Hannah Arendt characterized the "right to marry whoever one wishes" as elementary, locating it among the "inalienable human rights to 'life, liberty and pursuit of happiness proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.'" She was concerned with miscegenation laws, which in her view "constitut(ed) a much more flagrant breach of the letter and spirit of the Constitution than segregation of schools." She even considered political rights, including the right to vote, "secondary" to "the right to home and marriage."
This defense of marriage rights appears in "Reflections on Little Rock," Arendt's controversial critique of federal efforts to desegregate public schools, written over 50 years ago. She was wrong to oppose forcible school desegregation, but she was wrong for good reasons that remain relevant today, to battles over speech and association, as well as gay marriage (which, as Andrew Sullivan observes, seems destined to be legalized, eventually).
Arendt's opposition to federal enforcement of equal education rights was partly pragmatic, partly a reflection of her strong distaste for thrusting children into the front lines of a vicious, often violent political battle, and partly a demand to limit government intervention in private life and liberties (which also underlay her regard for marriage rights). Arendt was sympathetic to the private associational rights of parents who wished to control their children's education. In this instance, her defense of associational rights was inapt: if mandatory desegregation violated the rights of white parents to send their children to all-white schools, mandatory segregation had long trampled the analogous rights of African-American parents; in any case, laws governing public education ought not be written by private biases.
But while Arendt was wrong to place public schools outside the public realm, while she was insufficiently attentive to the relationship between educational and political equality, she was quite right to defend the freedom to discriminate in private and social realms. "[D]iscrimination is as indispensable a social right as equality is a political right," she stressed. "What equality is to the body politic - its innermost principle - discrimination is to society...without discrimination of some sort, society would simply cease to exist and very important possibilities of free association and group formation would disappear."
Today, those "very important possibilities" are indeed in danger of disappearing, thanks, in large part, to illiberal attacks by liberals on the private right to discriminate. Prohibitions on allegedly offensive or abusive speech and exclusionary private associations are common on college campuses (as I repeatedly lament), where generations of students are being taught that verbal insults are actionable virtual assaults, where an imagined right not to be insulted often trumps rights the fundamental right to speak, and where private associations are expected to comply with public rules prohibiting discriminatory membership requirements.
If campus crusades against speech and associational freedom eventually flourish off-campus, as today's students age into tomorrow's bureaucrats, the U.S. could eventually resemble Britain, where official illiberalism is rampant. The far right British National Party, for example, is being forced by the government to revise its constitution and membership criteria that discriminate on the basis of race, sex or religion. Membership is message, which means that the message of the BNP--and other groups--may be subject to government approval. Meanwhile, the repressive campaign to eradicate racism--not simply from education or employment but from everyone's hearts and minds--has resulted in reports of 40,000 incidents of racism a year involving children, according to a recent story in the Daily Telegraph (relying on an account by a local civil liberties group). "Primary schoolchildren and toddlers in nurseries are being punished for making racist insults...even if they do not understand the terms they use...At the same time, diversity 'missionaries' sent into schools to teach pupils about bigotry are said to be increasing the divide between white and black children by forcing them to see everything in terms of race."
Diversity zealots like this eviscerate everyday freedoms without advancing equality. It may seem counter-intuitive, but the fight for equal marriage requires a commitment to preserving the fundamental rights of bigots--racists, sexists, and homophobes--to think and express discriminatory thoughts and to act on them in private and social life. "Social standards are not legal standards," Hannah Arendt pointed out, "and if legislature follows social prejudice, society has become tyrannical."
This was an argument against mandating equality in private life (when social mores demand it) and prohibiting it in public (when social mores condemn it). "The moment social discrimination is legally abolished the freedom of society is violated...The moment social discrimination is legally enforced it becomes persecution...." The day that opponents of equal marriage are required to attend gay weddings or socialize with gay couples or prohibited from expressing disdain for them will be the day they suffer the sort of persecution now visited upon gay people denied the right to marry.
