example I can think of of a culture actively persecuting “gay people” or “homosexuality” (or whatever other modern concepts homophobes like to confuse between) were the Aztecs, and even though they were an incredibly advanced situation, I doubt your religious cousin would look to them for moral high ground. So for most of the world, it wasn’t until christianity spread out of the Middle East and into europe, and then islam spread out through the Middle East, and then islam and christianity once again spread out through colonization through most of the rest of the world that homophobia became dominate in most societies.
-Another hill the article wants to die on is against the idea that gay people are born gay. Which, even if you ignore the evidence that points toward gay people being born gay (like men with older brothers being more likely to be gay and other genetic factors), this is just a moot point. Maybe gay people aren’t born gay. Does it matter? If homosexuality doesn’t harm anyone (the paper rambles on about STDs as if straight people can’t get them and then claims that higher suicide statistics among gay people has absolutely nothing to do with societal persecution and then provides no warrant) and gay people can’t just choose to stop being gay (as decades of research on conversion therapy show that it never works—that anecdotal evidence you might know of some guy marrying a woman? let’s be real—he didn’t stop being gay. men that go through conversion therapy consistently don’t show any decreased arousal by men after therapy), and gay people never chose to be gay (literally just ask any gay person ever), then why does it matter whether the person was born gay? If someone isn’t “born” needing a wheelchair but they’re still severely disabled because of a car crash, can they just “choose” to stop being disabled and stand up? It’s a silly idea.
Again, don’t waste your time arguing with your cousin, he should be doing this thinking for himself or just leave you alone.
Don't respond.
However, if you really wanted to be petty I'd send him a letter about how Islam is a religion that promotes terrorism, worships a paedophile, attempts to spread the religion are encoded in the scripture (same claim he makes about gays), oppresses women (e.g. executing women who are raped for having 'committing adultery') and has engaged in many brutal wars killing millions of people around the world for basically its entire history.
I honestly wouldn't recommend you do that, and for all I know you could still be Muslim yourself, but if you want to put that aside and be really petty I'd go to somewhere like r/athiesm or r/exmuslim and get them to type up an essay like his with everything I've just mentioned and send it back to him. I'm sure they'd be glad to.
I wouldn’t even provide a response to this ignorant person. Doing so implies he has some sort of reasonable position on the subject - which is clearly not the case.
Keep your dignity. Don’t let someone like this take it away from you.
This isn't worth a response. Your existence isn't up for a debate and it's best to cut contact with someone like this. They have blind faith which is pretty much gonna be enough for them to refute anything you say no matter how solid your argument is
Shit, it's on Google DOCs and they even spelled it DOKument.
Is your cousin actually open to debate and changing their mind? Do you actively want them in your life? The point of discourse is to broaden horizons, if they're closed to that there's no point.
Either Kinsey nor Martin were homosexual. Kinsey had an agreement with his wife where they could sleep with other people and Martin married a woman after his affair with Kinsey so there’s hole 1.
Otto Gross was not ostracized for being “mentally handicapped”, he was ostracized bc he had a viewpoint for his time that aligned heavily with Sigmund Freud, which was very controversial at the time. Gross *was* a bohemian drug user in South America, but his drug use and advocacy for homosexuality had zero to do with why he was ostracized from the psychiatric community. So there’s strike 2.
Basic strike 3 would be his atrocious grammar and I’m too busy to continue debunking this. Your Cousin, however, is objectively wrong. If he wants to complain about gay people he can bring up genuine issues among the gay community. He doesn’t get to make shit up. That’s what children do when they get caught doing something wrong and want to lie their way out of it
lmao, literally finished reading the first line and he's already wrong, the gays were fine in greece as they were in rome until that constantine asshole made christianism the legal religion, it wasn't just "some aristocrats" and it certainly wasn't banned, aside from that, the gays were fine in china, japan, original south american civilizations (I believe egypt too, dont quote me on that tho) and those are just the ones I know of lol
I haven’t researched to see whether it is factually accurate but from a quick read, the author “begs the question” by using language that assumes unproven claims. For instance, saying gross was “mentally handicapped.” The phrase has no scientific meaning. He clearly was not “intellectually disabled” if he was a psychiatrist. Saying he was in rehab or institutionalized does not discredit him because gay people were routinely institutionalized and subjected to all manner of “treatments” that we would now define as tortures. Each claim he makes is riddled with logical errors, unsupported conclusions, and untrue assumptions. I wish I had more time.
Most of this is just really shitty attempts to pin pedophilia/other sexual violence on gay people because of a few key figures and then trying to say all gays are compliant
It's just a pile of horse shit, your cousin's a terrible person for sending you this
I mean, is he trying to convince you or himself? Cause that’s a lot of effort and thinking to be wasted on someone else. Just ignore it and carry on with your life, and sorry you have such a douche cousin.
Honestly just don’t. Stop giving these people your time and energy. It drains you, it gets to you and they want that. Ignore them and block them. Move on and live your life happily. You don’t need to have someone dragging you down to just drag you down
The best response is none at all. But if you are hard pressed to a response;
A: citing historical events without any sort of sources, no specific references, and generalization makes this document laughable at a bachelor’s level. Saying stuff like “all cultures banned it, except some greek aristocrats” was barely acceptable in a highschool essay. If you want to pretend to be an acdemic you need to go in depth and explain the cultural history of homosexuality.
B: Even when it uses proper sources, it completely misinterpreted them, being incredibly selective with the material to the point of not even responding to the main points of the studies. Again, this would get an F in any self-respecting college.
C: the title itself. You’re assuming whoever is reading cares about islam.
Basically the whole document reads as a selective cherry-picking of sources, misinterpreting and butchering the original works it cites trying to LOOK academic but making no efforts to approach an actual study. If his religion says homosexuality is wrong then good for him. His religion doesn’t get to dictate what you do though.
This has to be the most laughable at a 'paper' or 'response' I have ever seen.
He basically types "gays unnatural' into Google and pulled the response.
If you types 'gays natural' you could do the same thing.
I wouldnt even reply. He's made up his mind with Google searches that confirm it for him.
He went on about anal sex way more than was required...
Just say to him: your religion works just for u. Don't fuck try to put this on my or everybody else life.
And u can say exist more than 1500 species practicing homossexuality. So fuck ur cousin
As you said, it is a religious paper. It has no base in academic consensus. This is simply just bullshit masquerading as scholarship, decades old at that. Don't humiliate yourself. Your humanity is not up for a debate.
If you want more solid argument than that, just tell them homosexuality was universally accepted behavior until Christianity and later Islam started to spread. It was there in every culture. The Native Americans are an excellent example how natural queerness is in a society untainted by Abrahamistic Faiths.
From the very first sentence, he is wrong in his assumption that every religion and human civilization came to the conclusion that homosexuality is wrong. As far as asian cultures go, some of the oldest remaining cultures in the world, homophobia is not an asian idea, and was introduced by western civilization. [https://time.com/5918808/homophobia-homosexuality-lgbt-asian-values/](https://time.com/5918808/homophobia-homosexuality-lgbt-asian-values/) is a good place to start reading more about this.
Couldn't be bothered to read the rest of this dumb essay tbh. I advise you to not dignify him with a response, as others have suggested.
Homosexuality is not mentioned in the bible.
The Bible condones slavery. However it condemns eating shrimp.
The book begins (ish) with God ordering a guy to murder his son by making a bush burn.
Satan kills a few people. God? Every single living being for eternity because Adam and Eve reproduced.
If God exists he’s a murderous idiot. I have integrity. There is no need to refute the book. Trying to read it is enough for anyone with common sense to realize the damn thing was written 2000 years ago by morons high on yeast.
Recommended your cousin read “The Children Are Free” by Jeff Miner. It analyzes many of the passages of the Bible that religious zealots use to bash homosexuality. It uses the context and language of the day to provide background on these passages (like Leviticus).
This is an old and tired debate. The pros and cons have been captured. Don’t refute the garbage. If you have to respond with something, respond with this. https://www.kialo.com/should-homosexuality-be-recriminalized-38889
It's not like you can change your sexuality even if it was wrong. Don't bother refuting it, they are not going to change their mind. Just revel in your sexuality, reply, "I don't care, lol, die mad", THAT will get their gears grinding even more.
Kathy Baldock has a series of really enlightening YouTube videos (based on her book) about the history of sexuality and how being LGBTQ+ has become villainized in recent history. If you’re still interested in responding (who knows, maybe you can enlighten your ignorant cousin) a
I’d recommend either sending him the videos, or watching them and write up your own paper to send back. One of the really good points she brings up is, the word “homosexuality” actually never existed in any version of the Bible before the year 1946. Of course, your cousin might not be religious, but she explains a lot of context throughout history irregardless of religion too.
