Rapid Increase in Population

Your editorial was both moving and important. As you suggest, contraceptives can help to avoid this rapidly increasing problem.

But contraception is not, as you state, the only way to deal with the problem. Clearly, the prejudice in so many societies against lesbians and gay men is a means of forcing them to act as if they were heterosexual, and reproduce, or suffer punishment because they do not, ordinarily, have children. The twin goals of population stability and respect for human rights are both violated by insisting that homosexual people act against their own sexual orientation and enter heterosexual relationships.

If we state that we wish to respect human rights and we believe that overpopulation is a real problem, we act against our own self-interest by continuing to stigmatize homosexuality. It is only in a world where reproduction is the only and overriding good that homosexuality deserves this sort of intolerance and misunderstanding.

DAVID LINK

Los Angeles