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Wendy Kaminer
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Here in the UK, the British National Party (BNP) is represented in UK town halls and in the European Parliament, yet is being denied the free choice in a supposedly democratic society, to exist in order to protect and further the interests of the indigenous peoples of the UK, ie the 90% of the total population who have ancestry in the UK going back hundreds or even thousands of years. The body which is prosecuting the BNP - the so called "Equality and Human Rights Commission", an unelected QUANGO employing a vastly disproportionate number of non UK indigenous people (Africans, Asians etc) - are attempting to remove the right of self determination of the native British people. Ultimately this will mean the indigenous people will lose their homeland, a wicked conspiracy. Discrimination is a fundamental human right, it means making free choice about whom one associates with, choice of who you invite into your home, what soap powder you choose, etc etc. Only when our choices go against the elites' plan to destroy our racial integrity so as to further their one world order plan do they seek to deny us the choice. It looks to me, reading about the free speech restrictions in US universities, that the US is well down the same path. Read about our struggle at www.bnp.org.uk
The private right to discriminate is distinct from efforts to abolish the right of the state to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. One may discriminate against homosexuals in the private sphere as one wishes, many marriage-equality proponents will tell you, but the state must not discriminate on that basis.
The distinction in the law between private and public (read: statist) discrimination is paramount, and your argument largely fails to make the distinction. To assume, without any justification, that "opponents of equal marriage are required to attend gay weddings or socialize with gay couples or prohibited from expressing disdain for them will be the day they suffer the sort of persecution now visited upon gay people denied the right to marry," is the logical conclusion of the marriage equality movement, leaves one with the impression that arguments against marriage equality are hollow.
I guess we do have the right to discriminate but it would be a difficult world if we all exercised that right.
"Meanwhile, the repressive campaign to eradicate racism - not simply from education or employment but from everyone's hearts and minds - has resulted in reports of 40,00 incidents of racism a year involving children..." - I wonder how many incidents of racism there would be against both children and adults BUT FOR the campaign to eradicate racism, and I do mean to include the long arc of history here - children born into slavery and denied the opportunity to attend any kind of school, lynchings, beatings, miscegenation laws, etc.
The fact is, the right to discriminate is hardly ever a private one, and it has always been the rightful role of both courts and legislators to promote and encourage equality where privacy ends, (for simplicity's sake I'll say this "where" begins outside the home, so yes, pretty much everywhere.) In the context of race from a U.S. jurisprudential standpoint, this is the whole point of the state action doctrine, a keen and pragmatic legal principle. So, party membership may well be message but when the sole aim of the message is to accomplish PUBLIC political reform, the government in the US would have every right to oversee it to ensure that it complies with certain post Civil War Constitutional Amendments designed to protect the rights of racial minorities against domination by what Dr. Phil Edwards in the previous comment perversely calls the "indigenous" majority. I would note here that even if the BNP reforms its constitution, chances are the party's platform would not attract minority candidates anyway. So, the so-called "struggle" is, in fact, entirely worthless. But that's the UK.
In the US, it may well be true that some "diversity zealots" go too far in their quest for equality because yes, in the private realm, the right to speak and to associate freely is and SHOULD remain inviolate. When it comes to policing the behavior of children in schools who are too young to understand the meaning of the word "racism," perhaps we are going too far. However, marriage is neither for children, nor is it a private choice - it is a name given to a public legal contract associated with certain very public legal rights accorded to adults - the right to inherit and be entitled to benefits, the right to visit the spouse in a hospital, the right to fit into a particular tax bracket, the right to be protected by community property laws, etc, etc. The only private thing about marriage is who one chooses to sleep with, and looking around the US and Europe in this day and age, I dare notice that the technicalities of legal marriage are hardly necessary or even relevant for this kind of free private association.
