Homosexuality, Nature or Nurture?

Essay by MetzenasCollege, UndergraduateB, April 2006

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Is homosexuality a result of a deviation in someone's biological make-up, or is it due to the factors of environment while they are growing up? In this essay, I argue that homosexuality is indeed a inborn property rather than the way a child is brought up. To back up my argument I will use religious support, scientific proof and insight from someone who has been around a gay her whole life. This is a topic that has gone through much debate, a controversial topic that dates back before the days of great philosophers such as Socrates, and Aristophanes, which is discussed in the setting of Plato's dialogues of "The Symposium." In these dialogues, they discuss certain gender issues to explain the phenomenon of sexual orientation and the different factors that influence one's decision or preference of sexual partners. The dialogues reveal that even back in the days of our great philosophers without the advances in modern studies, they still believed the dominating factor for one's sexual orientation is determined by the nature.

What this means is: whether they homosexual or not is determined by not by the way they were raised but by innate properties passed to them through genes at birth. Evidence reveals that this was an issue even goes back to bible logical times. This topic is still discussed frequently even in the current era that we are living in. Although the approach to proving whether it is a causal of the environment and condition that one grows up in or natural innate properties that make them that way, they are still trying to prove the same point.

In the dialogues of "The Symposium," Socrates discusses the nature of homosexuality. Many of the great philosophers that we refer back to for knowledge were homosexuals; which proves that sexual...