Genetic Basis of Homosexuality

[broncofan]

Although this could easily go in the main forum, I decided to try to put it in this one because our views on this issue often dictates how we feel about political issues affecting the gay community.

First question. Do you believe sexual orientation is hardwired? The reason I say hardwired and not genetic is because there is evidence that prenatal hormone levels may influence a child's sexual orientation during a sensitive period where their brain has the greatest plasticity. So, while there may be a genetic influence there are other avenues to explain the immutability of sexual orientation if you think it's not a choice. Second, if you believe it's a choice, is it a choice that has any bearing on morality? For this I suppose we go back to Leviticus, and specifically the proscription on men lying with men.

Finally, if you are one who believes that gays should not be allowed to be married, or who believes that Colorado for instance was within their rights to change their state Constitution to prevent homosexuals from getting protection in hate crime legislation: Would your opinion change if you had a family member who was gay? And if not, then give us a short written sample of how you would explain this to your family member.

This is not to call anyone out in particular. However, if you have gone on record saying you are against gay marriage, your answers would particularly interest me.

[broncofan]

Oh and just to close a loophole. If you believe that homosexuality is immoral, or that it's acceptable for others to believe that, is the basis of your belief religious? And if so, how do you square this with our secular constitution and specifically the establishment clause of the first amendment?

Sorry for so many questions. Consider this your gay marriage/gay rights questionnaire.

I'll go first. I believe that homosexuality has a genetic basis and that those who are gay cannot be talked out of it or programmed to find members of the opposite sex attractive. While there may be one or two documented cases in history of people changing their sexual orientation, it is not something subject to much if any environmental influence. I think it has nothing at all to do with morality, as I believe sex is moral as long as the two (or more) parties consent and have the capacity to consent (this excludes sheep and children).

Finally, I do think that laws explicitly banning gay marriage are an end run around the establishment clause. When the first amendment says that the government shall not establish a national religion, I believe this also includes enacting policies that only have a religious basis. For instance, I would like someone to challenge this and make an argument for the immorality of homosexuality sans religion.

[trish]

I’ll eventually try to get around to most of your questions as they apply to me, but first and most importantly I want to emphasize that the nature/nurture question should be irrelevant to one’s moral and legal judgments of sexual and gender orientation. I don’t give a shit whether it’s a lifestyle that one chooses to take up or a biological imperative, gays lesbians and transgender persons are first and foremost persons and deserving the full measure of rights and protection afforded by the Constitution or any other legal and/or moral code pretending to codify what is just and unjust.

However the nature/nurture question is decided the answer will certainly be irrelevant to homophobes and bigots. If homosexuality is hardwired, bigots will regard it as a malady. You don’t let people with severe autism bang their heads against the wall and you don’t let homosexuals fuck each others asses. Michelle Bachmann’s husband thinks homosexuality is a disorder that can be cured. If homosexuality is all personal preference and choice, then bigots will of course says it’s an immoral choice. As far as social politics goes, I think the nature/nurture question is a lose/lose focus point.

Is sexuality hardwired? IMO yes. I’m not convinced it’s entirely hardwired in the genes. A great many traits are acquired in fetal development. Moreover, just as it’s important for heterosexual children in passing through puberty and through early sexual maturity to be exposed to a healthy balance of adult guidance and peer socialization in order to develop healthy sexual attitudes (affirming their personal and sexual identification) and acceptable social skills, the same is true of children with different orientations and identifications; i.e. even though orientation and identification might be determined by nature, they can be modified and directed by nurture (I don't think shoe fetishes are genetic for example).

As far as the moral implications of the first testament go: It says in Leviticus that a man should not lay down with a man as he would with a woman. That merely means that if you’re bisexual and you use the missionary position with women, then use the doggy or some other position with men. If you’re a guy and you only screw men, there’s no problem, you can use any and all positions. Besides, if you’re a Biblical literalist these are injunctions that God placed on the Levites. We aren’t Levites.

[hippifried]

I see all this in a spherical context, but that's an entirely different conversation. If you look at it linear, you can put hetero & homo sexuality extremes at the ends & bi-sexuality in the center. That leaves an infinite number of degrees off in one direction or the other. I doubt if any 2 people are exactly in the same place on the line. This is mostly hardwired. I say mostly, as a caveat, because I'm sure there are hedonists, especially around the the bi-sexual area of the line, who are just there for the activity & not because of any chemical attraction. That would be a choice, but the hedonists wouldn't give a flying fuck who likes the idea or not. They're not going to run off to NARTH or some other bullshit yokels who say they can fix you if they don't consider themselves broken. Sometimes, it's just about having fun.

