The Objective Observer

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Gay and Lesbian Interest

• Of Meerkats and Men
• Gays - A Final Word
• The Science of Gay
• I Don't Care That You're Gay
• Homosexuals and Housing
• Gay Travel
• Gay Superheroes
• Of Queers and Men

I imagine that being gay has never been easy. And given the United State’s puritanical past, being gay in America must be even more difficult than many other places in the world. Religion might very well be made the scapegoat in the misery of being gay, but that would probably be rather unjustified. To be honest, being gay from a scientific perspective is quite probably as bad or worse than being gay from a religious perspective.

From a religious perspective, being gay has generally been viewed as something that will earn you eternal damnation. That is to say that your gay soul will be forever damned in the flames of hell. Overall, that’s pretty bad and it might be hard to imagine anything much worse. However, religion generally has the concept of repentance and forgiveness. So, even if you are gay, you can repent, choose not to be gay and not get saddled with eternal damnation. Seems fair enough except for one little problem. According to experts at being gay, one cannot choose or not choose to be gay, one either is gay or is not gay. And even then, there are people that do choose to be gay or not to be gay. Those are not the gay people that I am talking about here though. There can be little doubt that there are those that make being gay a lifestyle choice, but that cannot possibly account for all gay individuals. There are some individuals that have almost undeniably been “born gay”. It is these individuals that claim to have been “born gay” that I am interested in with this article.

Make no mistake, being “born gay” is not a scientifically proven fact just yet. There are still those that will claim that being gay is, always has been and always will be a lifestyle choice. Much of the religious community falls into this camp with their “Pray Away the Gay” message. Frankly, I am not here to debate the merits of praying away gayness or whether or not one can or cannot be “born gay”. I say that for the sake of argument that we assume that one can be “born gay”; that at some point scientific research will isolate the gene or genes or brain wiring that make someone gay or at least increase the likeliness that they will be gay or choose the gay lifestyle. Regardless of the scientific explanation, we will assume for now that being “born gay” is a scientific fact.

So, once being born gay is established as a scientific fact, where does that leave us? Well, being gay would be a naturally occurring phenomenon that would ostensibly bring with it the validity of other naturally occurring reasons for discrimination such as being born female or being born black. Whether this is an actual benefit is unclear since the law already covers protecting individuals from being discriminated against because they are gay.

However, from a purely scientific standpoint, being gay is not a particularly good thing. Biologically speaking, it is a serious defect, genetic or otherwise, that does not aid in the propagation of the species. In fact, a gay individual would nearly guarantee that their particular DNA profile would not propagate to the next generation. This is the absolute worse thing possible from an evolutionary perspective. If your genes do not make it to the next generation, you do not only die, but your entire lineage dies and you effectively become extinct at a personal level.

Although it can hardly come as a surprise, this has to be rather bad news to those that are gay. On the one hand you have religion telling you that being gay is a choice and if you choose to be gay you are stuck with eternal damnation. On the other hand, you have science telling you that being gay is an evolutionary dead-end, a horribly disastrous natural experiment that serves no useful purpose in the proliferation of the human species.

Quite honestly, I cannot imagine anyone ever wanting to be gay given those two choices. Which reinforces the argument that some individuals must be born gay. However, one little thing keeps gnawing at the back of my mind. If being gay is the result of a genetic trait or defect, why would it not have been bred out of the human race over time? I mean, today we have technology that can allow gay individuals to bear children, but that was not the case during the main portion of human evolution. Given the length of human history, the genetic trait should have been eliminated from the gene pool. There are a few possible reasons to explain why this is not the case, I suppose, but I have a feeling that the answer lies more with the brain than with one’s DNA.

If it really is as “simple” as isolating being gay to a particular gene or group of genes, then what will become of the gay community once genetically engineering your children becomes commonplace? By completely rejecting that there is any “choice” involved, the gay community seems to have essentially grouped themselves with other undesirable genetic or birth defects such as Downs syndrome, Fragile-X mental retardation, DiGeorge syndrome (the most common genetic cause of heart and facial birth defects), etc. And once science progresses to the level that we can identify homosexuality early enough, would it not make sense to eliminate it just as we would with other genetic defects that we can control? Is this the message that the gay community wants to convey to the world, that being gay is some kind of birth defect? I would not think so, but I am left with nothing else.

To summarize, if one accepts religion as a basis for one’s world view, then being gay is an abomination that must be stamped out and if one accepts science as a basis for one’s world view, then being gay is an abomination that must be stamped out. Seems like either way you go, the answer is the same. However, with religion, there is redemption and forgiveness. There are no such equivalents in science.

To be perfectly honest, if the gay community is to survive and thrive as part of society, it would make the most logical sense to embrace being gay as a choice and a perfectly valid choice at that. The alternative, that people are born gay, is to move toward the path of eventually eliminating gayness from the world once science figures out how to do it. This raises all sorts of interesting questions. Will the gay community support or block scientific study into why people are gay? Will the gay community fight to prevent parents from genetically manipulating their offspring to not be gay? Will the gay community be forced to genetically engineer their own gay children in order to preserve their society and way of life?

For my part, I tend to believe that being gay is not strictly a genetic trait. The reason I believe this is because if it was strictly a genetic trait, I think it would have been bred out of the human race by now. I tend to think that it is much more complex than that and is made up of genetics, biology (hormones, etc.), brain development, environment and free will. Those are the ingredients but the proportions have yet to be defined. The gay community is fighting hard to eliminate environment and free will, but do they really understand what they are fighting for? Do they really understand that by defining gay in strictly scientific terms that they are fighting for the eventual extinction of gay?