If We Legalize Same-Sex Marriage We Will Go Extinct!

Jeffrey Kuhner at the Washington Times is worried that Americans will go extinct just like, um, Canadians:

The homosexual lifestyle signifies the triumph of neo-pagan Epicureanism. By its very nature, homosexuality cannot fulfill the primary function of sex: procreation and the reproduction of the human race. It is inherently a socially barren act. A homosexual society is a childless one—doomed to extinction.

You have to love this line of reasoning: If we don’t actively discriminate against gay people then—good God!—one day everyone will be gay (because heterosexual sex and opposite-sex relationships hold so little appeal) and then we’ll be living in a completely homosexual society (because there’s no such thing as a straight person, only gay people who have been coerced into forming opposite-sex relationships) and soon the human race will go extinct because no one will remember which hole to stick it in when you wanna make a baby (because people—at least the people who read and write for the Washington Times—are just that stupid).

Oy. More after the jump.

It’s hardly worth engaging a dope like Kuhner—and I shouldn’t have to engage with him at all; it’s straight people who should be most insulted by Kuhner’s “reasoning”—so I’m just going to walk on by. But I do wanna take this opportunity to suggest that procreation isn’t the “primary function” of sex for humans and hasn’t been for a long, long time. Yeah, yeah: it’s the reason we’re all here and we’ll go extinct if we can’t manage to keep track of which hole makes babes and which hole makes booms. But our sexualities, like our cultures, are hugely complicated affairs, and there’s a whole lot more going on than just the grim grinding out of billions of new humans.

A sex act can make a baby… if the people having it are opposite-sexed, fertile, and remember to stick it in the right hole. But sex also cements bonds of love, bonds of marriage, bonds of friendship, bonds of friendswithbenefitsship. By design we have a whole hell of a lot more sex—we have have a lot more orgasms—than we do children. The overkill built into the system is ridiculous: we’re interested in sex constantly, human females aren’t just up for sex when they’re ovulating, men produce more than a 100,000,000 sperm cells per ejaculation, post-menapausal women are horny. All of this overkill was built into the system—excuse me: it evolved into the system—to compensate for short life expectancies and childhood mortality and evolutionary pressures that made it likelier for the horny and fecund to survive and reproduce and pass on their horny and fecund genes.

But that was then.

Mordern humans have adapted sex, like so much else, to other uses. Social uses. And those social uses—the love you make—are arguably the “primary function” of sex in human societies and cultures today.