Darth Wong wrote:OK R.M. Shultz, since you have been totally evasive about the subject upon which you were challenged earlier, I have three questions:
10 Do you have any evidence whatsoever to support your bizarre claims about the way sexuality works? If not, then will you concede that your claims are unsubstantiated? And do not say "personal experience".
Look, I have offered an hypothesis to explain human sexual behavior and I have offered to defend it against any reasoned argument. The only response I have gotten (aside from infantile name-calling) has been a chorus insisting that “homosexuality is biologically determined.” This answer does not explain how significant numbers of people routinely change their orientation, whereas my theory does. Will someone please offer a theory that is comprehensive enough to include the idea that sexual orientation is fixed while simultaneously accounting for how in many cases it is not?
Darth Wong wrote:2) Do you have any response to the argument that the only way to escape these programs was to deceive the authorities about your true nature, either for Jews or homosexuals?
Supposing you were born Jewish — how could someone tell? Well, there would be your birth certificate which, until fairly recently, listed the parents religious affiliation. There would also be records of temple membership and a corresponding lack of baptismal records. If that didn’t do it, the Nazis were quite willing to go back to the eighteenth century with records or one’s forbearers. Ultimately, you were simply trapped.
But if you were gay, all you had to do was keep your pants up
and for all legal purposes cease to be gay!
I guess the issue here ultimately comes down to respect for the rule of law. In a totalitarian state one really does not owe the government any loyalty and is not bound, morally at least, to follow the laws. But in a free society, such as the one Alan Turing lived in, social order is not maintained by force but rather by the good behavior of the citizens and respect for the rule of law becomes a moral obligation. There are going to be bad laws in any system, but in a democratic system our duty is not to pick-and-choose which laws we will follow, but to endeavor to change those laws we disagree with at the ballot box.
Thus I would maintain that the Nazi persecution of Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies was of an order of magnitude worse than the persecution of Homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Communists, while the persecution of Allan Turing was (however foolish and misguided) accomplished within the rule of laws that he was obliged to obey. Sure what happened to Alan Turing was tragic, but he could have acted differently and avoided it.
Darth Wong wrote:3) Would you make the same moral argument about (for example) a law mandating the execution of all Christians, since Christianity is definitely far more of a voluntary choice than homosexuality is?
While I favor religious liberty I also recognize that I live in a democracy where my views are not always going to prevail. The traditional Christian response to persecution is the acceptance of martyrdom — not a lot of sore-headed belly-aching!