For the hardwire: In-utero chemical changes make more sense to me as the driving force of orientation. There is research in this direction with evidence to show. There's been a lot of people looking for a gene, but no success. There very well could be a genetic factor that drives some of the in-utero chemical changes, but I don't see that as necessary for it to happen. The general bent & chemical attraction is definitely hardwired.

The politics of all this is insane. Being blissfully divorced for 40 years, I'm not really all that keen on the institution of marriage in the first place. No skin in the game means that all my bullshit is academic, but here goes anyway:

I think everybody's looking at this wrong. This bullshit at the State levels isn't really attacking the establishment clause as much as it's an attack on the the "full faith & credit" clause of Article IV, the "equal protection" clause in section 1 of Amendment XIV, & the Civil Rights Act. This is sexual discrimination. These bans are merely telling someone that they can't enjoy the same legal privileges as someone else because they're the wrong sex. This isn't about religion because this is America. The proponants of "prop 8" couldn't argue their case in Federal court because they couldn't argue that the State of CA had the power to ban an activity on religious grounds. Religion has no standing in the legal argument. Religion has no standing in defining morality either. Morality is universal. It's about how we treat each other. Not what somebody who's hearing voices, seeing halucinations, or reading about somebody else's ideas has to say. The only real moral authority is our conscience.

John Calhoun was full of shit. There's no such thing as "State's rights". Political entities only have powers, & those powers can be limited or even taken away. This idea that States can override recognized human rights, codified federal law, or the Constitution itself is just a crock of shit. A State referendum claiming the power to discriminate, despite all federal regulation to the contrary, has no standing whatsoever. DOMA was a blatant attempt to negate "full faith & credit", based on sexual discrimination at the State level. The latest boot it got from the federal court isn't being apealed because the law can't be defended. With that gone, States like NC would have to recognize a marriage licence from another State, regardless of who the licencees are. & BTW: There's no such thing as "gay rights" either. All human rights are innate & apply to all humans. Any human being who wants to marry another human being, & it's all concentual, has human rights, dstablished law, & Constitutional protections on their side. There should be no need to establish gay people as a new minority class.

[BluegrassCat]

While there may be one or two documented cases in history of people changing their sexual orientation, it is not something subject to much if any environmental influence.

I agree with you on the larger question of the causes of sexual orientation but the instances of changing sexual orientation among women is not that rare. Female sexuality appears to be more much fluid than men's.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...ey-mature.html

[hippifried]

I agree with you on the larger question of the causes of sexual orientation but the instances of changing sexual orientation among women is not that rare. Female sexuality appears to be more much fluid than men's.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...ey-mature.html

Isn't physical attraction mostly chemical? It would seem to me that in order to change "orientation", one would have to change their chemical receptors. That'd be a good trick. Having children changes all kinds of stuff in a woman's body, including hormonal makeup. Other than that, we're probably just dealing with degrees in the position on the line. The article seems to promote the idea that you're either one way or the other to start with. Not necessarily true.

[broncofan]

As far as the moral implications of the first testament go: It says in Leviticus that a man should not lay down with a man as he would with a woman. That merely means that if you’re bisexual and you use the missionary position with women, then use the doggy or some other position with men. If you’re a guy and you only screw men, there’s no problem, you can use any and all positions. Besides, if you’re a Biblical literalist these are injunctions that God placed on the Levites. We aren’t Levites.

Brilliant! This is a point to bring up with the fundamentalists. I agree with you that it shouldn't matter at all whether sexual orientation is hard-wired as if it's a choice it is still a choice that causes no harm whatsoever. When I was reading some equal protection cases though, there was some discussion that all of the protected classes had in common the immutability of the class defining characteristic. But of course one can make the argument that there are individuals with predispositions to perform actual evil acts, and the question of immutability is not wholly relevant to whether such acts are acceptable. Likewise, the entire point is that gay sex or whatever other hedonistic (meaning mostly not strictly reproductive) practices do not harm anyone whether one is making a choice or is entirely predisposed biologically.

