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From Plato to St Paul, from Aristotle to Aquinas, Western thought, in contemplating homosexuality, has had recourse to arguments of nature. Plato described homosexual affairs as "contrary to nature" ; St Paul lamented the Roman women who "did change the natural use into that which is against nature" ; Aristotle considered pederastic propensities might arise "in some by nature" ; Aquinas contemplated the question "Whether the unnatural vice is the greatest sin among the species of lust?"

The historian John Boswell in his 1980 study Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality devotes many pages to what these different notions of "nature" may mean. The semantic difficulties are not confined to classical or religious authors. Much of modern-day discourse on homosexuality centres on arguments of nature and naturalness.

"Homosexuality is not 'normal'. On the contrary, it is a challenge to the norm. Nature exists, whether academics like it or not. And in nature, procreation is the single, relentless rule. That is the norm. Our sexual bodies were designed for reproduction. Penis fits vagina: no fancy linguistic game-playing can change that biological fact." Camille Paglia .

A deconstruction of this quotation illustrates the varying, and sometimes contradictory, notions involved in the "argument of nature". "Penis fits vagina" invokes the concept of natural (or proper) function. "Our sexual bodies were designed for reproduction" alludes to the theological proposition of natural law. "Designed" invokes a Creationist viewpoint of the natural world, whereas "in nature, procreation is the single, relentless rule" points to a Darwinian understanding. That there should be a "single, relentless rule" contradicts the notion of free will inherent in natural law and promotes instead a determinist view of human nature. The same phrase invokes the notion of laws of nature, which here, being "rules" which can evidently be broken, are not descriptive, as in the usual scientific understanding, but prescriptive in a legalistic sense. There is a contextual conflation of normal with natural, and "challenge to the norm" points to the contrast of what is natural with what is perverted. Natural is also contrasted with artificial: "no fancy linguistic game-playing can change that biological fact".

This article discusses the differing semantic constructions of "nature" and "natural" in relation to discourse on homosexuality.

Nature as Exemplar
This argument can be characterized in the slogan "Dogs don't do it, therefore humans shouldn't." It relies for its authority on the notion that nature is a teacher: if a phenomenon does not appear in nature (that is, in this instance, in animal sexual relations), then that phenomenon ought not to appear in human sexual relations. The argument involves a necessary confrontation with Hume's is-ought problem, which states, briefly, that what ought to be cannot be inferred from what is. On a more practical level, as early as 1910, André Gide noted in Corydon that dogs do indeed "do it", but that their owners are "inclined not to notice".

The argument is sometimes refined so as to exclude domesticated animals from the paradigm: animals in the wild don't do it, therefore humans shouldn't. In this form the argument logically posits a notion of humankind as ideally unsocial and that all forms of disapproved behaviour are the results of contamination from fellow humans.

In reality, instances of homosexual behaviour amongst animals, whether domesticated, encaged or in the wild, are well known and well-documented. Addressing this issue, the Darwinist Richard Dawkins has remarked, "Why drag in bonobos, as if the fact that [homosexuality] is common among them made it any more natural than the fact that it is common in humans? Let people do what they feel like doing (so long as it doesn't hurt others). You don't need to justify it by looking to other species."

Modern advocates of Ex-Gay therapies avoid the argument of "nature as exemplar". Dr Socarides of NARTH, while admitting homosexual behaviour in animals, states "the term homosexuality should be limited to the human species, for in animals the investigator can ascertain only motor behavior. As soon as he interprets the animal's motivation he is applying human psychodynamics – a risky, if not foolhardy scientific approach." And yet, anthropomorphism is ever-present in social discourse, as witnessed by the interested reactions to the film March of the Penguins.

The argument of "nature as exemplar" has no obvious gay-activist counterpart: though animal sexuality may be of interest as a counter-argument to the "unnaturalness" of homosexuality, the slogan "Dogs do it, therefore so must I" has rarely been recorded.