Choice and Morality

As a staunch believer in a minimal state free of religious influence and as an individual with precious little tolerance for superstitious mumbo-jumbo, it's only been natural that I too have indulged in my share of schadenfreude at the unravelling of the evangelist Ted Haggard (he of the "I bought drugs I didn't use from a rent boy I didn't have sex with" school of confession), but in itself the exposure of yet another hypocritical religious rightist wouldn't have moved me to post. No, what I find questionable is a line of argument being advanced by several commenters on this issue, including Andrew Sullivan:

For those who still - amazingly - believe that being gay is somehow a "choice," consider Haggard. If he could have chosen not to be gay, don't you think he would have? Even though he apparently believes being gay is "repulsive and dark" (while it is, in fact, just another wonderful way to be human), he still cannot prevail against it. It is integral to him. It has been "all of [his] adult life".

One day, he may realize, and I pray he does, that the only dark and repulsive thing is the closet, the betrayal of his wife and children, the destruction of a church, and the demonization of others in the same boat - all as a function of his own inability to face the truth. What is dark and repulsive is dishonesty.

Now, my issue with the above has nothing to do with the "rightness" or "wrongness" of being gay per se, but with the line of reasoning advanced by Sullivan which seems to imply that an urge or impulse is more or less worthy of condemnation depending on whether it happens to be a "choice" or "innate" and unchangeable: it is one thing to say that homosexual acts between two consenting adults harm no one but themselves, and quite another (and much less convincing) to wield against those who condemn such acts the defense "I was born this way! I can't change who I am!" If we are to accept this reasoning, what is to stop others with desires that aren't as benign from picking up the same argument? Who says practitioners of, say, child molestation, or consensual incest, can't make even more convincing cases for being "born that way" and resistant to any possible courses of treatment? Surely we wouldn't be ready to give the pedophiles a pass even if they could provide rock solid evidence of their assertions, would we? If anything, such evidence would be a powerful argument for locking them away permanently, as irredeemable threats to society.

Homosexuality is not morally equivalent to child molestation, of course, and I could just as easily have used, say, a desire for women of another race, a preference for men of a particular height or even an inclination for a particular sexual position to illustrate the flaw in Sullivan's argument: I could even have used a non-sexual issue like the "innate" male desire to bash in the head of a tiresome rival to make my point. The point at issue is that arguing the ethics of any conduct on the basis of its "innateness" is nothing but a red herring, as human beings are endowed with the self-control to restrain their "innate" impulses to do all sorts of things society rightly considers unnacceptable. A logically sound and entirely sufficient defence of homosexuality would simply be to say "As free individuals we are at liberty to indulge in any sexual acts we desire with other willing parties, regardless of what anyone else may think about our behavior", and leave it at that: even if such behavior were merely a habit picked up hanging around a particular set, the state still wouldn't have just cause to interfere with the freedoms of those who adopted it (and certainly not on the urgings of hypocrites like Haggard). There is absolutely no need to tie oneself up in knots arguing about the "innateness" of one's sexual practices as if one were making a plea to a judge for lighter punishment on the grounds of diminished responsibility, a line of argument which in itself cedes the premise that it would be okay to prohibit homosexual acts if they could be shown to be entirely a matter of choice.

PS: The argument I make above is by no means a new one, and while I can understand the political calculations driving certain gay activists to embrace the "Born this way" red herring in the land of the "Blame My Genes/Parents/Upbringing" school of apologias, it is in its own way as dishonest an argument as any ever made by the likes of Ted Haggard. The question of whether homosexuality is something society ought to permit is seperate from that of whether it is one society ought to approve, which is again seperate from whether or not it is "innate" (whatever that means), and I can easily think of several courses of conduct I think society should strongly disapprove of while legally permitting, including cigarette smoking, consensual adult incest and voluntary self-mutilation by the mentally disturbed in the name of "gender reassignment" [sic], none of my attitudes towards which would be changed in the slightest by any evidence of their "innateness" or otherwise.