“Homosexuality is unnatural.”
How do you know whether something is natural or not? Does it matter?
Consider this simple case study.
Person A finds bluish-green eyes, curly hair, an athletic body type, and a compassionate and well-read personality attractive. Person B seems to have all these traits. Person A is attracted to Person B.
Now consider the following scenarios —
Scenario 1: Person A is a (heterosexual) man, B a (heterosexual) woman. People say: OK! ✅
Scenario 2: Person A is a (heterosexual) woman, B a (heterosexual) man. People say: OK! ✅
Scenario 3: Person A is a (homosexual) man, B a (homosexual) man. People say: THE HEAVENS WILL FALL! OH THE HEAVENS WILL FALL!! 😮 😲
Scenario 4: Person A is a (homosexual) woman, B a (homosexual) woman. People say: THE HEAVENS WILL FALL! OH THE HEAVENS WILL FALL!! 😮 😲
Let’s simplify that a bit further. Look at it like this —
Person Z finds tall athletic men with long eyelashes, brownish hair, a sense of humour for dark jokes & a critical thinking mind, attractive.
Scenario 1: Person Z is a woman. Most people: OK! ✔️
Scenario 2: Person Z is a man. Most people: NO WAY! NOT OK!! ❌
What am I trying to get at? Not too many points for guessing.
The thing is when a person is attracted to another or falls in love with another person, there’s generally a host of contributing factors that could lead to that attraction — it could be their hairstyle, their eyes, their thoughts, their age, their body type, their overall personality, and so on. One of those contributing factors could also be gender.
Then why is it that that last factor — gender — seems to take on a significance all its own? For some reason, considerations about that last factor especially — gender — start to make things moral or immoral. So, what’s really morally wrong with homosexuality, if anything? And if nothing, what’s all this fuss about?
There are a few arguments given by those who oppose homosexuality on moral grounds. We shall look at all those arguments one-by-one in this series of articles and see if those arguments work.
In this article, we will start with the first argument: Homosexuality is immoral because it is unnatural. Let us dissect that. But before that, let’s discuss homosexuality in brief.
What is homosexuality?
Many people engaging in this public debate particularly like to make a distinction between homosexual “orientation” and homosexual “activity”.
This especially comes up when the debate gets into the argument of whether homosexuality is a “choice”. I shall address that argument in a separate article.
For now, let’s look a little deeper into this distinction and what it really tends to do.
Trivia: Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code criminalized homosexual “activity” or “carnal intercourse against the order of nature”. Homosexual activity was decriminalized first by the Naz Foundation judgment of the Hon’ble Delhi High Court and finally by the Navtej Singh Johar judgment of the Hon’ble Supreme Court, after a bit of an unsavory hiccup in the intervening period between those two judgments.
Homosexual “orientation” means being attracted to people of the same sex.
Homosexual “activity” means engaging in some kind of romantic activity with a person of the same sex.
Now, this distinction between “orientation” and “activity” in this case is much more problematic than it is useful. Philosopher John Corvino has articulated it beautifully.
It is useful because it kind of reinforces the obvious idea that we don’t and probably shouldn’t always act on any “orientation” or “feeling” that we have. For instance, would you justify killing someone because you “felt” like it in some moment? Obviously not! Just because you have a “feeling”, doesn’t automatically mean that you act on it. So in such a case, the distinction between “orientation” and “activity” makes sense.
But, this distinction becomes really problematic because in some cases it builds a very sharp boundary between ”orientation” and “activity” when such a sharp boundary really doesn’t exist. Human sexuality is one such case.
Human sexuality is such a integral part of one’s identity as a human being, that when it comes to sexuality, “orientation” and “activity” really do not have such a sharp boundary as this distinction tends to create. In fact, when it comes to human sexuality, who we are and what we do are all the more intimately connected. I shall delve deeper into sexuality in some future articles — for the purposes of evaluation of the current argument though, the above discussion should suffice, I hope.
Furthermore, when you tend to create such a distinction between “orientation” and “activity” in the case of human sexuality, you also make the mistake of trivializing each of those facets.
You trivialize the “sexual orientation” of a homosexual person by putting undue focus on the “gender” element of the “homosexual attraction/orientation” much at the cost of several other factors that contribute to that attraction — just as we saw in the opening case study.
And similarly, you trivialize the romantic “activity” of a homosexual person by putting undue focus on the “sex” element of the activity much at the cost of several other romantic “activities” like kissing, going for a long leisurely walk with your partner, going shopping in a mall with your partner, caressing your partner’s hair, making dinner for a date-night etc.
Note: I hope the readers realize that most of these above activities are, more or less, taken for granted for a heterosexual couple in our society. But the very same activities become an act of great defiance in our society requiring courage and sacrifice on the part of homosexual couples, to undertake. Courage, because one needs to be ready to face slurs, abuses, mockery, taunts, demeaning looks from strangers etc. And sacrifice, because you never know where else and how else you may be discriminated against on the grounds of your sexual orientation.
