Whatever this ontology or taxonomy may be, it isn’t trumped or superseded by political considerations — which is what you seem to be suggesting I believe, with your “when doing so” above.

I mentioned political manipulation as an unfortunate, frequent misuse of such multiplied classifications. It’s not a matter of “abandoning truth for political expediency.” Some subjects simply have no proper bearing on ethics or politics at all.

What I still haven’t seen you mention is any appropriate “other context,” one where such a subdividing of the continuum of human sexuality is actually pertinent.

The only such context I can think of is usually confined to a urologist’s or gynecologist’s office, or a fertility clinic, all of which applications of rational thought serve to make the difference you highlight far less important in practice.

Occam’s Razor can bring not only clarity to the categories, but also rest to the weary. Why take pains to subdivide more continua of experience than is necessary?

But you ask me why I identify what I see as an ontological difference between couples whom biology selects for reproduction and couples whom biology does not, when doing so “is used by the unscrupulous as an excuse to further their political manipulation and interest-group warfare. Which, in turn, only benefits those running the State.”

The clue is the Statue of Justice, which is blind.

In issues of equity, irrelevancies that cause prejudice need to be left out — ignored. I see the issue of the gender of partners as immaterial to the question of enforcing a contract.

But there are other contexts in which the difference between a biologically fertile pairing and a biologically non-fertile pairing is a proper subject matter and on point. A respect for relevant facts demands not abandoning truth for political expediency.

Noble ends do not justify ignoble means — and that’s why political spin away from obvious truths is one of the evils I care to write about.

That was, of course, the one question that was never asked before Elián González was ripped out of the home of relatives that had actually sheltered him. Nor has it been asked in the decade since.

Even a six-year-old can understand what tyranny the execrable Janet Reno was consigning him to return to at gunpoint. If he or she can articulate it to a neutral observer, that understanding and preference should become a material factor.

As for sexual orientation being, properly, irrelevant to matters of respecting contracts: Yes, you’re right, it should be irrelevant. And it should turn on individual rights, not those presumed for any special subcategory of humanity.

(Even for children, it’s not that they have any different or lesser rights than adults. It’s that intricate issues exist of how to be guardians for them, and how far, when they haven’t yet acquired adults’ tools for making judgments.)

You decried any notion of a break in that continuum of rights. Which makes me wonder, yet again, why you’d take such pains to proclaim such breaks in the continua of sensual, emotional, and sexual choices — your laborious fucking-versus-”kucking” distinction of several weeks ago.

I don’t see either area of human experience as calling, rationally, for such a break in perception.