So, although Ms. Arendt may well have been right "to defend the freedom to discriminate in private and social realms," Arendt's critique has no application whatsoever to the legal debate about the very public institution of marriage between adults.
Intellectually deficient and disengenuous argument. Arendt's "think of the children" defense of opposition to desegregation is particularly indefensible ("let's do lasting harm to multiple generations of BLACK children, rather than distress black AND white children by making them pawns in what amounts to white atempts to sustain cultural hegemony").
So to use any of it is just flaccid and weak thought.
Short version: opposition to equal status gays by the state is EXACTLY equivalent to Jim Crow laws specifically directed at blacks. The majority cannot "vote" to supress the minority. In many places you could get a majority to vote to enact laws specifically affecting black people TODAY. That you could, doesn't make it ok. Let's have the next specious argument...
To those of you who seem to be reading my post as an argument against legalizing gay marriage, I can only ask you to re-read it, please. Actually it's an argument in favor of legalizing gay marriage, which I have long supported (actively and financially.) It is an argument against turning majoritarian social prejudices into law, (and it explicitly states that Hannah Arendt was wrong to oppose forcible de-segregation and to elevate the private associational rights of segregationist parents over the rights to public educational equality.) I have made precisely the distinction between private and public (or state) discrimination that I seem to be accused of not making. In fact, that distinction is at the heart of my strong opposition to both prohibitions of gay marriage and restrictions on discriminatory speech or exclusionary private associations.
What about the freedom to disdain those who disdain the right for all individuals to marry? Would you deprive me of that? Because I disdain, hard.
The quest for gay marriage is not a quest for equal rights. Gay people already have the equal right to marry someone of the opposite sex, which is how marriage has been defined since the dawn of Man. What they are advocating for is an exceptional right, while couching it in the terms of legitimate quests for equal rights. Marriage is not the "right to marry a partner of one's own choosing." That is a back-door attempt to redefine marriage, which is a state-sanctioned relationship between a man and a woman. The reason voters have repeatedly rejected this quest is because its advocates are not engaging in an honest and direct process with the public, but are trying to force their agenda down our throats through the courts and through legislative action, and by slip-streaming behind the civil rights movement and by demonizing their opponents with judgemental and inflammatory language. Make your case directly and honestly, accept the outcome, continue to make your case directly and honestly and be patient.
@ Kaminer
I think you overstate your clarity on the matter. Your headline, "Equality, Marriage, and the Right to Discriminate" obfuscates the issue. Your language,
"The day that opponents of equal marriage are required to attend gay weddings or socialize with gay couples or prohibited from expressing disdain for them will be the day they suffer the sort of persecution now visited upon gay people denied the right to marry,"
does as well. The hypothetical day you speak of is not in the cards, and it takes an extreme flight of fancy to suggest that is either likely or imminent. Requiring the state to allow equal marriage is not the same as forcing private institutions and individuals to respect those marriages or couples.
@jpmurray
To suggest, as you do, that gay individuals have the same right to marry as straight individuals is not only disingenuous, it is also patently false. The freedom to marry is indeed the freedom to marry who you want, given consent and the establishing a minimal baseline of competency (hence, I cannot marry a dog or a child, for each fails to meet the competency requirement). Miscegnation laws failed because they unconstitutionally injected the state into what was an otherwise personal decision of one's CHOICE in partner. Your argument, rewound, reads as this: Black (or white) people have the same right to marry who they want, as long as that person is of the same race; therefore any request that they make to have the right to marry someone of the other sex is an exceptional right.
If this is "slip-streaming" behind the civil rights movement, it is simply because the parallels are clear. Politically, morally, and legally, homosexuals are on very similar ground to the ground the civil rights activists were. This IS in an honest and direct argument. Further, suggesting that legal action (or legislative action!) is a method of jamming an agenda down the throats of a majority who disfavors that agenda is unpersuasive. Legislative action IS the method by which or government makes political decisions - legislative majorities make those decisions on behalf of the people who elected them. Majoritarian rule was never meant to be the sole method of government in this country. A robust systems of checks and balances, as Madison would remind you, is meant to prevent such majoritarian rule and factional take-over that can all to easily trample upon the rights of the majority. The courts are just one of these checks that exist to protect the rights of a minority that you are so willing to cast aside as "exceptional" and therefore unworthy of protection from the whims of a majority.
