Thursday, January 30, 2014

John Corvino, What's Wrong with Homosexuality?: "A Risky Lifestyle" (3)




Another eye-catching statement from John Corvino's book What's Wrong with Homosexuality? (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013)--again, from his chapter entitled "A Risky Lifestyle," which considers the argument that homosexuality should be beyond the pale since it poses a threat to the health of society:


Some football players, drivers, and coal miners are indeed more reckless than others. So are some sexually active heterosexuals, for that matter. But we don’t cite statistics about their problems and conclude that no one should ever engage in any of these activities in any form (64).

One can find reckless behavior in any segment of the human population. Young people text and drive and have horrible accidents as a result. (But old people do, as well.)

Heterosexuals can be every bit as sexually reckless as can homosexuals. Heterosexuals contract (and communicate) STDs, just as homosexuals do. 

Yet no one takes a microscope to the promiscuity of the heterosexual community to argue that because a not inconsiderable proportion of heterosexuals engage in risky and promiscuous behavior, heterosexuals pose a serious risk to the health of the body politic, and heterosexuality ought to be morally suspect for that reason. The disparity between how the two groups are treated in this regard is obvious, and morally disturbing at a very fundamental level.

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