[betterunix]

"Do people lose their jobs for supporting LGBT rights. Yes."

Which is as much of a problem as what happened to Brendan Eich.

"If you think some people have less rights than other people just because of the way they were born, then you're a bad person."

Careful with that; all it would take is some new research on sexuality and sexual orientations to completely undermine that point.

[tomelders]

There's no evidence to support the idea that people are "made" homosexual. The only sane assumption to make is "Some people are gay, they're probably born that way."

Some people have more pubic hair than others. We have to wait until puberty before we know which people will have lots of pubic hair and which ones wont. But by your logic, there's some external force that occurs during childhood that will determine how much pubic hair a person will have. You'd be an idiot to think that way.

[ebfe]

Gay folks are significantly more likely to have been abused as children. That means one of two things- either there are social factors that influence homosexuality, or there are biological factors that can cause a child to be abused. Most of us consider the former to be more plausible than the latter.

The argument that some traits are influenced by socialization does not imply that all traits are influenced by socialization; your second paragraph is just inane.

[mkr-hn]

Even the perception that you might be gay tends to draw abuse from family and peers. If there's a connection, it doesn't surprise me.

[ebfe]

What would create the perception that a pre-pubescent child is gay? And do you believe that this perception is an accurate predictor of actual homosexuality?

[mkr-hn]

Generally, any deviation from socially enforced gender roles. There are plenty of kids who were abused for it and didn't turn out gay.

[ebfe]

But you believe that most kids who deviate from standard gender roles are gay? If not, there's no reason to believe that gays would be overrepresented in abuse statistics if this deviation was the cause of the abuse.

[tomelders]

> Gay folks are significantly more likely to have been abused as children.

Am I going mad? Is the whole tech community homophobic? That is an outright lie.

The National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS) 1.51% of the population of the US identify as GLBT, whereas other studies put this figure as high as 8%. However, statistics for people abused in childhood are significantly higher that this, with reliable estimates given for child sexual abuse to be 16% for males and 27% for females in the USA (NRCCSA, 1994).

Therefore, if there is a causal link between childhood sexual abuse and identifying as GLBT later in life, then why aren’t the figures for the number of GLBT people in the population reflected by the abuse statistics? There are significantly more cases of sexual abuse than there are people that identify as GLBT (Macmillan, 1997), and furthermore, the vast majority of persons sexually abused as children are heterosexual (Keith, 1991).

In addition to this, virtually all statistics agree that females are more likely to be sexually abused in childhood than males are - and yet, and yet there are proportionally more men that identify as being gay than there are women who identify as lesbian (Hite, 1991; Janus, 1993, Jefferson, 2001).

http://www.pandys.org/articles/abuseandhomosexuality.html

[ebfe]

Your link contains nothing to refute the fact that gays are more likely to have been abused (which is true), just the idea that abuse is the singular, causal factor of homosexuality (which nobody is suggesting).

[tomelders]

> gays are more likely to have been abused (which is true)

It is not true. Where the hell are you getting all this nonsense from?

[ebfe]

Here's a study on the topic.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11501300