Good question,
Often the vulgar is the history that goes beyond
politeness, ordinary belief and personal wars. It is amoral and
simply searches for the answer to today's situations in all of the processes of
the past. The operative word is fecund. It is the
dung heap where we find the real answers. In the present it is
considered rude and ungentlemanly and certainly has no relationship to
civility. It simply is everything. Groups that are
"Out" often inhabit the area and draw creativity from it until they become "In"
and then they move into the "upper spheres" of politeness and lose touch with
the base. The use of vulgar language on this site is a good
example. Passion is a part of the vulgar while the polite
projects the prevarication of "objectivity" which is impossible since no one can
know the whole story. Got to go, I'm working on the program which
has to be in tomorrow.
REH
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, October 25, 2003 12:56
PM
Subject: RE: [Futurework] Gay at
birth?
Ray,
may I ask you for one more explication? What is the nature of this vulgar
history? I note your point about 'wounded', and am asking what the 'wound' has
to do with the 'vulgar' history itself. Do you mean a history of the harm
society has inflicted upon itself?
Cheers,
Lawry
The Gospel according to Saint Thomas has a
homosexual bent to Jesus and no one knew anything about those female Baal
altars in the Israeli homes, since the bible mentions nothing of
it. Contemporary archeology turned them up. Today Lillith
is a character on a TV show but everyone knows Abraham and
Isaac. You are referring to official histories but the men have
been the writers and controllers of that. The same is true of
the heterosexual population. This has been gone over before and
I've made my point except for one last thing. There are always
three histories going at once in Western Society. The
official polite history, the common agreement history and the vulgar
history. Vulgar coming from the same root that vulva, vulgate,
etc. meaning wound. Valhalla is even a derivitive "Hall of the
Wounded." The Vulgar is usually the most
complete while the common is the contemporary acceptable.
The Polite is the one that carries forward in sacred and academic texts
until someone finds an altar to Baal Ashtoreth in a middle class first
century group of homes. That changes things and gets us back to
the wound. In this society the most wounded of the day are
called "Gay" and that should say something in
itself.
I won't comment any more on
this.
REH
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, October 25, 2003 7:52
AM
Subject: [Futurework] Gay at
birth?
Before anybody attempts to shoot me down by
quoting the article in today's New York Times, all I would say is
that I agree with the writer, Nicholas Kristof. There are two few studies
involving too small a number of experimental subjects to make any sort of
judgement yet. And, as he also writes, there's a great deal of emotional
capital tied up in this matter of proving a genetic link and experimenter
bias is likely to be very high in this particular sort of
investigation. However, if there were a specific linkage I would
have thought that something definite would have been found by now -- and
this would be able to be confirmed very readily.
For my part, I'm
prepared to say that the degree of homosexuality we see around us today is
probably far greater than at any time in history and this bespeaks
something very unusual, such as high stress. (Or it could be the large
amount of artificial contraceptive hormones that are being dispensed into
our sewage systems and some from thence into our drinking water. This is
certainly becoming a serious matter in England where many fish are found
to be changing into females.) Anyway, for the time being, homosexuality is
certainly hardly mentioned in the literature, apart from being mentioned
in a few individual cases such as Michael Angelo, Alexander the Great,
etc.
Keith Hudson <<<< GAY AT
BIRTH?
Nicholas D. Kristof
Some people say we should settle
gay rights disputes on the basis of the Old Testament. I say we should
rely on blinking patterns.
In case you've misplaced your latest
copy of Behavioral Neuroscience, there's a fascinating article about how
people blink. It turns out that when males and females are exposed to a
loud noise, they blink in somewhat different ways --except that lesbians
appear to blink like men, not like women.
The study (peer-reviewed
but based on a small sample) is the latest in a growing scientific
literature suggesting that sexual preferences may be not simply a matter
of personal preference but part of our ingrained biology. Indeed, some
geneticists believe that sexual orientation in men (though not women) may
be determined in part by markers in the Xq28 chromosomal
region.
One needs to be wary of these kinds of studies, partly
because researchers drawn toward this field may have subconscious biases
of their own. Moreover, many of the studies on the biological basis of
homosexuality are flawed by small numbers or by the difficulty of finding
valid random samples of gays and heterosexuals.
Still, while the
data has problems, it is piling up -- there are at least seven studies on
twins. If there is a genetic component to homosexuality, one would expect
identical twins to share sexual orientation more than fraternal twins, and
that is indeed the case. An identical twin of a gay person is about twice
as likely to be gay as a fraternal twin would be.
Earlier this
year, the journal Personality and Individual Differences published
an exhaustive review of the literature entitled "Born Gay?" After
reviewing the twin studies, it concluded that 50 to 60 percent of sexual
orientation might be genetic.
Many studies also suggest that sexual
orientation may be linked to differences in brain anatomy. Compared with
straight men, gay men appear to have a larger suprachiasmatic nucleus, a
part of the brain that affects behavior, and some studies show most gay
men have a larger isthmus of the corpus callosum -- which may also be true
of left-handed people. And that's intriguing because gays are 39 percent
more likely to be left-handed than straight people.
Now look at
your fingers. Men typically have a ring finger that is longer than the
index finger, while in women the two are about the same length. However,
two studies have suggested that lesbians have finger-length ratios that
are more like those of men than of women.
Studies suggest that
ring-finger length has to do with the level of androgens in the womb, and
that may help explain another puzzle of homosexuality a male is more
likely to be gay if he has older brothers. It doesn't matter if he has
older sisters, but for each older brother he is about 33 percent more
likely to be gay. Some scientists speculate that a woman's body adjusts
the androgen level in her womb as she has more sons, and that the
androgens interact with genes to produce homosexuality.
O.K., these
theories are potentially junk science until the studies are replicated
with much larger numbers. But we also shouldn't ignore the accumulating
evidence.
"There is now very strong evidence from almost two
decades of `biobehavioral' research that human sexual orientation is
predominantly biologically determined," said Qazi Rahman, the University
of London researcher who led the blinking study. Many others don't go that
far, but accept that there is probably some biological
component.
Gays themselves are divided. Some welcome these studies
because they confirm their own feeling that sexual orientation is more
than a whim. Others fret that the implication is that homosexuals are
abnormal or defective -- and that future genetic screening will eliminate
people like them.
For me the implication, if these studies are to
believed, is different It is that something is defective not in gays, but
in discrimination against them.
A basic principle of our social
covenant is that we do not discriminate against people on the basis of
circumstances that they cannot choose, like race, sex and disability. If
sexual orientation belongs on that list (with the caveat that the evidence
is still murky), then should we still prohibit gay marriage and bar gays
from serving openly in the armed forces?
Can we countenance
discrimination against people for something so basic as how they blink --
or whom they love? New York Times -- 25 October
2003
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>, <www.handlo.com>,
<www.property-portraits.co.uk>
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