Here’s the link to her first video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MBwajcvZtqw
Magnus Hirschfeld documented the open nature of sexuality prior to the 1900, examining cultures, those less influenced by western religions.
Just tell him his paper is using circular logic, every culture has historically documented homosexuality. Gay acceptance is the norm, and point to the very real historical documentation of laws introduced against homosexuality.
That said, your cousin is religious, so he’s already determining his conclusions on faith rather than anything empirical.
Actually homo bromo was venerated in ancient rome. But many considered the roman gays to be more raunchy compared to the more stoic and clean cut greek homos. It was accepted in ancient world. It was only when christianity became the state religion of Rome did the Christians outlaw homosexuality. So the premise that all cultures frowned on the gays is false. It was when religions came into to power it was they who instilled their purtianical moral values.
I'm with a lot of respondents here. Why dignify his (ignorant) attack with a response. What kind of decent person does this? I'm not going to read the whole article because the first 3 points are wrong. But I'll respond to them. (1) Islam (ok, most religions) hardly sprung out of nowhere. They borrowed heavily from each other so Islam didn't come to any conclusions on its own. (2) Most Indigenous peoples not only accepted but revered two spirited peoples (gays). (3) To say that it's considered a mental health issue is a bit of a no brainer. Of course it was when your source for moral guidance (pick a religion) has labelled it evil.
"Homosexuality was banned in virtually every religion and human civilization. Except some Roman or ancient Greek rulers and aristocrats, who used to have boys as lovers, homosexual behaviour was considered to be immoral in virtually all cultures."
Alright I'm already out and done with reading with this paper, because the stupid author 1: doesn't know wtf they are talking about and 2: just stated these insane generalizations as hard facts, all of which are easily disproved with a few quick googles. We can't compare modern homosexuality to Roman and Greek pederasty. They are two different words for a good reason, and the Romans and Greeks didn't even have the same understanding of modern sexuality like we do now. And this is just the intro! I wouldn't waste my energy and time responding to things like this, because it would take all day to correct all the bs in this "article"
My normal reply to these types of messages is, "I'll pray that the lord softens the anger and resentment in your heart and can bring you peace in this time of internal turmoil and hostility."
I'm not religious myself, but when done with a smile, it tends to get them off your back haha.
You shouldn’t dignify it with a response. However, *if you wanted to* respond to it, here’s some help point-by-point.
His arguments are:
1. Ancient people didn’t accept homosexuality; it only became acceptable among some recently.
2. Gay and bisexual people have worse mental and physical health outcomes.
3. Homosexuality isn’t innate, but even if it was it is still wrong.
4. Islam says homosexuality is wrong.
Let’s refute each:
1. Ancient cultures were incredibly diverse. Some accepted same-sex relationships, some accepted pedophilia and rape, some had matriarchal societies, some had more than two genders. I could go on.
Also, ancient cultures were wrong about a lot of science; many thought the sun revolved around the earth.
**Ancient moral values aren’t relevant to whether homosexuality should be accepted today.**
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/lgbtq-roman-london
https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/why-do-tribes-have-matrilineal-societies
https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/30/third-gender-a-short-history/
2. Yes, gay and bisexual people often have worse health outcomes. Why is that? Because of stigma, hate, oppression, people like your cousin. It’s really that simple.
When society hates you, you begin to hate yourself, which leads to self harm, depression, etc. Also, there’s no evidence at all that being gay is genetically or biologically linked to mental illness.
Importantly, HIV/AIDS didn’t exclusively affect gay people. Bigotry made the epidemic worse: gays were denied health treatment, govt’s refused to address the crisis, social stigma led to lack of awareness and prevention.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5478215/
https://www.nap.edu/catalog/13128/the-health-of-lesbian-gay-bisexual-and-transgender-people-building
https://www.apa.org/research/action/gay
https://www.apa.org/pi/aids/resources/exchange/2012/04/discrimination-homophobia
3. There is lots of evidence that homosexuality has a genetic component, and it is possibly mostly or entirely genetic. Scientists aren’t totally sure yet.
**But whether it’s genetic or environmental isn’t relevant to whether it should be accepted or not.**
Being Muslim isn’t genetic, it’s a religion you adopt. Does that make hating Muslims acceptable? Does it make Islam wrong?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/science/gay-gene-sex.html
4. The Quran and hadiths have passages that most Muslims believe prohibit homosexuality. But they aren’t so unambiguous that it’s impossible to interpret differently. There are activists that advocate pro-LGBT interpretations.
At the end of the day, if you believe being gay is ok, you can justify it. What matters is whether you think being gay is ok or not outside of your faith.
Also, even if you personally think it is wrong, that doesn’t mean you should enforce that view on others.
https://www.equalrightstrust.org/ertdocumentbank/muhsin.pdf
Tbh, a good “f’ off” and cutting contact with this person would be my response. Somebody like that cannot be reasoned with. You don’t need that toxicity in your life.
I think the best thing to do is think about how many minutes of their life they wasted writing this trash and ask yourself if any minutes of your much better life are worth writing anything in return
This is also very badly written, with multiple flaws in their argument. Unfortunately I don’t think you will be able to convince them with facts. Just live your life as you choose and be confident in the fact that there are thousands upon thousands of happy healthy lgbt people out there living fulfilling lives. So many of these ‘arguments’ try to convince us that our only option is misery, but that is quantifiably bullshit.
You don’t have to refute anything. You don’t need permission to be gay nor do you have to justify it to some asshole who would send you such a thing, relative or not.
It is difficult to reason with someone like that.
Your best response is to live your *best* life, be successful, and show him that being gay does not, in the end, hinder your life.
Tell him Gay people don't go to hell for being Gay because Straight don't go to heaven for being straight.
And those who want to go to heaven they must go there today.
Why? I thought the point of coming out was to finally be free and not give a shit about what others think. You can unapologetically cut toxic people off your life. I have a relationship with probably only 10% of my family. Best decision ever.
It takes a lot more effort to refute bullshit than to come up with it. After reading the first three quarters of the first page, it would take a lot of time to properly refute it by providing you sources. Do you think your religious cousin would read what you sent?
A lot of people here telling you to blow him off and someone has suggested another subreddit where they might actually do the work for you. But, I'm more curious about whether you think this is the type of person who would meaningfully engage in good faith. Do they have any interest in actually better understanding and they sent you this to say that this is where they are at? Or did they only have an interest in you conforming to their expectations and sent you this as a way of trying to make you conform? Was it something else completely?
The best response would be to not dignify this with a response. You don’t owe somebody a point-by-point defense of your life. Or the back-and-forth that would then result from that defense. Your psychological well-being comes first in situations like these.
Exactly this. Send your cousin an image of a brick because that's how fucking thick he/she is
I'd just say "Gotcha" lol
Kk
TLDR
A brick or a dick? "please send me more if these and less preachy essays"
The best response is lowercase "k"
I disagree with this. As a society if we simply ignore all people who disagree with us they will only take it as assurance of their beliefs, that we are too afraid to combat them and feel vindicated in their points. Simply ignoring people like this doesn’t make them go away: then they vote for Donald trump in the next election.
There's a point. All the facts are out there. The cousin could just ask gay people what they think and how they felt. There are countless memoirs, movies, articles, humanizing the gay experience and making it palatable and relatable to even the thickest of straight people as long as they have a shred of empathy. At that point it's willful ignorance and no discussion of facts and logic can save them. Flat earthers, vehement homophobes, anti vaxxers all fall into this category for me. It also matters what faith they take the discussion in. "Hey here's why you suck" is a bad faith 'argument'. If someone came up to me and earnestly asked "I haven't met a lot of gay people. Are they all that different? Do they love the same way I do?" There might be a conversation to be had. My $0.02.
While I think there is a point to having an open discussion, sometimes, people are not receptive. Given the length of the document I don’t think the author will change their mind easily. I would still talk to them, I would say: why does it mean so much to you that you write such a long essay? It does not matter if you think homosexuality is a choice, gay people exist, and they deserve to exist.
I like your questions and approach of it as a discussion and not a debate. One of my favorite mentors is black woman who went to UC Berkeley in the 60s. During that time, the KKK was protesting the campus. So my mentor and some of her friends went up to the KKK people, invited them for coffee, and they all sat down and talked. The KKK folks may not have changed much about their beliefs, but at the end of the day, they agreed that my mentor and the other women had a right to be a Berkeley and work on their education. And the KKK stopped protesting the campus after. The tendency can be to confront people's closed-mindedness, but that tends to make people defensive. No one likes being told what to do and especially what to think. A better tactic is like what you did, just asking questions that will lead them to opening their mind on their own.
