Editor,
Recent letters on the question of the naturalness of homosexuality have gotten me thinking. What's natural anyway? Maybe natural means the way things would be if humans weren't always messing things up.
Whatever the definition is, certainly we heterosexuals never do anything unnatural. Or do we? Maybe we'd better stop driving cars, since cars are certainly unnatural. Maybe we ought to quit wearing clothes and using toilets. If it's natural for a bear to crap in the woods, then it must be for us as well. UNM's good friend Don Schrader comes closest to being an all-natural human being, wearing practically nothing, walking everywhere, eating raw foods and even saving water by drinking his own urine.
But doesn't he like men? I guess he's unnatural after all. Then again, I used to have a pair of amorous male gerbils and once saw a same-sex octopus couple on the Discovery Channel. So, maybe, there are natural occurrences of homosexuality, after all. Or were the octopi brainwashed by the insidious homosexual agenda? Well, at least octopi don't use toilets.
Whatever naturalness might be, it is the basis of moral
goodness. But isn't it natural for people to kill each other? That seems to have been happening for a long time. Isn't that both natural and bad? Pure altruism may not be natural from an evolutionary standpoint, but isn't altruism a good thing? Even if it were true that the natural and the good are identical, humans gave up on being natural when we started using language and agriculture. That was a long time ago, so we must be a very naughty species.
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Maybe there's no obvious connection between naturalness and moral goodness. Oh well. Natural seems like a hopelessly vague and ambiguous category anyway. I'm sure ancient Hebrew law can clear things up. Certainly, no one has ever disagreed about how to interpret the Bible. Oh, that's right, such disagreements have led to the forming of hundreds of denominations. But at least everyone agrees that the Bible is the basis of morality.
Well, except for most of the world's population. Finding the answers might be more difficult than we thought. In the meantime, maybe we should extend the old-fashioned American values of fairness and equality to a group of human beings who aren't hurting anyone. We should probably continue using toilets as well.
Ethan Mills
UNM student
