I attend a regular college but none of the classes talked about homosexuality in animals. I looked at the article and while Bonobos, and Orangutans seem to have a large amount of homosexual behaviour, our closest relatives, Chimpanzees were not on the list of primates with significant homosexual behaviour, indicating that homosexuality in hominins is an unnatural occurrence that is caused by environmental factors rather than evolutionary factors. What evolutionary benefit is there for homosexuality in the human species?
And the human species does not have special "worker" classes that do not engage in reproduction so that is not a good argument.
That's the National Organization for Marriage study that was discredited right?
The Morris study claims that Chimpanzees don't ever exhibit homosexual behaviours, but that can quite easily be put down to a lack of study. Other species who have been investigated for this behaviour in more detail, like the bonobo, are near parity with humans to their genetic closeness to chimpanzees and exhibit promiscuous bisexuality as the norm.
As for what the evolutionary benefit is, you're aware of the Nurse/Harem Keeper theory right? We know animals such as packs of canines with males who only exhibit homosexual behaviours act in the role of the childminder, and packs with a gay nurse to watch the pups of the alpha enjoy far better infant survival rates. The same trait has been observed in primates, primate groups with the so-called "Super Uncles" or "Nurses" likewise enjoy lower infant mortality rates.
The more males in a tribe, males that don't have children of their own and can devote themselves to protecting their leaders offspring, the better the survival rate of the young who (assuming both the leader and the nurse come from the same genetic stock) are likely to pass on either the gay gene or learned homosexual behaviours (whichever cause you to sign up to, the outcome is the same in this instance).
For these "Super Uncles", we've only to look to human history such as the
Sacred Band of Thebes to see examples of it. The Band was at one time one of the foremost fighting forces in Ancient Greece, with the entry requirement of having a homosexual lover (and no wife). Plutarch wrote quite a lot about how the "bonds" forged by these men encouraged them to fight far harder to protect the men they fought alongside, and unlike other armies of the time did not suffer the same level of infighting or propensity to mutiny. The sex served a very important purpose, and still does among many species.
You are aware that homosexuals who were chemically castrated against their will have a staggeringly high suicide rate, right? If you really wanted to save their souls, you'd encourage them to become celibate monks like the Church used to do.
Benedict XVI changed this a few years ago, Homosexuals aren't to be admitted to the priesthood or religious orders anymore. Catholicism no longer places a distinction between paedophillia, pederasty or homosexuality, and identifies any "Same sex attracted individual" as being inclined to all of those things.