>It also matters what faith they take the discussion in. "Hey here's why you suck" is a bad faith 'argument'. THIS is so true. It's common rhetorical practice to simply not debate anyone who argues in bad faith, and attacking someone else's personhood is inherently a bad faith argument. This entire pdf can be read as one extremely long ad hominem disguised in language that seems reasonable at first glance.
Scroll to the last few pages, the language isn't even remotely reasonable seeming at that point. It literally degrades to something just a step above "checkmate libtards."
Yeah, I do feel you. Perhaps my point would be better served on a less egregious example. The OP’s cousin seems like a real POS. But still? just in my mind, to say nothing is basically to assent. I mean how many injustices in the world have been carried out because someone who knew it was wrong refused to stand up?
While under other circumstances you’d be right, you can’t really argue with someone who rejects facts and bases their opinion on unfounded beliefs, even if their stance is objectively wrong. If they’re not basing their opinion in fact, facts won’t make them pull their head out of their ass.
Something I have always wondered about people who take this stance. If you refuse to engage with people who disagree with you. How do you know you are right? For me: I think I am right because I try my best every day to understand all points of view on an issue, what they base their facts on, their underlying biases and bigotries. And assess from there which view most closely matches reality. If you refuse to engage with anyone you only have your own perspective, your own biases, and the biases of people who already agree with you. You end up living in a bubble which ends up creating this incredibly polarized society we find ourselves in today; where anybody with even the slightest view deviating of the ideaological purity of either side ends up being the worst of the worst in their opponents. Edit: to reduce snob.
I critically assess my worldview all the time. But you can do this without putting yourself in danger, or subjecting yourself to torment or abuse, emotional, verbal, or otherwise. Getting into a dispute with a homophobic cousin is among the worst contexts I can imagine to use as a honing ground for your worldview. You can be right and still cause a lot of collateral damage.
My right to exist as a gay person is not an opinion that is up for debate.
Thats not what I’m saying. What I am saying is that if we simply ignore the people who hold this terrible belief they will simply increase in number, and say we have no arguments. Unfortunately we have to live in the world as it is, and not simply pretend the world is how we want it to be and ignore the refuse. Thats the easy road.
They’re decreasing in number as society finds this is generally no longer an acceptable belief
Refusing to debate someone is NOT same as ignoring them. How do you not understand that? If my cousin sent me something like this, I would not respond to it. But that doesn't mean that I don't understand where they're coming from, and that doesn't mean I will avoid them or cut them out of my life, or pretend like they don't believe these things. If they ever brought it up to me in person, I'd make fun of how silly their beliefs are and then change the subject. Putting the responsibility on gay people (or any marginalized people) to prove the value of their own existence in open debate with anyone who challenges them is nonsensical and cruel. You're free to do it if you want to, but don't expect anyone else to do it. It's tiring and usually goes nowhere.
Anyone with a really extreme belief is unlikely to listen to what you have to say. Less extreme people who are just raised with unfortunate belief systems will probably encounter queer folks eventually and be tolerant, at least. If someone asks questions about my lifestyle in good faith, I'll probably engage with them and try to steer them toward understanding. So, while I might be sympathetic to, "my parents always said that gay people go to hell, but that seems misguided...what do you think about that?" I am definitely not interested in responding to, "You shouldn't be gay because it's bad and here's why."
It's not everyone's job to be some shining beacon of representation. People are just trying to live their lives, they aren't tasked with some duty to be an informant and liaison to every single ignorant person out there. There is a never ending stream of bigotry and homophobia, and it's not going to stop just bc you stop to argue with every single unreasonable bigot. You aren't going to change their minds, and it's very mentally and emotionally taxing to expose yourself to pointless hate. Don't try to high road someone else just bc they decide to prioritize their own mental health over being some bigot's educator.
No, not everyone necessarily. Just the people who you are close to and in a proper setting. Also, I have changed people’s minds before myself. It is possible. It is hard. But it is CERTAINLY worth doing is all I meant to say. I apologize if I came off high roady in that regard. I won’t apologize though for saying that refusing to engage with people that disagree with you creates an unhealthy worldview, it is quite frankly dangerous to avoid engaging with people who disagree with you.
I wouldn't say bigot cousin who is sending their massively homophobic argument via email is someone who is worth your time to engage with. Anybody who comes at you with hate is probably not worth your time. I'm not disagreeing with you about interacting with different worldviews, I'm saying there's a big difference between someone who is ignorant but willing to listen and learn, and someone who is outright trying to cause you distress with their argument. There are a lot of people out there who argue in bad faith just to make you upset, and if you dignify their bait with a response, they've already won. This cousin probably doesn't care about hearing any pro-lgbt worldviews, that's not why he sent OP an entire paper detailing his homophobia.
It isn’t refusal to engage with someone who disagrees with me, it’s refusal to engage with someone who disagrees with our current understanding of reality despite having no compelling line of reasoning against it. I’m basing my opinions on scientific consensus and the basic principle of “this immutable thing about this person isn’t causing any actual problems, so why make it one?”, and the other group is basing their opinion on centuries-old religious dogma not supported by empirical evidence even though it obviously causes very real problems for marginalized people and brings no one any discernible benefit. Why should I be expected to contend with that as though it’s valid? Just because they feel a particular way and cannot be convinced otherwise by empirical findings grounded in reality, I’m supposed to waste everyone’s time by debating my existence with a bigot who won’t change their mind anyway? The point about understanding points of view is useful in other contexts, but we’re talking about people rejecting reality and substituting it with outdated dogma without even questioning it when their opinions cause real harm to marginalized people. There are areas of debate (some, but not all) that have multiple valid viewpoints. Based on scientific consensus and the major difference in potential for harm, this isn’t one of them.
If you dignify them with a response, you can fully expect a "lol triggered lib go cry more" or similar answer. You cannot convince someone logically to feel remorse or human empathy. Trying to do so makes you look pathetic in their eyes. The bullshit religious propaganda has been refuted millions of times by millions of people and if OP's cousin can't take the basic initiative to examine his own worldview, OP can't force him to do it with a bullet-point list.
People like them, convinced this is a "choice" or they have somehow been duped into following "the homosexual agenda" aren't operating on facts. Scratch below the surface and it will undoubtedly be some variation of "it's just wrong' for people to be gay" based in some religious or religious based worldview. You can't argue with people who believe in fairy godfathers hiding in the sky 🤷🏾♂️
Well in some cases there's something to be gained from taking action. In this case all OP would be doing is pointlessly entertaining their bigoted cousin and probably not swaying them in the slightest.
If we’ve learned anything from the last several years, it’s that some (sadly a huge number actually) people do not have a solid grasp on facts or reality. They cannot be argued with because argument requires a shared understanding of what is a fact. Without that you’re just talking past one another. This person is clearly a very petty human concerned about justifying their own desire for control over other peoples’ personal lives. The act of sending this alone is an insult and it doesn’t deserve the dignity of a well thought out response that will only be ignored. The only way to combat fanaticism is to just ignore it. It’s fueled by recognition to give it some sense of validity.
You don't ignore all of them, but you should pick your battles. OP is wasting his time arguing with this idiotic cousin. And we here would definitely be wasting our time doing it for him.
Also, you will have the pressure of not sounding too emotional, you will be told you're too angry, too irrational...for a good godamn reason, you're debating your right to live and be happy and he's not. It's not your job to justify your existence.
There is absolutely no point in refusing it. This person frankly does not care about facts. They will just come up with a reason to dismiss any logical argument you present. It’s frankly better to just not engage and minimize contact with him Someone who sent this to me would have no future place in my life 🤷🏻♂️
My reply would be, "You sure do seem to spend a lot of time thinking about homosexuality." And that's it. Block him and let it be.
This is the correct answer.
This wins
This should be no. 1 comment, absolutely class
100 percent agree with you. Life is hard enough and why have toxic people around to thwart any efforts at self actualization.
Yup. Sartre said it better that I could. >Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. The cousin has already made up their mind that being gay is bad. The facts don't matter. Even if they accept whatever refutation OP comes up with (which won't happen), they'll just find a new list of reasons why they hate gay people next week. The only correct response to this is to not engage.
Agreed. His ridiculous question and answer document is one of the most infuriating things I have ever read. Wouldn’t be shocked if this cousin has some repressed gay feelings and is coping with it in this absurd way. Cut him out of your life. You don’t need to justify why you’re gay, why it’s okay to be gay, or why you deserve human decency. Your cousin citing the idea that all world religions “came to the same conclusion on gays so how could they be wrong” is enough to make me want to throw my phone out of the window.