That argument may be both direct and honest, but it is wrong, and will, in the end, fail. Asserting that equal marriage rights are "exceptional" is, however, either dishonest or ignorant.
Of course the hypothetical day when opponents of gay marriage are required to attend gay weddings, etc is "not in the cards." That is, in part, the point: Opponents of gay marriage will not suffer any loss of rights if (or when) they ultimately lose the fight for continued prohibition. Of course, "requiring the state to allow equal marriage is not the same as forcing private institutions and individuals to respect those marriages or couples." That too, is the point.
Wendy, sorry, but we'll have to agree to disagree. Gay people do indeed have the equal right to marry under a traditional definition of marriage, which is what 31 states have voted to enshrine: a marriage between a single man and a single woman. This is not patently false, but patently the commonly accepted definition of marriage throughout history. It is only false in the world of the "invented" right.
By your definition of marriage--"the freedom to marry who you want"--polygamy should be legal. It passes the consenting adults test and there is no legitimate argument that you or any advocate of gay marriage can make to distinguish polygamy from gay marriage. Please give me a better argument than the ones I usually get, that polygamy is not acceptable to to the polis (also patently true, by ballot, for gay marriage), is injurious to children (also claimed by opponents of gay marriage, with the science on the subject in either direction being insufficient and politicized), or is demeaning to women (even if they consent to it). I also get the "I didn't choose my sexuality" argument, which I accept; neither did I choose to be attracted to multiple women. Society's artificial constraints that prevent me for fulfilling my biological destiny.
The argument, you see, is really about where to draw the line between what is marriage and what isn't. Gays want to move it one notch over, without acknowledging the Pandora's box that opens up. Including confronting the fact that the Old Testament condones polygamy but not homosexuality.
As to the "republican" part of our democratic republic, it was intended to prevent tyranny of the majority and to protect EXISTING minority rights, which at the time of the Founding Fathers was clearly meant to represent minority political and religious views. It was not intended to invent new rights based on sexuality.
Sorry, I wrote to Wendy but meant Aaron.
Yes, yes, political correctness is obtuse and counter-productive. Welcome to the '90s.
@jpmurray
If you want to base the substance of your argument of the original intent of the founders, as you seem want to do, or suggest that the republican nature of our government was intended to protect only "EXISTING" minority rights, we can have that debate, too.
The founders, namely Jefferson and Madison, had no illusions that the country would be vastly different a century after the constitution was ratified. The flexibility written into our system of government has made America a remarkably resilient democracy because it allows us the ability to confront changing tides without destroying our government in the process. The republican nature of our government was never intended to protect only the existing minority rights of the 18th century in perpetuity. Factional disagreements and strife was a part of everyday political life in our founders' age, and it remains so. Minorities shift, Conceptions of rights change.
Nowhere does the Constitution enumerate the existing minority rights it exists to protect through its proposed system of governance. In fact, it EXPLICITLY, through the oft-ignored 9th Amendment, provided that "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Clearly that cannot be taken to mean that ONLY the existing rights of the political minority in 18th century America were to be protected in perpetuity.
I will accept the assertion that the argument is to draw the line that delineates what is and what is not marriage. The conservative position is: marriage is the union, recognized by the law with all the benefits thus conferred, between a consenting adult male human and a consenting adult female human. The liberal position is: marriage is the union, recognized by the law with all the benefits thus conferred, between one consenting adult and another consenting adult. I will ignore the Biblical reference because (a) I do not have the competency to discuss the meaning of the Bible, and (b) we live in a secular democracy that, from a legal perspective, does not care what the Bible says.
