Although I didn't mention it in my recent post on a certain A. Hitler, one of the reasons why I've been investigating the man's career is because it's long been clear to me that there is a direct line connecting the pseudoscience "justifying" Hitler's brutality and the pseudoscience being flogged in our day under the rubric of "genetics": not only can one trace the continuity of certain ideas over the decades, but often one finds that the actual institutions pushing these ideas, and even the very individuals who man them, are directly connected on an intimate level. To put it plainly, a lot of the hype being generated about genes "for" homosexuality, IQ or this, that and the other today is the handiwork of people who have been mentored or sponsored by actual honest-to-goodness Nazis, war criminals many of whom escaped justice only because they were shrewd enough to burn the evidence of their crimes when they saw the writing on the wall. The one time practitioners of "eugenics" and "racial hygiene" are the forefathers of today's "race realists" and self-styled advocates of "human biodiversity."
At any rate, I'm only mentioning this now in order to give some context to my interest in this post by John Tierney, not because the time is ripe for me to lay out in full the links between Hitler-era quackery and its more recent "Bell Curve" style incarnation. The point of interest for me here is that when Tierney lays out the theoretical possibility of a drug which can change sexual orientation, he also (intentionally or otherwise) strikes at the root of the problem with all "I was born this way!" attempts at justifying sexual preference, namely this: a trait can be completely genetically determined and yet highly malleable under environmental change!
To understand what I'm getting at, let's just take a look at the case of gender. While some people may claim that they are men trapped in women's bodies (or vice versa), the fact is that in 99.9% of case one's biological gender is completely determined by whether one receives an X or a Y chromosome for the paternal side, end of story: simply feeling oneself to be the "wrong" gender no more makes one a member of the other than my feeling myself to be born into the "wrong" financial stratum makes me the sole heir of Bill Gates. And yet, this is not the end of the story, for thanks to the marvels of surgery and endocrinology. it is perfectly possible for someone born a man to mimic a woman to near perfection in almost all physical particulars. As this example illustrates, even if one is able to say "I was born this way!", it certainly doesn't follow that "I have to stay this way!", which is the hidden implication that advocates of this pathetic line of apologetics would like to make.
Indeed, Tierney's thought-experiment amounts to a full-frontal attack on the whole "born this way" nonsense, as if it were possible to create a drug to turn straights gay and vice versa, those gays who'd been relying on this thin reed to argue (or rather, pathetically plead) for tolerance on the basis of not being able to help their inclinations would be completely stripped of their defenses. The only argument which could stand in the face of the hypothetical discovery of such a drug would be the one which gay rights advocates ought to be making and can make already, to wit "It's my life, I'm not forcing anyone to share my preferences, and I therefore have the right to pursue my personal happiness in my own way even if you find my choices completely unpalatable for whatever reason." No more justification than this is either needed or desirable, and it isn't as if Western societies demand that people all adopt the same preferences even in particular cases in which it is clear that people manifestly do have a choice, like religion for instance: which decent person would dare demand that the government force his or her neighbors to renounce their obviously wrong-headed choice of superstition, simply because all it would take to do so is uttering a few words to non-existent beings?
The argument from genetic inevitability - which is what I prefer to call the "born this way" line - is as dangerous as it is ineffectual, for if there is one thing the 20th century ought to have taught us by now, it is that attributing traits to the genes makes an excellent foundation for mistreating or killing those who supposedly carry those defective genes. If tomorrow it could be established that homosexuality was 100% genetic, and that just one or two genes were responsible for it, no more than a blink of an eye would be required to turn conservatives everywhere into fervent advocates of eugenic abortion: most would consider it a small price to pay to rid the world once and for all of the homosexuals they find so loathsome - certainly something "God" would forgive.
Finally, as far as the plausibility of any drug along the lines hypothesized in Tierney's post is concerned, I have to say that I think the odds of discovering such a drug are somewhat less likely than our coming up with "2001" style artificial intelligence, which is my own snide way of saying "pretty much zero." I simply do not accept that human sexuality follows the simplistic models offered by fruit flies or the "I was born this way!" ideologues, and in any case it ought to be completely obvious that no gene whose primary effect was to promote a preference for homosexuality could ever be selected for; furthermore, I don't even accept that the percentage of adults who engage in homosexual acts is relatively constant from society to society or age to age - if historical records are to be trusted, there have been several human societies in which such acts were almost universal amongst men of particular strata, and all the "PMITA Prison" and "Don't drop the soap" jokes illustrate the widespread awareness that "straight" men are perfectly capable of partaking in such activities when denied other outlets. How we express our sexual desires is very obviously not completely up to our genes to decide, and no drug will ever be able to make that decision for us.
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