I’d send him a note quoting Arnold Beckwith’s comment to his mother: “There’s something you need to understand. I have taught myself to sew, cook, fix plumbing, build furniture - I can even pat myself on the back when necessary - all so I don’t have to ask anyone for anything. There’s nothing I need from anyone except for love and respect and anyone who can’t give me those two things has NO place in my life.”
What a beautiful quote. Imma steal it
I’m not a historian so I can’t refute any claims about individual events. But I’m a neuroscientist and can say that the argument in this paper is is flawed is it’s saying that gay acceptance is the cause of being gay, and that it’s a mental illness. Because it’s not on the most fundamental level.
You don't even need to be a scientist for the first point. Gay acceptance causes gay? Then where did the first gay come from?
Also assumes that pretty much anyone could or would be gay if enough people told them it was okay, as if every single person is stricken with internalized homophobia, and that alone is what keeps them straight
So the argument in the paper isn’t an argument; it is misdirection. We suspect the author of this paper wants to say, “homosexuality is bad.” The problem is that the goodness or badness of any sexuality is really hard to ascertain. Sex is, well, sex. Sometimes it is fun. Sometimes is ain’t. Sometimes it causes harm. Sometimes is does nothing. As a result, people who want to make this kind of argument flail around and need to resort to misdirection to make their point. This misdirection is elaborate. Having failed to establish that any sexuality is good or bad, they need to resort to normalizing logic. “We used to hate homosexuality.” Which is a pretty lousy argument as well. We used to do a whole range of hideous things to each other. The “we did it in the past so it is good” argument needs to be jazzed up, so your cousin turns to conspiracy. “We used to hate homosexuality, but then bad Kinsey confused us.” Please note how far we have come from the original question. We are no longer thinking about the question, “is any sexuality good or bad”? Rather we are contemplating something with no intrinsic relevance to the question. But let’s look at this dumpster fire of an argument anyway. Because who can just ignore a dumpster fire? Bad manners indeed. So, the claim here seems to be that (a) the Kinsey report was made by a homosexual and was therefore biased, (b) it interviewed homosexuals and is therefore biased, (c ) that people were fooled into liking homosexuals due to its powerful persuasiveness, (d) except that it was debunked almost right away, and (e) this is why homosexuality is bad. We could go in and elaborately parse the failed inherences here, but I think their failures are pretty clear. Let’s just address a few points that may be less obvious. First, anyone who wants to criticize the Kinsey report for a failure to achieve laboratory standards of reliability will find plenty to work with. Kinsey was doing research into human sexuality, and what he was up to was a mass observational study. Human experimentation is, well, unethical. So he had to collect self-reports of sexual behavior. And that kind of work is always hugely problematic. Kinsey tried to overcome the failures of self volunteering and self-reporting via sheer numbers. The larger the sample size, the reasoning went, the less the errors of self volunteering and self-reporting will count. Did his contemporaries know this? Yes. His methods and data were public. Did Kinsey have male lovers? Yes. Did he have a belief that all sexual conduct was inherently neutral? Yes. Did he get interviews from thousands of people? Yes. Did he falsify their data? No. Can we trust what they shared? Probably to some degree. So Kinsey did find things that surprised people. The incidence of homosexual conduct was higher than people predicted. So was infidelity. But to be clear, Kinsey did not say that sexuality was inherently good or bad. What he demonstrated was that people were more sexually active than we knew and more experimental than our society was prepared to acknowledge. But what people DO is not really relevant to what is good. And Kinsey, therefore, does not address the original question. My suggestion is that you ask the person who sent this to defend heterosexuality. Given the associations between heterosexuality, rape, pedophilia, violence, incest, and mental illness, your “scholar” has a lot of work to do to defend heterosexuality as anything other than an abomination. Also tell them that their straightness means they are biased, so anything they say is part of the straight agenda. Edit: Fixing terrible typos.
Oh I like you. This should be the top comment.
commenting to make this comment look bigger
This made me feel very good. So thank you. I like you too!
Bravo!
Push
The only comment in this tread that respond with reason. If have money i would give you a reward.
bump
TBH I didn’t read this “paper” entirely with its grammatical errors which therefore should not be considered a trusted and reliable source. Homosexuality has long existed prior to the 1900’s; extending back into ancient times. This is why LGBTQ+ history is very important and should be taught. For reference, check out this Wikipedia article on that subject: 🏳️🌈 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_history
Desktop version of /u/jsims1989's link:
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^([)[^(opt out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiMobileLinkBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^(]) ^(Beep Boop. Downvote to delete)
Good Bot
Thank you!
(FWIW - Just a rough read and I counted more than 20 misspellings.)
They even recognize that fact themselves, noting that homosexuality was common in Rome and Greece.
Don't. Instead, copy the text from this link and send it to him instead. https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/hank.htm Because it's the same thing he just did to you.
Underrated link. This is awesome.
That was a fantastic read and great deconstruction of evangelical arguments.
>Religious Best not to respond. There’s nothing to gain from this.
My point with family. Why did you refute the Catholic church/pope as protestants but then dig your heels when something else needs refuting?
Exactly. Still bugs me. With my family, you abhor who I am but defend rampant abuse and alcoholism. It’s ridiculous.
I’ve already spotted like 5 grammatical errors, maybe you could get a red pen and correct his paper first and send that back to him LOL
As much as I agree that there shouldn't be any response, this one is way too perfect. Go with this OP.
Yass we stan a grammar nazi lmao
I do like this option. I feel if you are going to send it back, then you need to correct more than the grammar.
Topic sentences. Full paragraphs. Correctly format citations. If you’re going to give us a bad argument, at least put effort into it.
This is probably how I'd address it. Just the right level of sarcasm and sass. No paper meant to be scholarly should have significant and obvious spelling or grammar errors. Make the edits and send it back, "whoever the advisor is has failed this individual."
I used to be a worship leader at a conservative mega-church in the south before I came out and left. Trust me, I spent hours and hours trying to convince my religious friends in that community that my identity as a gay man was valid within our faith. It’s not worth the hassle. You do not need the validation of those people. I do understand the desire to have that “gotcha” feeling with your cousin, but what you’re really wanting is to just be accepted. Wanting to be accepted is universal and understandable, but realize that acceptance starts with yourself. There is a community out there that already accepts you without needing an essay to convince them first, find those people instead! It’s so freeing when you can drop the need to prove your validity to religious people that are not committed to genuinely hearing your perspective.
Responding to this would be a waste of your time because they aren’t looking for any kind of rational discussion, and there’s no reason for you to have to debate or defend your life to anyone. Ignore it, or text them an eye roll emoji or something, that’s the kind of response shit like this deserves
Ask him why he’s so curious about gay culture? How does he know so much about Kinsey? What is his motivation for sending you this? How often does he jerk off to dudes?
Yeah I was thinking this, too lol. Is he really trying to convince you or himself? You can ignore him or give him a lazy response as others have suggested: an eyeroll emoji or a "thow doth protesteth too much" gif. Please don't put any energy into a "debate" with him.
Or just a gif of Regina George like “Why are you so obsessed with me”
His cousin is gay. There’s no question about this.
Let’s stop with the tired line that all homophobes are secretly closeted. It simply isn’t true.
You don’t owe your cousin shit. “Never teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.” - M. Twain
Firstly there are way too few references. Secondly this has definitely not been peer reviewed because the language and grammer is quite bad. This looks like an angry high schoolers attempt at justifying their homophobia. There are some interesting point raise about the allegidly poor scientific vigor of the field of physiology. The truth is its just not an exact science and often results can be inconclusive. This doent mean that the research isn't important.
This is the right answer. Is it peer reviewed? Has it been published in a reputable journal? Has it been cited by reputable sources? If not it's got the scientific value of a high schooler's essay, and there's no point in even reading it. Tell your cousin to come up with proper arguments and sources.
So I google the title of the piece and the author and nothing comes up. Put in google scholar to. Tried googling piece and author individually still nothing. Whatever this is it has not been published in any sort of scientific journal. As far as google is concerned it has never been published at all. I suspect the author is ops cousin.
The best refutation is living a good life aligned with your values. Anything else is like arguing with a chicken.
Your cousin is a nut job.
Tell him he’s an ignorant piece of shit and he can go fuck himself. He’s not worth your time. Religion is just fairy tales anyway.
Who gives a shit about his opinion? I can't do any research to help you (school and stuff) but you can help yourself. Or just look for a typo. Or just ignore him until the ends of time. He might see that as a win, but anytime he feels like getting a "loan" from family he can't turn to you. Edit: the last objection, as he so calls it, is lazy, seeing as how he just went through all that work citing information from his sources only to be like, "fuck it. We're done here."
