"The social sciences are not hard sciences. They don't follow the traditional cause/effect paradigm and are notoriously gray and ambiguous."

This is true. I revise my original statement as follows: I'd forgotten that all scientific explanations are seen as "excuses" by a lot of traditionalists. Do you want to address my point now?


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"So let's get this straight - God gives us brains so we can oppose His guidance to us provided in the scriptures???"

Well, I do believe that human reason came before the scriptures. Incidentally, what is a higher authority: God-given reason, or man-written text?


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"I agree. 'Things are the way they are' is a line of defence often used by homosexuals to justify their dysfunctional behaviour patterns."

This is true. So what you must look at is the reason for change. Homosexual behavior, in and of itself, is not dysfunctional. (To call it so as you did is to poison the well, another logical error.) It's when you add all the oppression (in the form of invalidation) that has been placed on homosexuals that you start to see dysfunctional behavior in them. What I was talking about (and which you failed to address) is the fact that traditionalists don't have any real reasons for not legalizing same-sex marriage except that marriage in most of the world has always been a man and a woman.

You're talking about an individual saying "this is how I've been ever since I can remember," and therefore his or her argument is based solely on personal experiences. What I'm talking about is people who base their arguments on other people's opinions and behaviors: tradition.

And before you go off on another tangent, I'm not saying all tradition is bad, I'm saying it can be misguiding and doesn't take into account the personal experiences of the people it oppresses.