Hippifried, you make a good point. The establishment clause has never been used as a challenge to the ban of gay marriage or for that matter gay sexual practices. The reason I bring it up is that in equal protection cases, when they evaluate the state laws in order to determine whether the law in question is tailored to a legitimate state interest, that interest is often described in quasi-religious terms. The state interest that Justice Scalia has used to justify support for many in my view homophobic decisions are general morals laws. In general, when a state justifies a law based on its compelling need, the state is said to be exercising its "police power", to protect the health, welfare, and safety of their residents. But these morals laws have really been used as an excuse in my opinion to inject religious values into the equation. If the state interest can only be described in terms of the religious views of the residents then I think there is the potential that religious tenets are annexed to the legislative mechanism.

And I agree, sexuality needs to be looked at more fluidly. In fact, the entire history of 14th amendment due process and equal protection cases have tended to work with categories; in the case of due process with the "fundamental rights" and with equal protection with whoever is claiming to be treated differently by the legislative act. This has tended to be a weakness in due process cases as the fundamental right the Court found there is the right to privacy. I agree that it is a fundamental right, but imo not the only one at stake in abortion cases, and certainly not one I at first understood perfectly.

[broncofan]

I agree with you on the larger question of the causes of sexual orientation but the instances of changing sexual orientation among women is not that rare. Female sexuality appears to be more much fluid than men's.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...ey-mature.html

Interesting. I definitely did not know that. One of the interesting things I read, admittedly on wikipedia about homosexuality was related to evolutionary theory.

As we know, heterosexuals beget homosexuals. Sometimes gay men reproduce and sometimes gay women reproduce but one would have to think that in evolutionary terms, where everything is dealt with in terms of reproductive rates, preferring same sex partners is a disadvantage. And while there is a dearth of empirical evidence on the subject, there does not appear to be a significant diminution in the number of homosexuals in the population over time.

One explanation for this is that recessive alleles carried by heterosexuals provide an adaptive advantage. When they are double recessive this may encode for homosexuality which carries a reproductive disadvantage. However, whatever advantage the recessive alleles carry with them when there is only one copy, is enough to offset the disadvantage when one is homozygous recessive for this gene. Anyhow, the theory is based on the gene known to encode for sickle cell anemia. Two recessive alleles and the person has sickle cell anemia. One recessive allele and the person has increased resistance to malaria. You can see how this would only be an advantage in areas where there is greater exposure to malaria.

Anyhow, the downside of this theory is that it was formulated based on an analogy to a devastating illness, sickle cell anemia!

[BluegrassCat]

Isn't physical attraction mostly chemical? It would seem to me that in order to change "orientation", one would have to change their chemical receptors. That'd be a good trick. Having children changes all kinds of stuff in a woman's body, including hormonal makeup. Other than that, we're probably just dealing with degrees in the position on the line. The article seems to promote the idea that you're either one way or the other to start with. Not necessarily true.

That article is poor summary of the research, just the quickest result from google. It's well documented that some women (a minority obviously) who consider themselves 100% lesbian later find themselves attracted to men and vice versa. And since every human behavior and thought can be reduced to chemical reactions, that something is chemically based says nothing of its permanence. You can use the continuum metaphor but going from straight to gay is moving a lot of degrees. I think all this says we need to have different models of male and female sexuality, just like bathrooms.

[BluegrassCat]

Interesting. I definitely did not know that. One of the interesting things I read, admittedly on wikipedia about homosexuality was related to evolutionary theory.

As we know, heterosexuals beget homosexuals. Sometimes gay men reproduce and sometimes gay women reproduce but one would have to think that in evolutionary terms, where everything is dealt with in terms of reproductive rates, preferring same sex partners is a disadvantage. And while there is a dearth of empirical evidence on the subject, there does not appear to be a significant diminution in the number of homosexuals in the population over time.

One explanation for this is that recessive alleles carried by heterosexuals provide an adaptive advantage. When they are double recessive this may encode for homosexuality which carries a reproductive disadvantage. However, whatever advantage the recessive alleles carry with them when there is only one copy, is enough to offset the disadvantage when one is homozygous recessive for this gene. Anyhow, the theory is based on the gene known to encode for sickle cell anemia. Two recessive alleles and the person has sickle cell anemia. One recessive allele and the person has increased resistance to malaria. You can see how this would only be an advantage in areas where there is greater exposure to malaria.

Anyhow, the downside of this theory is that it was formulated based on an analogy to a devastating illness, sickle cell anemia!

I've heard this theory too. It seems to be the best we have at the moment. Btw, thanks for the interesting topic, Bronco. I hope Peyton comes back strong.