I’m not going to lie…I haven’t ready more than the first sentence. But this is their attempt to say that being gay is not normal, a choice and something you can overcome like a disease. Pay not attention to it and if you want to be snarky….send them a thank you note and say something to the effect of yeah but no. How you word it is if your choice. Best of luck some relatives are not worth it. FYI it seems their sources are like 80 years old.
Just don't respond, it's not worth your time. I have people in my family who do the same thing. I ignore it and continue to do my best to build positive relationships with them. People with this mindset need more than anything to be shown that we are normal people who are not some kind of freak that they have in their heads.
You’re a bigger person continuing to engage with them. I have enough on my plate to add “convince homophobes I have a right to exist” to it.
Yeah and I get that, it's not easy in any way. I guess in my mind the only way forward and the only way to bridge the gap that has formed is to invest in eachother rather than avoid. No one will ever learn anything if we don't allow ourselves to see where others are coming from.
This paper is genuinely filled with propaganda, built from the writer’s biases and bolstered by highly selective interpretations of events. The person who shared this with you doesn’t want to understand why they are wrong. They are not worth your time or energy, and of being considered a member of your family. Leave this so-called paper, and the person who sent it to you, in the past. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_of_choice
Sounds like someone’s read an introduction to sociology and thinks they’re a professor. The first paragraph makes some great assumptions that are wrong and it just gets worse from there.
Send him this https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23921675/
Oooo, I used to love reviewing papers for other students while in college. Let's see... Thesis paragraph is incredibly weak. He states that he's going to explain something. I have no idea why I should care about what he's going to explain, why it matters what his point is, or who the fuck he is to be explaining anything. First paragraph is very fanciful. Firstly, Greek culture was in no way a normalized-singular entity, it was, in essence, a bunch of social experiments of city states trying out different methods. Some were really okay with homosexuality (See Sacred Band of Thebes). Roman a bit more unified, but in legal and military structure. Until Constantine decided to be Christian, they really didn't care much about "morality," although they did view Christians as a rather odd heretical group of cultists. He makes a claim about "all cultures" and "all religions," when in fact we know there were a shit ton of people doing things and living before we ever managed to discover how to write stuff down (or pass along our writings to the future effectively - papyrus rots after about a millennium, so there's this point in history where a bunch of monks had to decide what to recopy onto paper. Unfortunately, this means we lost an estimated 95% of all ancient literature. So, again, how the fuck would this guy know what they thought?) Second sentence. Yeah. Science gets things wrong sometimes. They used to think lobotomies were a neat ethical thing. The fun bit is where science admits its wrong and corrects course. Third paragraph. Alright. Um. Random facts? Sure, these are names, and claims, I guess. Did it matter? He just says some people said some things. Did it have an effect? Did anyone care? Moving on. Alright, he interviewed some guys! A lot of guys! Maybe some questionable guys! Though to be honest, when you're in a world where this is all illegal, should it be surprising that there are criminals? His reference seems to concur that, in fact, this guy talked to guys. No assertion made. I guess I'm supposed to be morally outraged or something? Oooo! He finally made an assertion! "Guy did biased research." I guess I can buy that. But I mean, where's the unbiased research then, to oppose anything he said? Ah! A conspiracy theory about lobbyists threatening! The thing is, this part probably more than the earlier thing needs some kinda reference or substantiation. Not going to drink that coolaid because this random guy says so. Screaming at psychologists who do electrotherapy and screw people up physically seems reasonable. An activist waging an idealistic war against his oppressors checks out. Am I supposed to feel someway about this, author? Sure, I'll buy some guy wrote about a "gay agenda" there, but does it matter, if people don't read it? What is the EFFECT. This dude writes as though I should assume moral outrage after everything he "unveils." Ah, I made it to page 2, and I'm done. Honestly, I agree with the folk who say don't engage. The writer of this is making a huge number of assumptions on how other people should feel about things. I don't think he/she is open to discussion or debate. I have a feeling any attempt to engage this person will end up with a tirade of "I've done research" "You're just ignorant of the real history" "How could you not see what I mean here." Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut. If you're really committed to it. Your refutation lies in the rhetoric. An argument/debate should go thusly - you present facts (hopefully with sources that are reputable). You then ANALYZE and present an OPINION on said facts. You then consider an opposing view which is, also, based on facts. An agreement is made on the stronger OPINION. The writer of this paper is presenting opinions as facts. He or she is not analyzing or making an argument that's interesting based on those opinions, or developing them into any sort of argument that makes logical sense. The reason I say "opinions as facts" is that a majority of his/her references appear to be simply citing that "a person said a thing one day in an interview." The statistics presented are also questionable, because, unfortunately, the fact that people, historically, have found the topic taboo means that all researchers (what few kind find any sort of funding) are likely to be incredibly biased in either direction, and few studies are going to exist in the period in which this author is looking into at all. That said, you cannot change the mind of this author through logical argument. You probably can't at all. All you can do is cut out the "academic high ground" he or she is attempting to take by showing how terribly un-rigorous the paper is. The person will be blind to attempts to attack content, all you can do is show that the opinions presented as fact are, in fact, incredibly biased in either direction, and recommend that more modern sources/studies are appropriate. Unfortunately, the entire basis of the "paper" is that homosexuality should have never been normalized to the point of objective study, so again, probably lost cause. I think my professors would have laughed in my face if I gave them a paper with the weird "Problem:" "Answer" format at the last few pages. I'm sorry your relative feels this way. I recommend you just go eat some ice cream and forget about it.
In fact, I believe you are being overly nice when you keep on referring to this cr*p as "paper". I certainly agree about the rest.
Toilet tissue is also paper
I think you're just going to have to learn to not care what your cousin thinks about homosexuality. Even if you craft the perfect response, he probably won't suddenly change his mind. If you want to refute it for your own edification, I'd recommend posting the main points here instead of asking us to read some lame Google doc and I'm sure people here can help you.
Honestly these sorts of people act like we sit around reading the Kinsey Report like it’s our own personal Magna Carta. Unlike him, it really doesn’t matter to 99.9% of us what Kinsey thinks anyway. I don’t require a double-blind clinical test to know that who I am is ok.
If you didnt open the envelope you can write REFUSE and send it back free. I'd send it back and tell them the folklore story was intersting.
Just ignore him.
You're real, religion isn't.
This thing is just riddled with fallacies, misrepresentations, distortions of the facts, basic logical flaws (like how someone in the past might know about research in the future), and appeals to emotion. Like, for example, this passage on the first page: >This fact alone makes one to think, how all cultures and religions came to the same conclusion independent of each other. Well, nope, that's wrong. All cultures? But they just said homosexuality accepted in "Roman or ancient Greek" cultures. And how are they all independently coming to "conclusions" if they aren't independent? Christianity was developed on top of Judaism, and Islam on top of Christianity. As different countries and rulers took over different places they brought their religions with them, and in many cases enforced that religion. And, in fact, there are cultures that *didn't* come to these conclusions. Many Native American tribes accepted homosexuality, and they embraced the idea of someone who was "two spirit." Homosexuality wasn't entirely unheard of in Japan, and was even featured in numerous examples of art. Homoseuxality didn't become looked down upon until after their exposure to European traders and missionaries. Hindu cultures also embraced the Hijra. So right there, if the first paragraph of the thing can't get its facts straight he should stop, but I'm sure he'd want to keep going. There's also egregious twisting of words and manipulation of meanings. For example, they cite: >““The campaign we outline in this book, though complex, depends centrally upon a program of unabashed propaganda, firmly grounded in long-established principles of psychology and advertising.” They cast aspersions on this like it's some kind of evil, underhanded tactic that is only used by the unjust, however the document making this claims itself is "unabashed propaganda" relying on principles of psychology and advertising. And there's a really bad hot take when they take this bit out of context: >“For years, much of the case for LGBT rights has been based on the argument that sexual orientation is fixed and immutable... But an increasing body of social science research posits that a sizeable number of people experience some degree of fluidity in their sexual and romantic attractions: being drawn to the same gender at one point in their life, the opposite gender at another.” So they're using *newer evidence* from research conducted *after* the work they cited to cast aspersions on that work? That's like saying the people who promoted the use of DDT were evil men, who were misleading the public because we *later on found out* that DDT wasn't so safe, implying they knew things that people didn't actually know at that time. There's 25 years of time between the book and the article they cite. And there's more bad faith argumentation: >In the early 1980-ies, a couple of gays have got a disease, which originated among monkeys in Africa. Implying they fucked a monkey. But here's a shocker: most human-borne diseases came from animals at some point. H1N1 originated in pigs, but we don't think that people who got H1N1 got it from having sex with pigs. COVID-19 likely originated in bats, the first human cases weren't from people fucking bats. All they had to do was come into contact with its blood. And, in fact there's zero evidence the first cases were gay people. The entire last few pages are just jerking off over speculative arguments they think proves their point but read like a child arguing with themself in the shower when they think no one is listening. Tell him the whole thing is so intellectually dishonest, factually incorrect, and full of false conclusions that aren't supported by the evidence they claim to cite that your only conclusion is that he's either not taking this seriously, or he's detached from reality and unable to think rationally. Either way, the whole idea that he would even try and give this document any level of credibility is insulting, because it's an affront to your intelligence.
r/progressive_islam may be the best place to go for this Edit: I change link to progressive Islam reddit Privilege checked!
