"If I was gay, I wouldn't get in everybody's face about it all the time...and I wouldn't hide it either. I'd just relax about it and be who I was and leave other people alone about it. And that is exactly what I would prefer the religious right to do as well...leave other people alone." Little Hawk

What other process is there, Little Hawk? The change from having no legal rights to full equality under the law tends to create a chaotic period. It took a long time and a great deal of agitation before women in the US (and longer in England) won the simple right to vote. When one reads the history, it comes through very clearly that many people - probably mostly men, but also many women- became tired of the subject and wished it would just go away. It took more than 70 years of in-your-face-activism before the passage of the 19th Amendment, and I'm sure that there was a LOT of shouting and ill will on both sides both before and after those 70 years.

Does nayone today feel the need to argue the merits of it?

And, Little Hawk, you say:
"...quite possibly partly because of natural health reasons (anal intercourse is hard on the body in various ways, and is clearly not a very natural process for a body to undergo...the anus is there to eject waste matter, and that is its sole bodily purpose)." (What about the mouth, Little Hawk? Its only non-arguable function is for the intake of food and the harbo(u)r for speech.)

I would say that accepted and agreed upon uses of anything are not necessarily the final answers. It has sometimes occurred to me that some things- beauty, for instance - are what we say they are. It is the way we are wired. A slightly different wiring might produce the opinion that glistening wet black mud teeming with tiny critters has more aesthetic appeal than a limpid blue sky with puffy white clouds.