My view is that for most gay people, their lives will be better if they are not celibate than if they are. This is obviously not to say that they can't still live good lives while remaining celibate. Nor is it saying that some people will not have better lives if they choose to remain celibate. I'm just stating my bias here, which is that for most people, straight or gay, celibacy is not ideal.

That being said, I think there is a lot to be said for a consciously chosen decision to be celibate. Sex and the relationships that go along with it can often be a distraction from achieving your other goals in life. I just think that people who choose to remain celibate, not because of a dedication to some goal or project, but because they believe that acting on their desire is immoral (when doing so is in fact not immoral) will usually have worse lives as a result.

I don't want to push back too hard on the rest because I probaby agree with the basic intuition that celibacy for the sake of not conflicting with your religious views is hardly ideal. My (slight) pushback is just that it being not ideal doesn't really imply to stop the celibacy or that stopping the celibacy is the better path, because there is also a very significant conflict that comes with living in conflict with your core religious identity which can itself also bring considerable unhappiness and tension in your life. So it might well be that given the existence of this religious identity, the harm from not satisfying that trumps the harm from not being with the types of people you are attracted to. But who knows this is quite speculative and probably varies more person to person than allows for generalizations.

Very much this. Having read the sources cited in the article, it also seems that the OP is using SSA in the broadest possible sense... even as far as to include those who neither identify as gay nor desire gay sex, but have ANY level of same-sex attraction. This isn't problematic, per se, but when the OP then wants to criticize gay rights activists for not considering the views of a group who don't identify as gay, it becomes a fairly weak argument. That's not to say that this particular group should be denied a voice or support, but unfortunately one of the examples he gives turns out to be a gross misrepresentation of the facts:

Supreme Court Judgement

Just skimming. But does this men when i was a virgin and attracted to women i was not a heterosexual?

I'm under the impression it means that trying to define ourselves and others leads to unsolvable problems and therefore conflict.

So there are no heterosexuals or homosexuals and we are just left with attractions. OP's problem solved.

Lol...I tend towards believing the bible as if everyone didn't know that and I'm a big skeptic about human nature so, of course, I agree with the bible that God ordains government. Also when you study history there are just too many examples of human insanity when government got overturned. They had an anarchy under King Stephen in England that lasted 17 years. The Brits called it "when the saints slept." Society was riddled with robber barons and the people that lived through it hated that time in history. Also we've had enough revolutions in Europe and Asia and other parts of the world to be concerned whenever law and order gets over turned. Crazy things happen when there are no checks on people's behavior.

I think you're taking "people" to mean some sort of singular, like "individual people." That's a misreading of the statement. You can replace it with "the broader culture" probably without any loss of meaning. I don't think you would quite like that because it makes the gay community a "narrow" culture. But maybe that's not a meaningful enough distinction.

It's all in your choice of rhetorical lines. Does this imply that? Yes. Unless I don't want it to, then no. You want to slam the door in the face of one person, but not on the person next to him. If you want to have nuance, then you must also use nuance in your word choice.

I agree that they do not define themselves as individuals by homosexual activity. But I'm not claiming that they do. I'm claiming that the community as a whole is defined by the activity and not just the attraction. I should say (since this wasn't explicit) that this does not negate the role of attraction as being meaningless. But the homosexual community would be quite different in conception if there were not some sexual component to it. And, again, this is not a negative.

I'll keep pointing to this because it's the most clear example as to why it is this way. If all gays were celibate, there would be nothing like the gay community of today in existence. The things that the community represent would be *very* different. Given that the modern gay community arose out of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this should not seem that surprising.

I'm not saying that it's ALL about sex (in saying this, I retract "defined by" as being an over-stated description -- Edit: the phrasing of "defined by" was not a narrow definition but closer to "strongly characterized by"), but the sexual component is very central to the construction and conception of the community. If there were nothing more to the gay community beyond an acknowledgement that they find themselves attracted to members of the same gender, you would not have the modern gay community.

Returning to the point of OP, the distinction between mere attraction and having sex is relevant and important to many gays (regardless of whether you or I think it is). This is a counter-cultural perspective relative to the position of the gay community.

The gay community is mostly a self-identifying group of people. That is, people can claim to be or not be a member of the gay community. As it is an in-group/out-group distinction, there is an expectation within the community of conforming to some loose system of beliefs or perspectives which would be necessary for acceptance within that community.

Since there's not a centralized body that declares membership, membership is based primarily on association.

The gay community is made up of its members and what the "view" of the gay community as an aggregate is must surely be dependent on the aggregate views of its members? I don't see how if gays overwhelmingly define "being gay" as having an attraction - and you don't seem to contest this - how it could be that the community at large is defined by the activity and not the attraction. And yes, of course, a nontrivial - but hardly all - of the community is sexually active and if this was not true obviously it would be a different community. But if the question is what is the core and defining identifier it is, as its members believe, sexual attraction.

For example, the asian community would surely be different if the behaviour of using chopsticks was considered religious taboo, but that doesn't mean the defining aspect of the asian community is chopsticks. Yes sex is an important component, more important than chopsticks, but it is not the core identifier for either its members or the community at large.

My mothers in law are part of a pretty tight nit lesbian group. They do activities like play lots of ice hockey and they all have motorcycles they like to go riding on together. Some of them are sexually promiscuous, some are in long term committed relationships, others are life long virgins with no plans to change this. What binds this otherwise diverse group of people has very little to do with the actual activity of sex. They have a common identification as "being gay" by their sexual attraction and they engage in various stereotypical activities like the biking, the hockey (that might just be a canadian stereotype) the short cropped hair, the rainbow flags, and the like. If this doesn't respresent at least part of the gay community I don't know what would, but in no sense would the dominant characteristic of this community be the actual activity of sex.

Aaron I have to refer you back to uke's earlier point of "So what?"

We all accept that there is a difference between an impulse and an action, but so far you've said nothing of any substance or interest. Given we all agree with the impulse/action distinction, what are the consequences of this distinction that compelled you to post this article?

This absolutely belongs in the courts. We have a 14th amendment and further laws against gender discrimination. Laws against gay marriage violate equal protection. It's irrelevant what psychiatry determines is true. The individual has the right to determine their identity.

I actually slightly retract my earlier "so what". Obviously it is of tremendous consequence to followers of these anarchonistic religions that get them thinking homosexual acts are in some way bad or worse than heterosexual acts. To them, being gay but not acting gay allows for a compatibility with their warped worldview and so is consequence. The "so what" applies to the rest of the world.

ya...its not like we had to have a perfect psychiatric understanding of identity before the courts could tackle problems of the horrific discrimination against black people.

Btw, it is worth saying that for people who are gay yet find that a huge conflict with their religious identity, I would hope that they would, like the OP, manage to find peace and live what I will take at his word is a happy and fulfilled life. However, undoubtedly there are innumerable such people at the other end of the spectrum where the conflict between their sexual desires and norms imposed by their religion and their society causes considerable stress and tension in their lives, leading to an unhappy life, or perhaps even the taking of their life. Suicide rates, for instance, among LGBT youth are vastly higher than the background rate, although there are various factors for this. So just in the same way that it is worth noting that being gay and a religious zealot who thinks acting gay is bad does not necessarily lead one down a road, as the OP demonstrates, it is also worth noting that it very much can.