You suggest that my view of marriage, the right of a consenting adult to marry who s/he wants as long as consent and competency are met, leads to polygamy. And I wont give you the arguments you are so tired of hearing (although I disagree with your description of the science regarding child rearing). The government provides for marriage as a mechanism to grant benefits (it has a number of reasons for doing this).
It can choose to grant marriage licenses or not, and can grant the inherent benefits or not. It does on both counts. To discriminate against a class of people based on animus towards them or because "that is how it has always been done" does not illustrate a compelling state interest. I am not saying that there is a fundamental right to marry and receive benefits from the state. What I am saying is that the government is obligated to provide a compelling reason as to why those benefits are conferred to one class of people and not the other. Animus and historical mores do not meet the compelling state interest test. Homosexuals, heterosexuals; blacks, whites; men, women; these are CLASSES of people that the state should not be allowed to discriminate against one way or another. Its laws must apply equally to ALL of them. Polygamists, like thieves, are people, but do not compose a class of people deserving protection. We discriminate against them because of their behavior, not because of who they ARE. The state can discriminate against gay or straight polygamists in granting marriage benefits, and it only has to have a shadow of a good reason - be it because polygamist households lower property values, etc. As long as we care about equal protection of the laws, we must apply all laws equally to classes of people based on WHAT and WHO they are; we do not have the same obligation to do so based on WHAT they DO.
Aaron, the 9th Amendment protects rights not enumerated in the Constitution as they were understood at the time of the Constitution. That is the meaning of "retained" and why the word is not "invented." There were no gay rights at that time, or an identified minority of gays. The push for gay rights is an invented modern concept. Gays are not being denied anything that they previously had, so are not being discriminated against.
Your argument about the definition of marriage is not principled, but is self-serving. The line is, as I have stated, between marriage as it has been understood throughout the history of mankind, and all other types of relationships that have not been understood to be marriage. Except that for much time, and in many societies, polygamy was expressly understood to be marriage, as it is today in many African and Muslim countries. There is a stronger case in history and precedent for polygamy than for gay marriage.
You have also deliberately misunderstood the distinction I made about the biological nature of polygamy by saying that we "discriminate against them because of their behavior, not because of who they ARE." I'm telling you that I am, by nature, a polygamist. It is in my biological nature, which I did not choose. If society permitted it, I would gladly have several wives. It is as natural to me as being gay is to gay people. The arguments you are using against polygamists are the very arguments that have been used against gays "we discriminate against them because of their behavior, not because of who they ARE." Hypocrite.
@jpmurray
Perhaps you have never read any of the famous and well respected constitutional scholars who have discussed the 9th Amendment, or the 14th for that matter. Perhaps you have not read the opinions of the Supreme Court that discuss, DIRECTLY, the equal protection of groups of people. For your sake, I will assume you haven't, because the arguments you advance is support of rights is so anachronistic as to be laughable, and I believe that even a cursory knowledge of how we, through our constitutional system, provide benefits and protection to citizens, would seriously cast into doubt your beliefs on the issue.
By your argument, that rights are only denied if they were rights that were once had but are now not, is also laughable. Let's rewind. 1963. Blacks are not being denied their right to vote because its a right they never had before, therefore we don't need to protect that right today. Is that really your position? If not, you have to re-evaluate your argument.
I did not ignore your biological distinction between homosexual marriage and polygamy - rather, I countered it. Your distinction, by itself, is self-serving, and is also incoherent. If biology compels me to marry more than one person, then my biology can just as easily compel me to rob, kill and rape. This does not make me a hypocrite. Discrimination against gays by denying them the right to marry is not based on discrimination against what they do, it is discrimination against who they are. Your very reliance on historical norms (which I do ignore, to an extent, as meaningless in a constitutional democracy) demonstrates that.
