it seems you are confused about what I actually said skrum. you said there was hard to find an reason for selection of a "homo" gene, unless it worked on a population level,

while I answered with why you only need family level to find a reason for the gene to exist.

I made no argument about marrige.

and ill restate the two ways it is thought to work at family level. maybe I will state them better.

1) it is belived that the gay gene increases the fertility of women that has it, so it increases fertility of woman and decreases fertility with men that has it. that is one of the reasons it exists, that does not need any explanation about population level

2) this is the tougher one for me to explain
for the gene to be triggered happens before the male is born, and is mainly a function of how many older brothers the man has. i think it is something like 0.04 * 1.02^n(or 0.04 + 0.01*n ), where n is the number of older borthers he has.

now the reason to have a higher chanse of being gay the more brothers you have is about social life. most social animals have "gayness". the gay brother will not compete with his brothers for women, and will be better able to keep the group of brothers cooperating, and will be better able to help settle disputs. by serving such a role in the group he will increase the fitness of all his brothers who will indirectly pass down genes that are common to his. so the gay mans genes survives through his nices and nephues, and his role in the family will increase their chanse of survival.

it is like ants, for the worker ants, it is better to be helping the one fertile sister, than to be fertile self.

skrum, I am not perfect today either, but you have to concider a pre civilisation life. when most women have 7-15 children, but most of them die before the age of 20.

so if the man has 2-4 brothers and sisters, he would be helping between 15 and 60 nices and nephues. if because of him 9/15 grow up, instead of 6/

Since you probably didn't read any article Thraxle I took the liberty of running a quick google search on "anthropology & marriage".

This is the first article that came up: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cultural_Anthropology/Marriage,_Reproduction_and_Kinship

I glanced it and it pretty much covered the same material I covered in my intro anthropology class here at Notre Dame. Pretend to read it (or humor me and actually read it) and I will drop the subject.

To Everyone Else:
I'm not a faggot so I don't really care either way, but that's just the point. If you're not gay you probably shouldn't care whether someone wants to marry a dude or not. And FYI all this nonsense about "cultural conservatism" is silly considering marriage was originally the combination of the Germanic practice of marrying who you lost your virginity to and the Roman practice of ceremonial marriage was only established in order to designate rights of inheritance. In both cases nothing explicitly excludes gay marriage, furthermore if you're still adhering to the notion of "cultural conservatism" consider for a moment that marriage was an official rite until around the time Rome fell. This is probably because the government was no longer establishing rights of inheritance in the West.

So if you really want to be "culturally conservative" then you should only allow the state to marry people. And it should only be respected as a civil union that has certain legal consequences, as opposed to dogmatic policy.

I was not arguing against the family argument, I was replying specifically about the number of children of gay males.

I presume that what triggers the gay gene is the presence of the older brothers, not the fact of their having been born. Or is their having been born enough? Even if they are absent, their having been born somehow affect the mother's chemistry thereafter?

Is helpfulness a function of gayness? Or is gayness a function of helpfulness? A helpfulness gene would be beneficial even if it did not imply gayness because the older brother would benefit. So all males could have a helpfulness gene. The increased gayness might be a result of reduced access to women because of the younger brother's lesser economic status, so the younger brother seeks the only other outlet.

Since you probably didn't read any articles Thraxle I took the liberty of running a quick google search on "anthropology and marriage".

This is the first article that came up: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cultural_Anthropology/Marriage,_Reproduction_and_Kinship

I skimmed it and it pretty much covered the same material I covered in my intro to anthropology class here at Notre Dame. Pretend to read it (or humor me and actually read it) and I will drop the subject.

To Everyone Else:
I'm not a faggot so I don't really care either way if homos get married, but that's just my point. If you're not gay you probably shouldn't care whether someone wants to marry a dude or not. And FYI all this nonsense about "cultural conservatism" is just silly. Cultural conservatism when applied to marriage implies there was a perennial tradition of marriage in the first place. Since we can trace modern marriage back to the combination of Germanic and Roman practices of marriage we can't really say it's untraditional to allow people to marry whomever they want. The Germanic practice of marriage was to marry who you lost your virginity to while the Roman practice of ceremonial marriage was established in order to designate rights of inheritance. In both cases nothing explicitly excludes gay marriage, furthermore if you're still adhering to the notion of "cultural conservatism" consider for a moment that marriage was an official rite until around the time Rome fell. This is probably because the government was no longer establishing rights of inheritance in the West. How do I know all this, well I went to an expensive private school and most of it is on wikipedia anyway.

So if you really want to be "culturally conservative" then you should only allow the state to marry people. And it should only be respected as a civil union that has certain legal consequences, as opposed to dogmatic policy. But if you continue to cling to the idea that legal union between gay couples is wrong then I would probably point at your upbringing and prejudices as the underlying reason, rather than belief in any sort of justification under the pretenses of logic and reason.

Finally, to anyone who still opposed gay marriage: If you admit you only oppose it because your were raise to not like gays I think most people will probably be content with that answer, as we all have prejudices. I for example hate kikes and red haired people and disapprove of them being able to get married.

Sociological issues aside, I feel when you outlaw same sex unions you run into a possible 14th amendment violation. I am really curious to see how this shakes out in the courts over the coming years with first the 9th Circuit Appeals and almost assuredly a Supreme Court Petition after that.

Thrax: Many churches are basically charities. My dad helps keep the books for the church my parents attend. Although the numbers change from month to month. generally speaking the spending break down loos something like this. Priest housing, food, expenses ect: 3%
Wages for church employees: 2-6%
Church and rectory upkeep: 8%
Money sent to arch dioscese: 10-20%
Outreach to poor and other programs that benefit the public: everything else

I'm not saying all churches are like this. I can't even claim that all Catholic churches are, but a large portion of them are. Further more, I don't know that the IRS has a protocol for taxing donations received by an institution. Most churches get >90% of their money from donations.

blunt: The tradition of marriage goes back far before the Romans. Jews have been getting married for over 3000 years.

Can we get off the homos though? both figuratively and literally.

lets shift focus back to the tea party, and what they stand for, and why or why not some of their members are batshit crazy.

Det I know marriage goes back farther than the ancient world and even in to prehistory my point was to just highlight what the church based its rite of marriage on.

As far as tea partiers go, they're all bat shit crazy and don't have any idea what they're going to do.

If we didn't have a bat shit crazy Prez and Speaker the bat shit crazy Tea Party wouldn't have come into existence. Credit Obama with revitalizing the Conservative Movement.