Homosexual Reproduction & Eve's Rib:

Regarding the inherent natures of hetero v. homosexuality, I see heterosexuality as being inherently better than homosexuality only in one sense (I stress that word because although there may be many advantages to being heterosexual—being free from societal mistreatment because of your orientation, being able to marry the person you love, etc.—these are, I think, almost entirely the result of the way homosexuality is treated by society & the culture at large as opposed to the inherent qualities associated with the condition): the ability to procreate. That is something that only heterosexual, not homosexual couples, by nature can do. But that, much to the chagrin of the social conservatives, soon will change. A mouse with two moms and no Dad just gave birth. Fascinating story.

It’s interesting that it was 2 females as opposed to 2 males who gave birth. But this should not surprise us. Single sex reproduction does exist in nature. And when it occurs, it’s always the maternal genes that are involved. From the article, “Some lizards and other animals reproduce with only maternal genes, but mammals do not.”

Males are to some extent…an aberration of nature. From James Q. Wilson’s The Moral Sense:

It seems clear that Mother Nature would much prefer to produce only girls, because she does such a poor job producing boys. Her preferences are quite clear in this regard: all fetuses begin as females (my italics); only in the third month of gestation does masculinization begin. And when it does begin, it sometimes is a process prone to error, leading to all manner of deficiencies and abnormalities. Not only do men have a shorter life expectancy than women, a fact that might be explained by their more violent tendencies, but the higher mortality rate appears almost from the beginning: male fetuses are more likely than female ones to die in utero, and male infants have a higher death rate than female infants.[] Having invented the male, Mother Nature doesn’t quite know what to do with him. It is as if she had suddenly realized, too late, what every student of biology now knows: asexual reproduction is far more efficient than sexual reproduction. But now we are stuck with men who are likely to be both troublesome and vulnerable. pp. 167-168.

And tying what Wilson wrote in with my thoughts on religion, as science discovers more and more about Nature, it makes anything but a metaphorical reading of the Bible (with it’s “male-centric” worldview) seem more and more untenable. As Andrew Sullivan has written regarding humans’ (mammals’) default gender, “The Book of Genesis is therefore exactly wrong. It isn't women who are made out of men. It is men who are made out of women. Testosterone, to stretch the metaphor, is Eve's rib.”