If you fail to understand the nuance of that argument, this debate is surely over. I could care less about historical mores as the basis of our conception of rights. By the same token, women should also not have the right to sue for divorce, own property, or work. Chinese exclusion would still be acceptable.
Our democracy is not frozen in amber, to be held up to the light as the only way in which our society can be ordered by reference to how it was arranged in the 18th century.
Why marry at all?
Aaron, we're not going to agree. You're not going to admit to the contradictions in your own language about gays and polygamists because it would force you to accept that polygamists have as much right, perhaps more, to demand sanctioned marriages as gays have. I may read further opinions about the 9th and 14th Amendments--I have read many--but I doubt those opinions (an interesting label not applied to the Constitution, by the way) will bring me closer to agreeing with the liberal bent towards inventing rights consistent with modern liberal views, even if at the time of their writing such opinions represented the majority of justices on the court issuing the opinion. Case law evolves, is circumstantial, and is seldom unanimous. It is seldom linear or exclusively consistent with one philosophy's views. There are usually two or more, sometimes opposing, interpretations of laws and the associated facts. Judges retire, die, and are replaced. Public sentiment changes--as is happening today with abortion--and case law often changes with it.
If you want to read a truly brilliant opinion, read Justice Scalia's opinion in Heller v. D.C. I hope he is assigned this year's case on political free speech regarding the Hillary movie, so that he can extend his brilliance to free speech.
If I am a practitioner of bestiality or necrophilia should I petition the courts to stop the state from interfering with my rights? After all I am not hurting any member of society.
Everyone in the end has a line which they can not cross. Sure, that line is different for different people. It is not unreasonable for society to get together and decide (perhaps by popular vote) exactly where that line is.
Olga Wayne - there's nothing "perverse" about the term "indigenous peoples", however I guess the Americans would like to forget what happened to the indigenous people of their continent, but we don't want a repeat of that here in the UK. Incidently, the idea of homosexuals getting "married" is about as perverse as anything gets - homosexuality is the ultimate attack on what makes us human - ie the need to reproduce.
This seems like a reactionary argument -- according to Wendy, the tragedy of institutionalized homophobia is that, in trying to change it, the gay rights activist may infringe on the homophobe's right to his opinon. In other words, the anti-gay activists are the real victims here.
Is that an argument that any successful rights movement anywhere has embraced? Did Eisenhower worry about the tender feelings of Orval Faubus when Faubus used the National Guard to keep black kids out of segregated schools? No. As it happens, Faubus later changed his ways -- but that was after desgregation, and it wouldn't have happened without it.
So sorry, NOM and friends, I'll still call you out when I get the chance. That's part of living in a free society.
"Dr" Phill: Sorry, did you just say that the need to reproduce is "what makes us human"? That must have been a typo. I was always under the impression--as the early Christians stressed over and over--that what was supposed to make us human was our capacity for using reason. The need to reproduce, in any case, can't be what makes us human, since we share that need with all living things. To say that it's what makes us human is like saying that having teeth is what makes cows into cows.
A good case could be made for the claim that the ability to love is what makes us human. But you wouldn't like the implications of that thought, I suppose.
Also, I would love to know at which history department you learned that Anglo-Saxons were the indigenous peoples of the British Isles. Or did you attend Uni in the 17th century? I suppose they picked up Germanic genes by osmosis over the English Channel? And they must have developed a Germanic language independently of the fact that Germanic languages were spoken on the continent? Or do you just suppose that the genetic, historical, anthropological, linguistic, etc, evidence is all part of a giant conspiracy to disenfranchise the poor, endangered conquerors? By the way, do you include Celtic peoples in the "indigenous" calculation? What about the people who were there before them? Do you only include people with bad teeth? Or do you just use the term "indigenous" as a stand-in for "white"?
It's important to make these things clear. Otherwise, somebody very gullible might accidentally miss your very subtle attempts at masking racism and homophobia behind fiction.
