Can the government compel you to provide someone a service against your will?

[Rhyfelwyr]

I suppose we have reached an impasse, as I do not believe this can be verified with any degree of statistical certainty in the societies that you mentioned. We cannot even get a truly accurate gauge of the prevalence of homosexuality in our own society.

Fair enough, it is a very difficult topic to get accurate statistics on.

I simply cannot accept a distinction on those grounds.

Well an explanation would have been nice, but even if you reject what I said above, here's another line of thought - consider the impact of external factors to humans and their society. For example, for most of our history as a species, our fundamental social relations were forged around life as hunter-gatherers, and all that that entailed. Our society was one that has limitations placed on it by external things like our environment, and our social relations were forged within that reality. Principles like patriarchy and hierarchy emerged in a world where circumstance limited population groups to around 150 or so.

Meanwhile, something external to this, like the development of agriculture (while the capacity to use the relevant tools is of course natural, the ability to use them to this end is external and circumstancial, and for those earliest farmers, entirely novel and alien to human life) meant that while we had the same inherent social relations, the world they were expressed in was fundamentally changed. Whereas patriarchy and hierarchy once maintained the natural family unit, they now maintained a system of injustic and inequality - relationships that were alien to the individual. Consider how natural law theorists of monarchy said that the position of the king as head of a nation, was an extension of the principle of the man and head of the household, and thus it was entirely natural for one man to be subject to another. Would you agree with this? For me, such as society maintains the natural social spirit, while subjecting the individual to the whole, and thus a life which is itself unnatural to them.

And while the restraints that a hunter-gatherer life placed on humanity could be said be to be external and therefore artificial, the thing is that this was the environment our social relations were built for, since it defined the period where we arose as a species.

Without these constraints, society may still be said to be a natural phenomenon - but having escaped it's bounds, it no longer maintains an order that is a natural expression of those social relations inherent in us. Indeed, it is thought that the rise of agriculture is what gave rise to instutionalised inequality - and thereafter, it was all downhill as society became less a natural order, and more an artificial monstrosity.

See above. This is tautological, as any conditions pertaining to humanity will be "artificial". Being more generous and taking "artificial" as - look, I'll just cut it short and say that societies have been "artificial" in your sense since at least the second generation of humans", if not even millenniums prior in pre-human hominids. Again, this is perfectly natural for humans.

If you take "artificial" as meaning "anything external to the individual", then of course everything is artificial. But this ignores the fact that humanity was forged in a particular environment with a particular way of life, and thus is intrinsically linked to them. Likewise, if you take "natural" to mean "anything and everything arising out of nature", then of course everything is natural. However, I think we all recognise the need for distinction, and that something can become sufficiently altered from its original form that it is deemed something different altogether.

For society, a watershed in this regard, is whether or not it continues to be expressed in the way it originally was. For society to be natural, it must be organic - it must be something that flows from all its inhabitants, and expresses those relations inherent to them, that we can see ingrained even in their genetic code (babies crying for mothers, formation of families etc). When this link becomes degraged, and society instead expresses something more arbitrary, a system of legal codes and customs etc, then the mode of expression has fundamentally changed, and society could be said to no longer be natural. Well, it remains natural in the sense that it arose from humans, but the social order it maintains is no longer something natural to humanity - it is not the way we are designed to live.

And on top of that, you have like I was saying above, the external influences as well.

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And as for the bit about what has caused various forms of homosexual relationships throughout history, I think power is only part of the story, but really we are all speculating. Although as you said yourself, some distinction between "ugly" and "pretty" remains, which demonstrates to me that attraction plays at least some role.

I would also point out that not all examples relate to pederastry and the like. In the Ottoman Empire, I think it involved fully grown males, likewise I remember an article (sorry I don't have it) in the BBC (IIRC) that was about how common homosexuality is in modern Pakistan - because it is so difficult for guys to access girls prior to marriage, they engage in homosexual behaviour, and families actually ignore it so long as the plan to marry a woman and have a family.

For me, there are just to many examples where sexuality seems to be circumstancial, and where attraction/pleasure (can you really separate the two?) seem to be the core motivation.