[xyzzy_plugh]

Thank you for this. You are correct.

My thinking aligns here, insofar that it's not apparent to me that the current situation is somehow less bad than any historical scenario.

In some sense it all comes down to what we're measuring. What are we measuring here exactly?

[EGreg]

You gave up too quickly. Allow me to steelman YOUR point LOL

Let’s go with what his rewritten suggestion is saying, and see how it reads in various contexts…

“Aren’t humans supposed to be not exclusively homosexual? The only species with actually observed exclusively homosexual individuals are humans and domesticated sheep. In every other species, including Bonobos, individuals may be seen engaging in occasional homosexual behavior but then “defect” eventually and hook up to impregnate the females. So perhaps gay men and lesbians doth protest too much. Maybe they are all open to a heterosexual encounter here and there. The drop in genetic fitness of a purely homosexual preference would be so low that it would have been heavily selected against by evolution.”

Of course, this can show that humans have recently made biological evolution not apply as much, with sperm banks, contraception, reducing child mortality to negligible levels etc. They moved past historically high levels of war, polygamy, forcible intercourse, human trafficking, etc. As Steven Pinker details in “The Better Angels of our Nature”.

And before that, they already used rudimentary technology to make eunuchs, castratos, Shakesperian actors playing women etc.

And therefore the idea of “should have” is relative now. “This is how it’s always been so this is the way it has to be”. And with AI, it gets fuzzier still!

[andrewflnr]

This is where we get to goals rather than facts, but I'd argue that trying to second-guess gay people's sexuality is a distraction. The moral principle is to let consulting adults do what they want, as long as they're not hurting anyone. Nothing after that needs to matter more than a bar conversation.

(Yeah, that probably sounds like moving the goalposts. In a lot of cases the goal will be implicit and you can just talk in your debate partner's languages of "supposed to", and that's the situation I was imagining in my first post. But if it gets messy, then yeah, you'll need to get explicit about is-ought.)