RH - Whatever the way you look at it, homosexuality is not a natural condition because it cannot lead to reproduction. Just as a person born with a disability - eg a club foot, low IQ or even idiocy - should be tolerated, understood and not be persecuted, then neither should homosexuals be persecuted for their deformity. However, just as no sane person would "celebrate" deformities, then neither should a perversion like homosexuality be "celebrated". Here in the UK the queer movement has the media and the elites by the throat - how long, I ask myself, will it be before homosexuality becomes compulsary? Like all hysterical, ignorant and intolerant liberals you attempt an ad hominem attack on me ("Dr" as if I am not) plus mockery and insults against my knowledge of history ("..did you attend Uni in the 17th century) ["uni" - now that word tells much about you] - by "indigenous" peoples I refer to the people in the UK with long ancestry here, and originally formed after thousands of years evolving into closely related tribes in the european land mass. Just in case you don't understand, I am not referring to the African negro, the Amerind, the Abo or the east Asian, but white people. Do you have a "problem" with the term "white"? Certainly the Jewish UK Justice Minister and architect of Multiracial Britain, Jack Straw, certainly has! Let us hope his days of influence are numbered.
Two things:
First, I have no problem with the term "white," though I think "pink" is more descriptive. I merely wonder what "indigenous" could mean, on an island whose original population left during the last Ice Age, and whose current white population is made up of waves of migrations of ethnically distinct tribes, culminated by an Anglo-Saxon invasion that genetically displaced the males on the Island. Of course you CAN just say that the indigenous population is "white," but that just ignores the ethnic diversity involved. Why is skin color so important? Why is the distinction between Gauls, Anglos, Saxons, Romans, and whoever else settled in Britain insignificant, while the distinction with more recent immigrants is paramount? In thousands of years, one will just as easily be able to refer to the "indigenous" population of Britain as "brownish", looking only at people with thousands of years of ancestry there. Why is preserving the racial make-up at this particular point in history so important? (I have no idea, by the way, what you mean by "evolving into closely related tribes in the european land mass." Are you suggesting that the current residents of the UK did not originally arrive from the european landmass but, instead, evolved "into" the people who live there?)
"Natural" is a loaded, but empty term. Using the internet to spread political messages is hardly natural. Neither is spreading political messages in the first place. Neither is writing. Unlike all of these things, homosexuality is something found among non-human animals. Why doesn't that make it more natural? On the other hand, killing members of one's own species as a demonstration of power and status seems to be fairly natural. Should we say that humans who don't routinely kill their neighbors are suffering from a "deformity"? You may also have heard of overpopulation: perhaps homosexuality is nature's attempt to deal with it. Why not? Nothing in nature prevents any of these interpretations, so it's simply a logical error to talk about one thing or another being "natural" or "unnatural", and the latter therefore as a "deformity" and thus somehow wrong. (Blue eyes were also, at one point, a deformity.)
Are you really worried that homosexuality will become compulsory? You mean, the government will send police to your house and force you to have sex with other men? Or do you just worry that, were homosexuality actually to seem like a more viable option, completely heterosexual people would suddenly choose to change their orientation? Now why would someone think that?
Our original population may well have left during the last ice age, but as the English channel wasn't there it was easy for this seed corn of our race to return. After migrating out of Africa many thousands of years earlier, and before the last ice age, they were exposed to cognitative testing environments which gave them their characteristics - eg increased IQ, sociabilty, instinct to have small families (too many offspring perished, unlike in sub saharan Africa), cooperation etc. The distinction between Gauls, Anglos, Saxons, Romans, and whoever else settled in Britain insignificant, because they all came essentially from the same gene pool after the last ice age, whereas recent immigrants do not - why should our cousins turn out exactly like us if they evolve under different conditions, separately and in isolation? (look at the average low IQ of black Africans, for instance). I am suggesting that the current residents of the UK DID originally arrive from the european landmass.
Typo - cognitively not cognitative