To the editor:

In response to Mr. Bialota’s assertions in Thursday’s Daily that being gay is unnatural by virtue of the inability of same sex couples to give birth, I would like to contribute my two cents worth. I am no scientist, nor am I particularly well-versed in this argument, but I do have an opinion.

Nature, for better or for worse, has lots of ways of keeping people from having children. Impotence is a huge problem for men throughout the world, and there is no shortage of women who find themselves unable to have children.

It’s a sad thing, and very unfair, but that is the way the world works. I would dare say that, at this point in time, there are more medically defective heterosexual couples than there are active homosexual couples.

And I further have to ask why love is associated with procreation? Using your reproductive argument, you are comparing mankind far more to many animals, whose only function in mating is for reproductive value (and often times form no discernible “relationship” aside from the single incident of breeding) and completely dismissing the very human concept of love.

Love is not about child birth. For many, having a child can be an act of love, but that is not the sole expression of love. If being gay was just about who you slept with, then your argument would have merit and I would probably have to grudgingly agree with you. But it’s not. It’s about who you hold close to you and who you love.

I think it is safe to assume that there will never be more gay people on earth than there are straight people who don’t want children. And from a population explosion standpoint, there is no difference between the two.

But as far as the capacity to have children goes, getting back to the main point of the argument, by saying that only those people who can have children together are “natural,” you accuse several very dear family members of mine of being “not what nature intended.”

And since none of them are gay, I have to take a bit of offense at your remarks. You are entitled to your opinion, and I applaud you for being curious rather than hateful.

I hope my response has something of merit in it, for you, and if not, I apologize.

All I know is that the way I feel and the way my mind and body work are natural things to me. And nothing anyone else says will ever make me say they aren’t. Who is ANYONE to say that someone else’s actions or thoughts are against the way of nature, since nature obviously made them the way they are?

Even if we are to buy into the ridiculous notion that your sexual orientation is a choice, that is a choice which nature has built us to choose. I believe people are born with disposition towards lots of things — certain types of foods, certain climates and certain types of people, both as friends and as significant others.

Nature is a vastly complex thing, and I don’t presume to understand even a fraction of a fraction of the things that just happen, every day, on nature’s say-so.

Just an opinion, that’s all I have here. But this is the opinion page, so it’s got just as much validity as anything else on this page.

Jeremy Schwennen

Sophomore

Agricultural education