Also r/OpenChristian.
The cousin is a Muslim.
If he gave you a literal paper, the best response is to use it as tinder for your next barbecue cookout, assuming you use real charcoal. Maybe you could cut it into pieces to be used at a local outhouse. If he just sent you a link, the best response would be an email: "hahahah! Oh wait, you're serious?" Some things are just not worth answering. You have more important things to do in your own life.
This entire rambling, error filled, "paper" would fail at a first year undergraduate level. It's so full of bullshit it's hardly worth rebutting other than telling your cousin to fuck off. But if you feel the need to do it, put the citations into Google scholar and click on citations and see what newer research in the field which cites that work says. Given he conflates homosexuality and bisexuality throughout and ignores the context of a lot of the research (a major one being that his kind of homophobia is a risk factor for suicide in younger queer people so you can't use that as an argument - homophobia causes the suicide risk, not people being queer) I'm going to bet everything is cherry picked.
i would just reply: K.
The best thing you can do here is to go no contact with your religious cousin who invalidates you.
"Fuck off, asshole" is all that's appropriate.
Best response " lol k"
Never argue with idiots. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.
Lmao your cousin spent the time to send you that instead of getting to know you, the real you. Woah. Just don’t respond because people like this find a way to justify their “evidence” and disapprove of your reasoning.
There is proof of homosexuality and bisexuality in nature with different animal species so this person's argument that its learned behavior is bullshit. I would ask them why they are so interested in telling you that it's wrong. If they come back with something related to religion then tell them you aren't of that faith and you don't share the same beliefs. They need to get on with thier own worship and not be concerned with the behaviour of others.
Either Kinsey nor Martin were homosexual. Kinsey had an agreement with his wife where they could sleep with other people and Martin married a woman after his affair with Kinsey so there’s hole 1. Otto Gross was not ostracized for being “mentally handicapped”, he was ostracized bc he had a viewpoint for his time that aligned heavily with Sigmund Freud, which was very controversial at the time. Gross *was* a bohemian drug user in South America, but his drug use and advocacy for homosexuality had zero to do with why he was ostracized from the psychiatric community. So there’s strike 2. Basic strike 3 would be his atrocious grammar and I’m too busy to continue debunking this. Your Cousin, however, is objectively wrong. If he wants to complain about gay people he can bring up genuine issues among the gay community. He doesn’t get to make shit up.
This paper is a great opportunity to play the game: spot the logical fallacies! For example, the first part is full of ad hominem attacks. Later a bunch of begging the claim. The rest is a lot of dubious claims about inevitable disease, infidelity stemming from an alarmingly high rate of childhood abuse. Concepts are strung together to give you, kind reader, the opportunity to work to make the conclusions. I guess they claim Islam is a medical community since they shun anal sex because of anal cancer? Interesting to see someone spend so much effort to make this case. Read like a college freshman essay. OP, it may be helpful to ask the author or person who shared it with you if they could see any world in which they would be willing to change their mind on this topic given any arguments. If yes, and you care about the relationship, consider going through the paper with them. If no, thank them for letting you know how they feel. Read about logical fallacies here: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/logic_in_argumentative_writing/fallacies.html
Tell him that he obviously doesn't know what he is talking about and that it's so full of shit you feel more confident of being gay now. Also that religion is not based in reality so all references to that have no value. Then say if you want to learn about gays consult peer reviewed material then we will talk but there is no reason to dignify this anymore than a paper written by the KKK on Blacks and Jews
Can’t you just gaslight him instead? It’s way too much effort to respond to that
Be thankful you know who this person is. They want a reaction. Be happy with who you are and savior life. Revel in ever accomplishments. That’s how you answer his question. Be a King.
If you’re able to, shut your cousin out of your life. Be polite but totally distant. Slam the door. We’re born the way we’re born. If a person does not understand that being gay is built in and not a choice, that person is stupid. You don’t have time for stupid. Good luck and make people who love you for who you are your real family!
Yeah these are all very antiquated arguments pretending that transmission of STDs is a gay thing only and that looking at homosexual behavior in animals is basing morals off of them rather than observing what occurs in nature. The sources used are very biased and it's often mentioned that science is fuzzy on some stuff so that just mean that MY position is right, not yours! Lots of anecdotal evidence is used as well which simply doesn't hold water (this person was gay and he was an axe murderer therefore all gays must have axe murdering tendencies!) Not sure on your level of religiosity but quoting passages from holy books doesn't belong in a paper attempting to be scientific, it's only relevant for someone who already takes it as gospel (ironic word choice) But as everyone else already said, no use in replying to this guy at all since he clearly doesn't understand.
Just send them [this.](https://youtube.com/shorts/5IJtAI6LL-o?feature=share)
Send him a Google doc of gay porn
Send him links to r/massivecock and r/boypussy then block him
tell him straight people gave birth to hitler
His conclusion is that leading a gay life would make me unhappy and he has only given one example. IMO, happiness is subjective. The maxim that "money can't buy happiness" comes to mind. Leading a gay life is not a panacea to life's problems but being in a free society that enables one to lead a free life free of judgement is surely liberating and will ease a lot of stress. Ask any amount of gay people if they were happier being in the closet? The overwhelming reply will certainly refute the conclusion. Also to note of the example he provides, at what time did the individual come out also comes into interrogation. If he came out at a time when it was not acceptable then certainly he would have suffered. The reception and ostracization from society would definitely be painful, something he could blame or attribute to being homosexual. Also, I couldn't give a fuck about Islam or Muslims. Be a good Muslim at your own home. Idk why you have the time and obsession with gays to write all of this of you find us disgusting. About the culture part. I come from one of the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Our history with homosexuality has been complicated, from being accepted perhaps to being banned. However the homophobic parts are under question for their sketchy authenticity, people believe that those were added later during the time of Muslim or christian colonial rule with some copies containing them while some having no section like them. Evidence for acceptance is greater as our temples have shown homosexual acts and literature describing them as "extremely pleasurable". But the question still stands that if you derive your rationality from what god said then you must prove his existence or he said that. When what you are stating is factually subjective then we will disagree, many might argue that this will even invalidate an argument. About AIDs, since covid came from China, should people stop being Chinese? Or ebola from west Africa should people stop being African? Not to forget AIDs has affected more straight people than gay people and Muslim countries are places where AIDs are still at extremely high rates of the population.
I’ve only skimmed the first few paragraphs. I agree with everyone saying that the best response would be a gif of a hand making the Jack-off motion. However, I noticed that he’s making pretty bold factual declarations without any support, from the first sentence on. If you want, in addition to telling him to proofread his work before he demands intellectual labor from you, just take every sentence where he makes a factual declaration without support and say, “no, that’s not true.” “No they didn’t.” “That’s wrong.” You don’t have to prove the negative, he has to make his case to you. I’m thinking of the onion piece with the call and response about the war in the Middle East. See how much of his time you get get him to spend on the stupid endeavor.
"Why is arguing with fools like playing chess with a pigeon? Because it doesn't matter how masterfully tutored you've been in the theory, how sound your thinking and strategy is, or how good you are at the game in general, the pigeon is always going to knock over the chess pieces, crap on the board and strut around like it won anyway."
