Homosexuality, what is "natural", and the thought police

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/homosexuality-decriminalisation-50-gay-sex-unnatural-rights-british-people-believe-same-sex-a7862191.html

A few unorganised thoughts:

- Is there still someone out there who thinks that the "gay rights" movement is really just about freedom to do what they will in the privacy of their bedrooms, rather than the wholesale re-engineering of society in their image? Let this survey, the associated comments, and all the other propaganda pieces you're seeing in the news this week (the time of the 50th anniversary of the 1967 acts decriminalising private homosexual intercourse) disabuse you of that notion.

- It's the thought police. The idea that someone, somewhere does not approve of their bedroom activities drives "gay rights" activists wild. It's not just "I want freedom to do what I want", but "everybody must approve of it" and "nobody must even think differently". The idea that some people still don't want to whole-heartedly endorse their views maddens them, and they can't live with it: the campaign must be total and eternal. Why would that be? Something to do with conscience?

- i.e. A totalitarian agenda. Nobody can be accused of peddling conspiracy theories when they point this out any more, since now they have sufficient cultural power to be completely open and straightforward about saying so, and have for a number of years.

- Note that the headline, like very many headlines dealing with the results of surveys, is wrong. The headline says that "Four in 10 British people believe gay sex is 'unnatural'". However, the article goes on to explain that this number of people both (presumably) think it is wrong and were willing to say so in the survey, despite the considerable social pressure to hide their true thoughts and say otherwise. The aspect of social pressure means, with a very high degree of likelihood, that the true number of those who believe that homosexual acts are unnatural is very much higher.

- Of course they do. If they don't, then they must be pretty ignorant of some rather basic anatomical facts.

- "Seventy-eight per cent of people aged 18 to 24 said that gay sex was natural, while 69 per cent of those aged 65 and above believe it is not." I wonder how much part social pressure pays in that. People aged 65 and over have much less to lose in various areas if they say what they really think, compared to 18-24 year-olds who've been given continual indoctrination as to what they are supposed to believe. Of course, the 1960s sexual revolutionaries have spent a long time teaching people to reflexively believe that younger people are automatically more interesting, relevant, thoughtful, cool, etcetera - that was a useful tool in the fight against other authorities in society (strong families, church, etc.).

- The main issue with the question itself, is what "natural" means. People with different world-views will interpret that in totally different ways. Christians believe in an "order of nature" - which isn't an order artificially imposed upon nature with only an arbitrary (fiat) relationship to it, but rather an order intentionally embedded by God in creation, arising from its construction, so that creation reflects his purposes and the right uses of things and indicates their binding nature upon us. But, what is "natural" to an atheist? They could stick to physicalism, i.e. biology (in which case homosexual acts are unnatural), or they could take it to mean "something that happens in the universe", in which case more or less anything is natural as long as it isn't physically impossible, and then the question is meaningless.