This is a discusion I often do with my fellow gay friends, and we never reach a consensus, maybe here “the power of internet” will provide more data to deepen the subject.
The general accepted theory is that someone is “born” gay, so every 100 persons we have a more or less invariant % of gays in the population, and so far I tend to agree to this hypothesis.
I have an issue anyway with “conversion therapy”, I regard them as a pile of trash stemming from morally backward religious people and in fact conversion therapy is banned (or should be, I do not recall if it is banned or not) on the basis that since you are born gay, you cannot “convert” a person to not being gay, it would be against their nature and I agree with that.
Anyway gay adoption could lend some help to them, unexpectedly (and unexpected, counterintuitive things are what intrigues me more).
Let’s think together: if we do a longitudinal study on the children of gay couples and we see that among them the % of gays are higher than in the general population, one can conclude that you can “become” gay due to gayness exposure, and thus since you were not gay but you bevcame one, than with conversion therapy you can “reverse” to the hetero state.
What do you think? Do you have some good reliable data that confirm or deny this hypothesis? Are you aware of any good, high quality well done statistic research into that?
I think these points are not particularly important.
I see “gayness” as being no different than being left-handed.
If a higher percentage of kids raised by gay couples turn out to be gay, then so what? As long as they are well adjusted, happy, and pulling their weight in society . . . then I couldn’t care less if they are gay or not.
Objections to homosexuality have more to do with religion (and culture) than biological reality.
People believe that all of these adverse cosequences will happen from recognizing gay marriage, and this is all bullshit. People say “it isn’t natural” . . . but modern surgery with anesthetic isn’t natural, either. Vaccines aren’t natural. Neither is flying in an airplane.
Marriage as often been redefined in history. Sometimes, marriage was polygamous. Sometimes, marriage between close relatives (like in Egypt, or the European Hapsburg royal family) was the norm. In India, widows were expected to comit suicide by throwing themselves on the burning funeral pyre of the dead husband.
And so forth.
Gay marriage harms no one.
Unlike ignorant bigotry, and from your response here it’s clear @europeanatheist is still trolling.
but of course it harms noone and I am absolutely in favor of it. In Europe we normalized it way earlier than in US.
I am interested in serious open discussion and statistics.
In most of my circles homosexuals have no kids, though I have a significant amount with kids. Even the boss of a firm that I work with in Germany has kids (via insemination, lesbian couples) and we all see this as normal.
My intriguing curiosity it is really statistic and science based. The underlying hypoythesis is that you are born gay, if we observe that statistically more kids from gay couples are gay I observe a statistic anomaly.
If you think I am a troll, I can only say you are a lousy sherlock. Why cannot someone have genuine scientist curiosity? I thought would have been easier to discuss such topics rationally with atheist like me, but I must be wrong.
It is like discussing why ashkenazi jews make a disproportionate number of nobel laureates. Is it nature or nurture? Mine is pure statistic curiosity, I worked with statistics a lot as scientist and I am always intrigued by oddities
For those who go in for a scientific consensus:
“Over 90% of the reviews assessed concluded that there was no association between parent and child sexual orientations, demonstrating a clear scientific consensus on the issue since at least 2001.”
Scientific Consensus on Whether LGBTQ Parents Are More Likely or Not to Have LGBTQ Children: An Analysis of 72 Social Science Reviews of the Literature Published Between 2001 and 2017
https://vc.bridgew.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2154&context=jiws
Thank you for clarifying this and providing this material.
As for social pressure at home, how do you control for the bias, if any, of the parental figures when considering if a young person declares for or against being gay, all other factors being equal.
BTW, I used to say “If you don’t know if you’re gay or not, suck a dick. If you like it, you’re gay.”
One guy challenged me to put up or shut up. So I did. I’m not.
Thank you, I will read the study over the weekend, this is the kind of material I was looking for
Not everyone who reads the forum will take the time to read the paper.
CONCLUSION: “Conclusion Adams and Light (2015) used a network-citation approach to determine that a scholarly consensus had been reached by the late 1990’s on same-sex parenting, the consensus being that outcomes for children of same-sex parents were no different than outcomes for children of heterosexual parents. We have presented a different approach for determining consensus by evaluating 72 literature reviews published on same-sex parenting between 2001 and 2017 with a focus on the issue of whether LGBTQ parents are more likely (or not) to raise children who are LGBTQ. Our results, derived from English language social science journals, found that over 90% of the literature reviews agreed with a “no difference” conclusion.” (Goes on to list agreeing scholars.)
maybe people who have parents who are gay, are more likely to admit to/report being gay themselves (as presumably their parents won’t hate them for it).
Something to always keep in mind when dealing with statistics: typically we don’t know the actual rate of X, typically we know the reported rate. Reported rates tend of have selection/survivor bias; like I suggested above.
How many of us were programmed by our heterosexual parenting minions?