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Comment by HoverSausage | Hacker News Reader

Only around 5% of people are gay and many gay people have children. How can this possibly have a significant impact on birth rate?

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Indeed hardly. If you want to push up the birth rate, do the reverse of what is done to (sensibly) limit it: stop girls from getting an education, promote means of maintaining a patriarchal society (e.g, specific branches of organised religion), limit independent journalism, block foreign media — there is a huge list of actually effective strategies to boneheadedly resort to.

Anti-LGBT+ laws serve a different purpose: useful scapegoats. How is this different from Hungary and Poland?

A prominent world-award-winning fantasy author summarized a convincing argument on the subject a number of years back.[1] His argument is that heterosexual marriage is both necessary and challenging because of the natural differences between the sexes. If we remove stigma from same-sex unions, such as through the efforts of activists, men will tend to prefer same-sex relationships because they are simpler and more enjoyable:

  > Men, after all, know what men like far better than 
  > women do; women know how women think and feel far
  > better than men do. But a man and a woman come
  > together as strangers and their natural impulses
  > remain at odds throughout their lives, requiring
  > constant compromise, suppression of natural desires,
  > and an unending effort to learn how to get through
  > the intersexual swamp.

[1] http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2004-02-15-1.html

So the argument is that if being gay is legal, straight men will turn gay because it's easier than dealing with women? And that strikes you as a convincing argument, does it?

Assuming you aren't trolling, it sounds like you are actually homosexual, you don't know it due to your upbringing, and you're projecting because you think (just like you do) all men are suppressing their inner homosexual desires.

Not the first person to do so, either.

That is quite a creative hypothesis to level at the author of this essay and the significant fraction of the world's population who agree with its sentiment.

Have you read what you wrote yourself?

> ... men will tend to prefer same-sex relationships because they are simpler and more enjoyable

(emphasis mine)

The world's population who agree with this sentiment is usually called "gays." Also, there's nothing wrong with being gay. Don't be like one of those preachers who get caught in bed.

Your question is already amply answered by the quotation I included earlier.

Whether it’s a joke or a falsehood, the idea that the opposite sex is hard to understand is widespread and not simply a gay sentiment.

Have you ever heard the saying that men are from Mars, women are from Venus?

It doesn't, but if you try to ground your homophobia in "evolutionary science" or "social capitalism" then you're not a bad person, you're just staying "facts"!

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