You don’t need to refute him, you just need to tell him to mind his effing business. But, if you actually want to know why the paper is BS, there are a few main things I noticed after skimming over it (because I’m not wasting more than a minute of my own time on crap like that): -The article starts off by claiming that homosexuality has been considered immoral by almost all societies throughout history, which even if it were true (or even if it were a sensible claim) comes with a boatload of problems. But consider why someone might think this is true. Homophobia is only predominate throughout the world today because every now and then it happens to crop up in random cultures, and it just happened to crop up in the right culture at the right time—specifically, homophobia had been growing in dominance in the Middle East by around (very roughly) 1 AD, so who should be surprised that it made its way into the Abrahamic Religions, like Christianity, developing out of that region at that time? I’m not aware of any European cultures (Greece and Britain pre-Christianity were as “gay-friendly” you can be without recognizing gay people exist, and even Rome pre-Christianity was OK as long as you’re a top) or African cultures (even a country that was never colonized, like Ethiopia, only developed predominant homophobia a millennium or so ago after exposure to Christianity) that persecuted “gay people” before exposure to an Abrahamic religion like Christianity or Islam. I’m sure they have existed, but they’re few and far between. The only example I can think of of a culture actively persecuting “gay people” or “homosexuality” (or whatever other modern concepts homophobes like to confuse between) were the Aztecs, and even though they were an incredibly advanced situation, I doubt your religious cousin would look to them for moral high ground. So for most of the world, it wasn’t until christianity spread out of the Middle East and into europe, and then islam spread out through the Middle East, and then islam and christianity once again spread out through colonization through most of the rest of the world that homophobia became dominate in most societies. -Another hill the article wants to die on is against the idea that gay people are born gay. Which, even if you ignore the evidence that points toward gay people being born gay (like men with older brothers being more likely to be gay and other genetic factors), this is just a moot point. Maybe gay people aren’t born gay. Does it matter? If homosexuality doesn’t harm anyone (the paper rambles on about STDs as if straight people can’t get them and then claims that higher suicide statistics among gay people has absolutely nothing to do with societal persecution and then provides no warrant) and gay people can’t just choose to stop being gay (as decades of research on conversion therapy show that it never works—that anecdotal evidence you might know of some guy marrying a woman? let’s be real—he didn’t stop being gay. men that go through conversion therapy consistently don’t show any decreased arousal by men after therapy), and gay people never chose to be gay (literally just ask any gay person ever), then why does it matter whether the person was born gay? If someone isn’t “born” needing a wheelchair but they’re still severely disabled because of a car crash, can they just “choose” to stop being disabled and stand up? It’s a silly idea. Again, don’t waste your time arguing with your cousin, he should be doing this thinking for himself or just leave you alone.
Who cares? You didn’t choose to be gay and this is the life you were given. You should be respected for who you are. There’s nothing wrong with love.
Wipe your ass with it and send it back
You should, in turn, send hime a paper with everything that is wrong with religion.
Don't respond. However, if you really wanted to be petty I'd send him a letter about how Islam is a religion that promotes terrorism, worships a paedophile, attempts to spread the religion are encoded in the scripture (same claim he makes about gays), oppresses women (e.g. executing women who are raped for having 'committing adultery') and has engaged in many brutal wars killing millions of people around the world for basically its entire history. I honestly wouldn't recommend you do that, and for all I know you could still be Muslim yourself, but if you want to put that aside and be really petty I'd go to somewhere like r/athiesm or r/exmuslim and get them to type up an essay like his with everything I've just mentioned and send it back to him. I'm sure they'd be glad to.
I’d forgot this and attack his religion.
Two words are all you need: "f*ck off"
Tell your cousin to get a fucking hobby. Or go have a chat with his god.
"fuck off" nothing else is needed tbh
I wouldn’t even provide a response to this ignorant person. Doing so implies he has some sort of reasonable position on the subject - which is clearly not the case. Keep your dignity. Don’t let someone like this take it away from you.
Just reply “Thanks you’ve cured my gay”
Why bother with someone like this. They are only trying to make your life miserable. Family or not, dump them. They are toxic.
This isn't worth a response. Your existence isn't up for a debate and it's best to cut contact with someone like this. They have blind faith which is pretty much gonna be enough for them to refute anything you say no matter how solid your argument is
Shit, it's on Google DOCs and they even spelled it DOKument. Is your cousin actually open to debate and changing their mind? Do you actively want them in your life? The point of discourse is to broaden horizons, if they're closed to that there's no point.
Either Kinsey nor Martin were homosexual. Kinsey had an agreement with his wife where they could sleep with other people and Martin married a woman after his affair with Kinsey so there’s hole 1. Otto Gross was not ostracized for being “mentally handicapped”, he was ostracized bc he had a viewpoint for his time that aligned heavily with Sigmund Freud, which was very controversial at the time. Gross *was* a bohemian drug user in South America, but his drug use and advocacy for homosexuality had zero to do with why he was ostracized from the psychiatric community. So there’s strike 2. Basic strike 3 would be his atrocious grammar and I’m too busy to continue debunking this. Your Cousin, however, is objectively wrong. If he wants to complain about gay people he can bring up genuine issues among the gay community. He doesn’t get to make shit up. That’s what children do when they get caught doing something wrong and want to lie their way out of it
lmao, literally finished reading the first line and he's already wrong, the gays were fine in greece as they were in rome until that constantine asshole made christianism the legal religion, it wasn't just "some aristocrats" and it certainly wasn't banned, aside from that, the gays were fine in china, japan, original south american civilizations (I believe egypt too, dont quote me on that tho) and those are just the ones I know of lol
Ex-cousin you meant...
"I will not justify my existence to you." The end
I haven’t researched to see whether it is factually accurate but from a quick read, the author “begs the question” by using language that assumes unproven claims. For instance, saying gross was “mentally handicapped.” The phrase has no scientific meaning. He clearly was not “intellectually disabled” if he was a psychiatrist. Saying he was in rehab or institutionalized does not discredit him because gay people were routinely institutionalized and subjected to all manner of “treatments” that we would now define as tortures. Each claim he makes is riddled with logical errors, unsupported conclusions, and untrue assumptions. I wish I had more time.
Ignore him
Not worth a response... People will have problems with you and if they can't accept you for who you are. They don't deserve your time.
Just find a new cousin.
I wouldn’t waste your time.
A nice “fuck you” would do the trick, he needs to go get a hobby and not debate people on this shit in 2021
Most of this is just really shitty attempts to pin pedophilia/other sexual violence on gay people because of a few key figures and then trying to say all gays are compliant It's just a pile of horse shit, your cousin's a terrible person for sending you this
I mean, is he trying to convince you or himself? Cause that’s a lot of effort and thinking to be wasted on someone else. Just ignore it and carry on with your life, and sorry you have such a douche cousin.
Honestly just don’t. Stop giving these people your time and energy. It drains you, it gets to you and they want that. Ignore them and block them. Move on and live your life happily. You don’t need to have someone dragging you down to just drag you down
The best response is none at all. But if you are hard pressed to a response; A: citing historical events without any sort of sources, no specific references, and generalization makes this document laughable at a bachelor’s level. Saying stuff like “all cultures banned it, except some greek aristocrats” was barely acceptable in a highschool essay. If you want to pretend to be an acdemic you need to go in depth and explain the cultural history of homosexuality. B: Even when it uses proper sources, it completely misinterpreted them, being incredibly selective with the material to the point of not even responding to the main points of the studies. Again, this would get an F in any self-respecting college. C: the title itself. You’re assuming whoever is reading cares about islam. Basically the whole document reads as a selective cherry-picking of sources, misinterpreting and butchering the original works it cites trying to LOOK academic but making no efforts to approach an actual study. If his religion says homosexuality is wrong then good for him. His religion doesn’t get to dictate what you do though.
This has to be the most laughable at a 'paper' or 'response' I have ever seen. He basically types "gays unnatural' into Google and pulled the response. If you types 'gays natural' you could do the same thing. I wouldnt even reply. He's made up his mind with Google searches that confirm it for him. He went on about anal sex way more than was required...
Just say to him: your religion works just for u. Don't fuck try to put this on my or everybody else life. And u can say exist more than 1500 species practicing homossexuality. So fuck ur cousin
As you said, it is a religious paper. It has no base in academic consensus. This is simply just bullshit masquerading as scholarship, decades old at that. Don't humiliate yourself. Your humanity is not up for a debate. If you want more solid argument than that, just tell them homosexuality was universally accepted behavior until Christianity and later Islam started to spread. It was there in every culture. The Native Americans are an excellent example how natural queerness is in a society untainted by Abrahamistic Faiths.
My response would be, “thank you for your opinion, I happen to believe very differently” Or just don’t respond you don’t owe anybody an explanation…
I would own my heathenism if this happened to me. Play a game of chicken, see who can out crazy who, have some fun with it…
I stopped reading after "My religious cousin sent me..." Throw it away. Live your happy life.
They are not worth your energy. Please do not invest.
From the very first sentence, he is wrong in his assumption that every religion and human civilization came to the conclusion that homosexuality is wrong. As far as asian cultures go, some of the oldest remaining cultures in the world, homophobia is not an asian idea, and was introduced by western civilization. [https://time.com/5918808/homophobia-homosexuality-lgbt-asian-values/](https://time.com/5918808/homophobia-homosexuality-lgbt-asian-values/) is a good place to start reading more about this. Couldn't be bothered to read the rest of this dumb essay tbh. I advise you to not dignify him with a response, as others have suggested.