Trying to define homosexual people only in terms of one particular sexual activity is such a reductionistic picture of their very real lived experiences — lived experiences as equally real and valid as those of heterosexual people. This distinction effectively reduces homosexuality to just one sexual act between two people of the same sex and ends up creating such a false picture for the society. Thus, the oversimplifying & reductionistic tendency of this distinction is also what makes it much more problematic than useful — as I earlier proposed.
Now having discussed about homosexuality a bit, let’s move to dissecting our original argument at hand — homosexuality is immoral because it is unnatural.
Homosexuality is unnatural. Hence immoral. Is it and is it?
Alright, for argument’s sake, let’s assume for a moment that homosexuality is unnatural — though it is not, it is as natural as it can get, but be that as it may.
The obvious response to that is — And? So what? Unnatural, ok, so what? Where is the link between naturalness and morality?
You know what else is unnatural? Brushing your teeth twice a day is unnatural in some sense. Wearing clothes is unnatural. Vaccination is unnatural. Taking antibiotics is unnatural. Buildings are unnatural. Bridges are unnatural. So what? To act morally then, does one go live naked under a tree then? Does one swim like a fish to cross the oceans? Obviously not!
So why does it matter whether something is unnatural or natural when judging its morality?
At the heart of it, it is just a semantic labyrinth. I could define “natural” in a sinister, shrewd way that makes things that I don’t agree with or find objectionable “unnatural” by definition — by MY definition. And this is exactly what Victorian morality embedded in Section 377 of the IPC did. It defined “natural” carnal intercourse in a way that excluded intercourse between two consenting adults of the same sex (among other things).
Another argument (or rather fluff) that is often thrown around with a lot of confidence in public debates is this — scientific research has failed to find “a gay gene” for same-sex attraction, thus it is unnatural and thus immoral. I have already elucidated above that to judge the morality of same-sex attraction by gauging its naturalness is just a bad argument.
But since this is an article in my “De-fluffing the fluff” series, let me briefly address the point of the “gay gene” thingy — the fluff.
Scientific research has not found “a straight gene” either. Does that make heterosexuality “unnatural and hence immoral”, by that logic? No, it doesn’t. In fact, a person’s eye color or hair color also cannot be traced to “a <xyz> gene”. Does that make your eyes or hair unnatural? No, it doesn’t. This applies to a lot of traits of human beings. The only point I am trying to make here is that it is absolutely illogical to use the “failure-to-find-a-gay-gene-hence-unnatural” argument here. Sexuality of a homosexual person is complex human trait and it is complex because it is presumably governed by an interplay of both “nature” and “nurture” — just like the sexuality of a heterosexual person, just like the color of your eyes or the texture of your hair etc.
Oh, by the way, research does indicate several strong and reliable links between biology and sexuality. But more on that in some future trivia article.
Furthermore, if you were to take the dictionary meaning of the word “natural”, it just says — “existing in (or derived from) nature; not made or caused by humankind.” And homosexuality does exist in nature — in many other animal species. But, again, why should I even get into this? It’s just irrelevant!
If something is “unnatural”, it doesn’t automatically or logically follow that that something is immoral. In other words, something being “unnatural” does not automatically make it immoral. The argument is therefore invalid. The notions of “naturalness” and “morality” aren’t automatically linked.
Alright, I have belabored the point enough.
There are a few other things that people might mean when they forward this argument about homosexuality being “unnatural”. This can be seen as not one argument, but a bundle of multiple smaller arguments. I shall address each of them in a separate article in the future.
Talk to people from the LGBTQ+ community. 🌈
Many of you who are LGBTQ+ allies might wonder why is it that I am addressing arguments from the other side that you think are obviously wrong. Some of you might even feel enraged at these arguments when you hear it from someone.
But I would like to believe that these are actual concerns of people on the other side of the debate. And the debate cannot move forward until those concerns are logically & sincerely addressed. When I say “concerns”, I do not include obnoxious disparaging remarks and vitriolic taunts from rabid people.
One thing that the nationwide public debate stirred by the recent marriage equality judgment of the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India has shown us is that there is an evident lack of societal support and understanding towards the LGBTQ+ community. This is also reflected in our legislators and governments.
The way forward now is to address this debate head-on and in an inclusive civil manner, so we can begin to help well-meaning people on the other side of this debate understand the issue better. Gradually. Brick-by-brick.
After observing and pondering over this issue for long, there’s only one obvious thing I have arrived at which I think is crucial, regardless of the amount of debate we have on this issue. And that obvious thing is this — you can only understand people, their emotions, their lived experiences and their humanness if you talk to them and get to know them.
So, to well-meaning people on the other side of the debate: Please go talk to and engage with people from the LGBTQ+ community, just as you do with your friends or other fellow citizens. They won’t attack you with their Gay Pride Horns. Or so I hope! 😜
The writer is an engineering & design graduate from Stanford University. His X (formerly Twitter) handle is @IamSid_Chandra
