China is presenting the world with a most interesting experiment, thanks to a radical and inhumane policy of one-child-per-couple, a preference for male children, and the murder of baby girls that has led to a lopsided ratio of males to females. Andrew M. Potts has a solution. It’s got to be better than waging war on neighboring countries to kidnap women.
Perhaps this is due to my social conservative inclinations but I do find these references to “gay rights” quite unhelpful. I would much prefer to see a general defense of individual rights pointing out, if necessary, in what ways these righst are not being respected in specific circumstances and regarding particular groups.
As it stands, most of the LGBT agenda as it is presented in mainstream media tends to look as a tool of the far-left to promote “social and cultural change”, something which I believe governments should not do. I think this is unfortunate not only for the wider community (which gets divided into different “groups”, each being propelled to stand up for their specific “group rights”) but also for gays (most of which I presume have diverse poltical preferences and do not support the far-left) which get instrumentalized by the LGBT political activists.
“Put simply, embracing gay rights and promoting social acceptance of gay and bisexual men in China would greatly improve the odds of success for those exclusively heterosexual Chinese men seeking partners–by taking closeted gay and bisexual men out of the competition.”
A simpler, non-related point: what about lesbians? Does the article presume that gay men significantly outnumber lesbian women?
Unless some argument of the sort is made, it would seem to me that the “solution” proposed (assuming it would “work”, which I very much doubt…) would also reduce even further the number of available women.
A better “solution” would be to promote male celibacy. Maybe the Chinese government should reconsider it’s ban on the Catholic Church… 🙂
If homosexuality is distributed across the sexes in equal proportions, then indeed the above solution doesn’t affect the ratio of available men to available women.
Decriminalizing homosexuality and ending private persecution makes sense simply from a rights perspective, a reason that is completely sufficient to do it, and probably the only compelling reason to do it.
Here’s a possible solution for the heterosexuals’ problem — polyandry. Robert Heinlein suggests a variety of polyandrous forms of marriage (some involving polygamy as well) in “Moon is a Harsh Mistress.” Why not? This might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but would be good for some.
If there are long-run imbalances in the heterosexual M:F ratio, I would expect this to happen, given enough time to overcome the political and cultural barriers.