I said most cultures in recorded history have been heteronormative. In Ancient Greece, the most commonly cited example, it was a mixed bag and was more often about pederasty and power dynamics than it was about equal homosexual relationships. It wasn't a one-to-one equivalence of the way we view sexuality today.
As I said, there were times and places where it happened, but you'll struggle to find more than a handful of examples of accepted homosexuality throughout recorded history.
Do you disagree that homosexuality has been overwhelmingly a taboo in pre-modern times? Or that it was ever accepted in a way that it is in developed societies today?
Cholera pandemics are a relatively recent phenomenon, with the first major one starting in India in 1817 and several others occurring over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. They didn't start happening until people were living in very large, crowded cities.
I'll dig up the sources when I can but you can find writings from Ancient Rome to Medieval Europe describing good water to drink (clear, cold, fast-moving, odorless) versus bad water (stagnant, dirty, smelly). Of course they didn't know why the good water was better than the bad water and, as you said yourself, it wasn't a complete picture, but they most definitely knew which water to drink and which to avoid. It's why you find settlements along fresh water sources and why people have always dug wells.
One thing I don't see mentioned a lot is that water has always been the most commonly consumed drink simply because making beer is resource-intensive. I don't doubt that people would have tried to drink only beer if they could get away with it, but it just wouldn't be practical when the stream is right over there.
There's no way to know this for sure. Though we have examples throughout history of some cultures being accepting of homosexual or transgender identities, it's entirely possible that most prehistorical cultures were strictly heteronormative just as they were once we started recording history.
"Beer and wine were invented because drinking water was unsafe."
No, people have generally always known how to find clean drinking water and understood its importance. Beer and wine got made because they were delicious, nutritious, and got ya drunk.
"Medieval Europeans needed spices because all of their meat was rotten."
No, they had the same physiology we do and would have been just as disgusted by rotten meat. They would eat fresh meat when in season, and they knew how to preserve it by smoking, salting, drying, pickling, or fermenting it. Medieval Europeans wanted spices for the same reason we do, because they taste really good.
My dawg, priceless is a figure of speech. It doesn't mean you literally can't apply a price to it. Sell it for whatever you want if it's the Holy Grail.
Directly involved with a political party, voting, or lawmaking.
The problem with calling things "political" or "not political" is that literally everything in our world, from real objects to abstract concepts, is affected by laws and government. So you gotta draw the line somewhere.
Show me something "not political" and I'll show you how it actually is.
I disagree, but that's a matter of semantics. I think "political" in this context means directly relating to politics. Because if my examples are political then everything is political, and so the question is meaningless.
To me, "orange water" is a pitcher of water that has some orange slices chilling in it for a bit of flavor. "Juice" is the stuff results from squeezing a fruit or vegetable to expel its liquid.
Not impossible, but I don't see what advantage there would be to keeping him alive vs just getting rid of him entirely.