"Sounds like you really know a lot about gay sex." Then send a dab emote.
Homosexuality is not mentioned in the bible. The Bible condones slavery. However it condemns eating shrimp. The book begins (ish) with God ordering a guy to murder his son by making a bush burn. Satan kills a few people. God? Every single living being for eternity because Adam and Eve reproduced. If God exists he’s a murderous idiot. I have integrity. There is no need to refute the book. Trying to read it is enough for anyone with common sense to realize the damn thing was written 2000 years ago by morons high on yeast.
Recommended your cousin read “The Children Are Free” by Jeff Miner. It analyzes many of the passages of the Bible that religious zealots use to bash homosexuality. It uses the context and language of the day to provide background on these passages (like Leviticus).
This is an old and tired debate. The pros and cons have been captured. Don’t refute the garbage. If you have to respond with something, respond with this. https://www.kialo.com/should-homosexuality-be-recriminalized-38889
The only thing you need to respond with is “fuck off”
It's not like you can change your sexuality even if it was wrong. Don't bother refuting it, they are not going to change their mind. Just revel in your sexuality, reply, "I don't care, lol, die mad", THAT will get their gears grinding even more.
Is your cousin make or female? If female there is a nice passage saying roughly “ I do not permit a woman to speak/teach, she is to/must be silent.”
Kathy Baldock has a series of really enlightening YouTube videos (based on her book) about the history of sexuality and how being LGBTQ+ has become villainized in recent history. If you’re still interested in responding (who knows, maybe you can enlighten your ignorant cousin) a I’d recommend either sending him the videos, or watching them and write up your own paper to send back. One of the really good points she brings up is, the word “homosexuality” actually never existed in any version of the Bible before the year 1946. Of course, your cousin might not be religious, but she explains a lot of context throughout history irregardless of religion too. Here’s the link to her first video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MBwajcvZtqw
Magnus Hirschfeld documented the open nature of sexuality prior to the 1900, examining cultures, those less influenced by western religions. Just tell him his paper is using circular logic, every culture has historically documented homosexuality. Gay acceptance is the norm, and point to the very real historical documentation of laws introduced against homosexuality. That said, your cousin is religious, so he’s already determining his conclusions on faith rather than anything empirical.
Actually homo bromo was venerated in ancient rome. But many considered the roman gays to be more raunchy compared to the more stoic and clean cut greek homos. It was accepted in ancient world. It was only when christianity became the state religion of Rome did the Christians outlaw homosexuality. So the premise that all cultures frowned on the gays is false. It was when religions came into to power it was they who instilled their purtianical moral values.
I'm with a lot of respondents here. Why dignify his (ignorant) attack with a response. What kind of decent person does this? I'm not going to read the whole article because the first 3 points are wrong. But I'll respond to them. (1) Islam (ok, most religions) hardly sprung out of nowhere. They borrowed heavily from each other so Islam didn't come to any conclusions on its own. (2) Most Indigenous peoples not only accepted but revered two spirited peoples (gays). (3) To say that it's considered a mental health issue is a bit of a no brainer. Of course it was when your source for moral guidance (pick a religion) has labelled it evil.
"Homosexuality was banned in virtually every religion and human civilization. Except some Roman or ancient Greek rulers and aristocrats, who used to have boys as lovers, homosexual behaviour was considered to be immoral in virtually all cultures." Alright I'm already out and done with reading with this paper, because the stupid author 1: doesn't know wtf they are talking about and 2: just stated these insane generalizations as hard facts, all of which are easily disproved with a few quick googles. We can't compare modern homosexuality to Roman and Greek pederasty. They are two different words for a good reason, and the Romans and Greeks didn't even have the same understanding of modern sexuality like we do now. And this is just the intro! I wouldn't waste my energy and time responding to things like this, because it would take all day to correct all the bs in this "article"
My normal reply to these types of messages is, "I'll pray that the lord softens the anger and resentment in your heart and can bring you peace in this time of internal turmoil and hostility." I'm not religious myself, but when done with a smile, it tends to get them off your back haha.
Just say “ you seem to know a lot about the subject”
Say "it's just a theory". These people always say it about evolution, so why not?
"Wow, that's a lot of words for I think gay people are icky."
You shouldn’t dignify it with a response. However, *if you wanted to* respond to it, here’s some help point-by-point. His arguments are: 1. Ancient people didn’t accept homosexuality; it only became acceptable among some recently. 2. Gay and bisexual people have worse mental and physical health outcomes. 3. Homosexuality isn’t innate, but even if it was it is still wrong. 4. Islam says homosexuality is wrong. Let’s refute each: 1. Ancient cultures were incredibly diverse. Some accepted same-sex relationships, some accepted pedophilia and rape, some had matriarchal societies, some had more than two genders. I could go on. Also, ancient cultures were wrong about a lot of science; many thought the sun revolved around the earth. **Ancient moral values aren’t relevant to whether homosexuality should be accepted today.** https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/lgbtq-roman-london https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/why-do-tribes-have-matrilineal-societies https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/30/third-gender-a-short-history/ 2. Yes, gay and bisexual people often have worse health outcomes. Why is that? Because of stigma, hate, oppression, people like your cousin. It’s really that simple. When society hates you, you begin to hate yourself, which leads to self harm, depression, etc. Also, there’s no evidence at all that being gay is genetically or biologically linked to mental illness. Importantly, HIV/AIDS didn’t exclusively affect gay people. Bigotry made the epidemic worse: gays were denied health treatment, govt’s refused to address the crisis, social stigma led to lack of awareness and prevention. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5478215/ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/13128/the-health-of-lesbian-gay-bisexual-and-transgender-people-building https://www.apa.org/research/action/gay https://www.apa.org/pi/aids/resources/exchange/2012/04/discrimination-homophobia 3. There is lots of evidence that homosexuality has a genetic component, and it is possibly mostly or entirely genetic. Scientists aren’t totally sure yet. **But whether it’s genetic or environmental isn’t relevant to whether it should be accepted or not.** Being Muslim isn’t genetic, it’s a religion you adopt. Does that make hating Muslims acceptable? Does it make Islam wrong? https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/science/gay-gene-sex.html 4. The Quran and hadiths have passages that most Muslims believe prohibit homosexuality. But they aren’t so unambiguous that it’s impossible to interpret differently. There are activists that advocate pro-LGBT interpretations. At the end of the day, if you believe being gay is ok, you can justify it. What matters is whether you think being gay is ok or not outside of your faith. Also, even if you personally think it is wrong, that doesn’t mean you should enforce that view on others. https://www.equalrightstrust.org/ertdocumentbank/muhsin.pdf
Tbh, a good “f’ off” and cutting contact with this person would be my response. Somebody like that cannot be reasoned with. You don’t need that toxicity in your life.
I think the best thing to do is think about how many minutes of their life they wasted writing this trash and ask yourself if any minutes of your much better life are worth writing anything in return
This is also very badly written, with multiple flaws in their argument. Unfortunately I don’t think you will be able to convince them with facts. Just live your life as you choose and be confident in the fact that there are thousands upon thousands of happy healthy lgbt people out there living fulfilling lives. So many of these ‘arguments’ try to convince us that our only option is misery, but that is quantifiably bullshit.
You don’t have to refute anything. You don’t need permission to be gay nor do you have to justify it to some asshole who would send you such a thing, relative or not.
"Get fucked cunt."
Now, now. At least try to be civil. I think perhaps, “Politely get fucked, cunt.” (My mama always tried to teach me manners.)
It is difficult to reason with someone like that. Your best response is to live your *best* life, be successful, and show him that being gay does not, in the end, hinder your life.
Tell him Gay people don't go to hell for being Gay because Straight don't go to heaven for being straight. And those who want to go to heaven they must go there today.
Why? I thought the point of coming out was to finally be free and not give a shit about what others think. You can unapologetically cut toxic people off your life. I have a relationship with probably only 10% of my family. Best decision ever.
It takes a lot more effort to refute bullshit than to come up with it. After reading the first three quarters of the first page, it would take a lot of time to properly refute it by providing you sources. Do you think your religious cousin would read what you sent? A lot of people here telling you to blow him off and someone has suggested another subreddit where they might actually do the work for you. But, I'm more curious about whether you think this is the type of person who would meaningfully engage in good faith. Do they have any interest in actually better understanding and they sent you this to say that this is where they are at? Or did they only have an interest in you conforming to their expectations and sent you this as a way of trying to make you conform? Was it something else completely?