Hacker News Reader

Comment by theknown99 | Hacker News Reader

It'll probably be the same time science makes it possible for you to request your unborn baby be ensured to be "not gay".

So there's plusses and minuses to science...

View on HN

Which will mean that you can request your unborn baby will definitely be gay. His head is still going to explode.

But that would still mean that one would be able to relegate being gay to the status of a birth defect in that case, right?

One of the problems I see here is that debate seems to go between the "Gays are bad people" crowd and the rebuttal of "but they can't help it" with one side calling the other homophobic.

And yet in Western culture, it seems almost certain that men are becoming increasingly less free to express anything that might possibly be interpreted as gay.

I feel like it is the opposite in western culture, express any views which go against the flavour du jour and you are branded a bigot, a homophobe, a xenophobe, .

It's funny. I think we've misordered our ideals. Tolerance, diversity, and freedom have been set up as goals in themselves, but then this means that perceived intolerance (and indeed it is anything perceived as intolerant) towards the wrong groups must not be tolerated, and hence diversity cannot accommodate real cultural or viewpoint diversity. It also means that freedom is more and more regulated, as if there was no real tradeoff between perfect justice and perfect freedom (but anyone who believes that should read Plato's Republic!).

I think, actually, these must be set up in the service of something else. If we have these in the service of self-improvement and learning, then we tolerate and appreciate diversity because we know that we can only learn where there is disagreement, and we respect freedom because without a right to make mistakes there can be no growth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com