animals do not set up any definite age for copulation; as soon as a male and female have reached puberty, coition. takes place automatically, with no thought as to whether is is proper. Furthermore, a male may mate with his own female children or sisters or mother, and a female with her father, brothers or male children, in blind, unquestioning obedience of the command of Nature to propagate the species. Thus, among animals we have "child molestation" and incest, as well as cases of homosexuality, with no laws or regulations to complicate matters and drive the victims into insanity or suicide.
In history we find that there have been periods during which homosexuality and incest, if not openly accepted and even fostered, were at least casually accepted as an inescapable part of life, notably during the time of Sappho, known as the Golden Age of the Greeks. And "aficionados" of foreign movies know that most French and Italian movie makers casually accept homosexuality and other deviations along with heterosexuality as an integral part of life, so much so that, instead of being preoccupied with the problems of homosexuality, they build comedies and other plots on other subjects which include homosexuality as naturally as heterosexuality.
In the field of anthropology we find that in India child marriages are or were common, and are arranged even before puberty, on the assumption that copulation will take place at puberty, which may be as early as eight years of age. Thus a man who in the U.S.A. is considered a degenerate and criminal for having coition with a child, and not allowed to marry children under specific ages, which are different for the different states, may in India marry a child of any age, as long as it is understood that he will not seek coition prematurely and will look after his wife properly.
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The taboos affecting the above rose as follows:
a. Before or during the time of Moses the Jews found themselves outnumbered by their foes, and with a diminishing population. To prevent race suicide and to augment their numbers so as to throw off their foes, they issued an edict making homosexuality an offense, in order to force through more marriages and increase procreation (this was repeated in Hitler's Germany). It being human nature to go from extreme to extreme and to confuse lust with love, the unthinking prejudice that grew out of this forgotten edict expanded unbelievably to encompass even the noble brotherly love extolled by Jesus and other enlightened teachers, and has carried over to our times.
b. Incest, once obligatory for Egyptian royalty, came to be forbidden when it was found that inbreeding multiplied defective genes along with desirable ones, producing increasingly degenerate offspring. Were there no defective genes among human beings, there probably would have been no reason to forbid incest.
c. As man evolved spiritually as well as physically, he began to see that ideal sexual intercourse is the result of a deep mutual love, and that emotional maturity preserves the joy of such unions. He also saw that depraved members of the human race misused their "new brain" in union with their animal propensities to sink below the level of their animal forbears, by forcibly raping children and causing irreparable harm and even death. As a result intercourse and marriage with children came to be forbidden.
The above three, out of many examples from the different fields of science, serve to show that, if we would find logical answers to the problems of homosexuality, we must see them as part of a much larger whole. I have deliberately used in discussing child
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