@digitalimpression You say that I misrepresented you when I portrayed you as having already admitted that orientation is not a choice, but here is a direct quote from your first response to this question:
“Attraction may be there, but the conscious choice to act on that attraction must also be there.”
Sexual orientation is about attraction, and you have admitted that the attraction is innate; this is implicit in the way you contrasted attraction with the part that we agree is a matter of choice—i.e., acting on that attraction. Purposely or not, then, you have admitted that orientation is not a choice.
As to my question of what is to be gained, I was not asking about goods to be won. I was asking about the dialectical ends to which the conclusion you are asserting (but failing to argue for) might be put. This is clear if you look at what I wrote before the sentence you chose to detach and respond to out of context.
So I ask again: if you aren’t trying to make a moral question, and if you aren’t trying to give an answer to the OP, what is the purpose of asserting your view? Why are you so upset that people are disagreeing with you and asking for actual arguments (instead of mere assertions) if you aren’t really trying to make any point at all?
And why are you accusing people of being “violently defensive” when you’ve been treated with kid gloves and merely been asked to be so kind as to clarify and defend your view? Indeed, this is one of the least fervent discussion of this topic I’ve seen on Fluther. It seems to me that you expected to be met with vitriol (as evidenced by the bracketed phrase in your first response) and now you refuse to see anything but what you expected to see.
In response to the questions you posed for me:
(1) You asked for an example of how it is difficult to be different (that is, non heterosexual) today. LGBT teens are at least twice as likely and possibly four times more likely to commit suicide than heterosexual teenagers. Between 30 and 40% of LGBT teenagers attempt suicide at least once, often due at least in part to constant bullying. The situation has gotten bad enough that an entire project devoted to the specific issue of LGBT suicide has been started.
Since you apparently think that the murder of non-LGBT people makes the targeted killing of people for their sexual orientation irrelevant, perhaps the fact that other people commit suicide will make you similarly callous to the issue of LGBT suicide. But you asked for the difficulties of being different, and those are evidenced by the higher rates at which LGBT teenagers are committing suicide and getting murdered. This is an answer to your question, then, even if you’d prefer to ignore it.
(2) As for the relevance of why people chose to be different in the first place, it goes to the plausibility of your explanation. You say that people are non-heterosexual today because it is easier to be non-heterosexual in contemporary society. Leaving aside the fact that “easier than it once was” is not the same thing as “easy,” there is the problem that there were non-heterosexual people prior to the present time.
You cannot explain why they are non-heterosexual by appealing to the state of contemporary society. They were non-heterosexual prior to the present age, and indeed it is often due to their efforts that society changed to the degree it has. As such, your explanation faces a regress problem.
(3) The point about “x is wrong” not following from “x is a choice” was not aimed at anybody, and I did not suggest that anyone had said or implied otherwise. It was part of my larger point about the dialectical inertia of your claim.
Finally, I would like to suggest that we are not “insatiable.” We simply are not satisfied by non sequiturs and non-answers. General is a place for in-depth discussions. If you do not give us thoughtful, substantive answers to work with, you will be called on it.