He’s making an extraordinary claim and must provide extraordinary proof. And you can’t prove a negative.
Somehow, I don't think you will.
Aside from Rush, who was it that said, “It’s not the nature of the evidence but the seriousness of the charge that invites investigation.”
I know it was some Dem congresscritter (McKinney?). Find that and you have your response.
Put two gay men on a deserted island and come back in 20 years and ask there children if they are gay.
A person can't change their race, or their gender, or their height. Those are traits we are born with. They cannot be changed.
Homosexuality is a behavior choice. How else do you explain someone who grows up a heterosexual, lives a heterosexual life by dating people of the opposite sex, having a spouse of the opposite sex, and spending years of their lives as a straight person then one day announcing that they are gay? Why is it that straight people can choose to become gay, but gay people can never become straight?
It is a choice.
Here’s a little mind game you could play.
State that people are born Conservative.
Then when your acquaintance retorts ‘yeah, then they wise up and become liberal,’ you can then trap them in their logic by asking at what point a gay newborn wises up and becomes heterosexual?
I am a Republican; but, I firmly believe that my son was born gay.... So this liberal may have gay folks in his family. I would not waste my time with this. You will not convince him anyway/
He'll either have to become a pro-life supporter of gay rights or a pro-choice homophobe.
Given that identical twins are born with the EXACT same DNA, if one were gay, and it were dependent upon genetics, by logic, the other would necessarily also be gay.
This, by itself, does not constitute scientific proof of anything.
But it certainly is compelling.
FRiend, it is a fallacy that the mere absence of evidence supporting any given assertion proves the counter-assertion.
Example of another illogical argument based on your same fallacious reasoning:
There is no evidence that Abraham Lincoln hated vanilla ice cream. Thus, Abraham Lincoln must have liked vanilla ice cream.
Wrong!
Regards,
Some years ago the theory of the gay gene was promulgated by a very respected professor from one of the elite California universities.
At the time, the gay community hated that idea. It was a ‘choice of lifestyle’ issue they said. They were gay by choice and proud of it. The attacks by the gays and thier liberal/left sympathizers about ran the professor out of the liberal and academic community as a homophobe or something.
Then their attitude and that of the MSM changed when HIV came to the attention of the public in the 80s. The only way to get funding for research was to portray themselves as helpless victims of their genetic code, because otherwise they could just change their ‘choice of lifestyle” to avoid the plague. NO gay gene, no money.
And of course the liberal elite and the grant chasers jumped on the gay gene bandwagon.
You might want to investigate these countervailing arguments and what motivates them.
Your friend would be correct. The lack of evidence does not prove the converse. That’s a logical fallacy with a name, argumentum ad ignorantiam.
Now that is not to say that you’re not coincidentally correct and that gayness is not congenital, just that lacking evidence of a gay gene does not make it so.
Simply put, if something exists, its existence is independent of any proof that may or may not exist at the time. Or rather the existence is not dependent upon the human discovery of said proof.
I believe the saying goes something like "it's impossible to prove a negative".
What you can say is that despite the best science has to offer looking into it, they have found exactly zero evidence to support your opponents' point of view.
If your correspondent cannot deal with that basic a fact of logic, then he is not worth talking to.
Ask him why some are afflicted with gayness and others not. Then step back and watch his head explode.