The remnants of colonialism continue to produce winners and losers economically, with the winners stuck in local maxima where they extract value from the people, but the people themselves see only marginal benefit, and development is stuck at a snail's pace.
As with seemingly everything in life, the incentives for the different players really don't line up. Consumers lose, producers lose, and only a select few middlemen win anything at all.
Compassion is the root of all virtue, and the balm for all vice. With a greater attention to compassion, every member of the chain of persons that grow, pick, process, market, sell, and even own Kenya coffee will help contribute to a better, fairer, and less deleterious to the Earth, system of farm-to-table.
Being compassionate includes being honest in one's business dealings, as well as not being greedy for exhorbitant profit. It also endures that everyone in the pipeline is actually performing a useful service, not just being an unnecessary middleman adding needless cost and other encumbrances.
And, of course, the Kenyan system was set up by the English Empire, so its parasitic pattern of worming its way into the fabric of all economic transactions is baked into their system. Yes, it's going to be difficult to extricate that selfishness from their system, but it's difficult for every culture to rid itself of the parasitism of selfishness in our societal systems. Note that ALL our current systems have that oft-dominant component present in them, causing waste and grief for all but the callous owners.
In our every endeavor, compassion is the only guaranteed path forward that has no intrinsic negative elements or effects, only difficulties due to our idioticly selfish inertias -- selfishly callous disregard being the opposite of compassionate service to the whole's well-being.
Empathy and compassion are social virtues, however if you bake it into the underlying governmental systems, you can end up in situations where those who are in control get to decide which type of “compassion” to enforce.
Your family's views are unequivocally wrong. Acting upon homosexual desires, like all other choices we make, is a personal choice; so long as no one is being forced to do anything, and the object of one's desire is sexually mature (each society must define that, itself, but let them be adults, respect their choices, and help them understand the situation), there is no sin there that I know of, except for, perhaps, a bit of greedy waste of sexual energy, but that is ubiquitous, AFAICT.
No, what makes a person deserving of hell is to disregard the happiness of others, or to even cruelly create unhappiness via oppression. We are to love one another, not judge them for their personal choices. Besides, it looks to me like many, or perhaps most, gay folks were born that way, in the same way we understand the biology of trans folks' brains likely differ in ways that are counter to "normal" sexually dimorphic structures (Dr. Robert Sapolsky details this in his freely available Human Behavioral Biology class from Stanford). Regardless, one's sexuality (and gender identification) is one's own business, so long as what we do is consensual with other adult participants.
No one is truly practicing religion if universal compassion is not the teaching or the goal. Of course, liars and hypocrites and the willfully ignorant say otherwise, but what they say doesn't count for sh_t. You can identify them because, beyond their ebullient, self-satisfied faces of perceived self-superiority, they are deeply unhappy and very likely to have no power over their own demons. Such is the fate of the cruel hypocrites. When we sow unhappiness, that is what we reap.
I disagree with your last paragraph, though. There is only one kind of compassion: gentle, kind, and respectful (at least to some extent), and it is not any one religion's purview to determine it. It is a human potential, and a human requirement, required for our personal and societal evolution towards peace and happiness, each and every one of us. Anyone who tells you "their" compassion is special or solely of one path or another is just another over-confident fool who has been deceived into believing their false sense of self-superiority. That way is the way of the oppressors, the tyrants, and their followers who cause so much mischief and misery in this world.
But, no, there is no compulsion in religion, so it should never be baked into any govt, but we can and should bake fairness in regulations regarding taxes, income reporting, and even minimum and maximum wages, so that the whole of society is, if not benefitting, at least not harmed by their commerce. No company can operate without either the consent of the state or this world's entire cultural and technological apparatus. We can at least ensure that their profit is not wholly destructive.
Interestingly, those earlier studies claiming to show that brains of the trans-identifying are atypical for their sex didn't control for sexuality, and many used exclusively homosexual cohorts.
So the findings were actually brain differences relating to homosexuality - later studies that controlled for sexuality (including same-sex and opposite-sex attracted transsexuals in the study population) couldn't replicate the earlier results relating to sexually dimorphic brain structures.
Instead, researchers found functional differences in brain regions relating to body perception, similar to what is seen in body dysmorphic disorder patients.
> (Dr. Robert Sapolsky details this in his freely available Human Behavioral Biology class at Stanford).
There is a video where he discusses this, albeit without properly citing any studies, but his description of the research is out of date. Probably it's an old recording.
Yes, my understanding of Dr. Sapolsky's work comes from rather old videos he did, so, sure, I don't doubt that what you're saying is probably true, but I'm not a neuroscientist, so I'm going to have to rely upon the expertise of others to validate any claims/results. Thanks for your explication.
Regardless, what is important is (IMHO) that our notions of how genderish traits can mix and match in different individuals in ways that don't match our classical notions of gender. The best result of that would be recognizing that we have to take each person as they are, and let them be their happiest self, by their measure.
At the end of the day, however a person justifies it, respectful, kind, gentle-as-possible compassion is the best policy for us all, to everyone, always. It is always our choice.