What is Natural?

Daniel Florien of the Unreasonable Faith blog has a wonderful post challenging religionists to defend their stance against LGBT marriage equality.  The primary line of attack has to do with the argument that gay marriage is not "natural," and he destroys this argument masterfully.  I'll summarize the points after the jump, but you should really read his post, it's a thing of beauty.


What is natural?

We spend lots of time, effort and money to protect ourselves from the "natural" world.  The implication that "natural == good" and "unnatural == bad" is not only insufficient, but wrong.  I'm surrounded by non-natural things: plastic, steel, electronics, fabrics, and so on.  Are these things bad?  If natural is good, why don't we all live naked in the woods?

Is unnatural always immoral?

Saying that gay marriage is unnatural is a sanctimonious way of saying that it's immoral, but this incorrectly implies that unnatural == immoral.  Flying is unnatural for humans; is air travel immoral?  Plastic isn't natural, but Christians still use credit cards.  On the other hand, things that happen in nature, such as murder and theft, are not labeled as "immoral."  Morality is a specifically human concern, and such has to be measured by means other than "natural vs unnatural."

Does homosexuality occur in nature?

On the other hand, homosexual behavior (mating practices with members of the same sex) does occur in nature.  A review by Nathan Bailey and Marlene Zuk (Department of Biology at UC Riverside) in 2009, published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, concludes

Same-sex behavior is a nearly universal phenomenon in the animal kingdom, common across species

Sounds "natural" to me.

So the next time you hear someone say "it's not natural," you'll be better able to point out to them the incoherence of this statement.   There's a lot more to this, including interesting discussions in the comments, over at Unreasonable Faith.