The Future of Homophobia: ‘Liberal’ Eugenics
The search for a gay gene has intensified since the publication in the early 90’s of the now famous research by Simon LeVay and Dean Hamer. Their findings were reconfirmed only last year with the release of a study from Dr. Alan Sanders, who studied the genes on 409 pairs of gay brothers and found they shared notable patterns in two regions of the human genome, on the X chromosome and chromosome 8.
Yet the importance and significance of a genetic explanation for human sexual orientation is hotly contested within LGBT academia, where a rift has opened between those who view the essentialist (“born that way”) thesis as a vindication of LGBT human rights and those who see it as both irrelevant and dangerous. In the latter camp is Julie Bindel, who claims that resting human rights “on the basis that we can’t help who we are is counter-productive.” She sees those who embrace the gay essentialist thesis as attempting to vindicate homosexual behaviour (which is a choice) on the grounds of biological difference, which would put gay rights on the same basis as anti-racist or feminist politics.
Many gay people are sympathetic to Bindel’s claim that homosexuality is not due to genes but to “a mix of opportunity, luck, chance, and, quite frankly, bravery”. But what Bindel means by “homosexuality” is homosexual behaviour, not the involuntary experience of homosexual attraction or desire, which can be expressed or repressed. Essentialists may agree with Bindel that homosexual behaviour is a choice. The essentialist thesis is not determinism and does not require that homosexuals have no choice about their sexual expression. Indeed, Bindel is right to say that sexual behaviour is down to a variety of factors and not simply reducible to biological sexual attraction. Although sexual desire is probably a relatively strong motivator, human beings are complex. Our sexual behaviour, like our other behaviours, is also influenced by the fact that we are curious, pleasure-seeking, social creatures who crave approval and acceptance and avoid danger and social rejection. Perhaps not surprisingly, Dean Hamer expressly rejected some sort of ‘gay gene determinism’ after publishing his study on the gay gene back in 1993.
I would not claim that all people who identify as lesbian or gay were born that way. For any variety of personal reasons, some people simply prefer to share intimate partnership with someone of the same sex. Even if people are “born that way” this would not entail that they necessarily behave in exclusively homosexual ways. Some might even pretend to be straight for their entire lives. Nor is anyone claiming that being “born that way” is a necessary condition for granting full legal acceptance of homosexual behaviour. In a liberal democracy, bisexuals and people not born with a predisposition to same-sex attraction ought to be free to participate in homoerotic (or any) sexual behaviour, so long as it is consenting and between adults.
Julie Bindel, Simon Copland, Jane Ward and others underestimate the significance of the essentialist thesis for LGBT rights. This is partly because, whether LGBT rights advocates like it or not, research into the biological causes of sexual orientation continues unabated. If private companies can profit from offering prospective parents a eugenic ‘treatment’ for homosexual orientation, we can be sure they will lobby hard for the liberty to do so. There is some indication they are already laying the discursive groundwork for a eugenic age.
The traditional nexus between acknowledging that some people have no choice in being ‘born that way’ and social tolerance of homosexual behaviour has broken down. So Bindel is right that pinning one’s hopes for justice and equal rights on gay biology is a lost cause. Homophobic Christian ethicists have already changed their rhetoric to prepare for a biological homosexual identity.
Nowadays, instead of describing the given aspects of natural ‘creation’ as the very benchmark of God’s design and plan, Christian bioethicists such as Ronald Cole-Turner, Michael J. Reiss, Nigel M. de S. Cameron, Dr. Roger Straughan and Ted Peters emphasize how biotechnology might facilitate human interventions into “fallen creation” in order to ‘restore’ it to ‘its full glory’. At any rate, these ethicists argue in various ways in support of treating homosexual orientation as a target for biomedical intervention. Back in 1992, only months after Simon LeVay published his “gay gene” theory, the Roman Catholic Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reiterated its position that the homosexual inclination must be seen as an “objective disorder”.[1] Since previous church proclamations had given “. . . an overly benign interpretation” to “the homosexual condition itself, some going so far as to call it neutral or even good”, their letter went on to clarify: “Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.”
From the 1990’s onwards a variety of religious and social conservative bioethicists began publishing widely in support of interpreting homosexuality as a pathology and used pseudo-medical language with a view to the future when ‘reprogenetics’ or some similar treatment scenario will be viable. These authors were frighteningly well placed to influence public policy.[2]
Insofar as it is motivated by a dread fear of eugenics, I understand and sympathise with the desire, expressed by many in the LGBT community, to reject the biological definition of homosexuality. But whether or not there is a biological substrate that determines patterns of sexual attraction is a question of fact, not one of value. So, if it turns out that there is a “gay gene(s)”, denying its existence in theory will not prevent big biotech firms from providing the means to eliminate it in fact. Therefore, forming an anti-eugenic lobby to advocate for laws that would prevent the misuse of biotech is preferable to treating the gay biology as a chimera.
So-called “liberal eugenicists” are already arguing for unlimited and unregulated use of reprogenetics. ‘Reprogenetics’ refers to the merging of reproductive and genetic technologies. They distinguish reprogenetics from eugenics in that the latter implies state coercion with the presumption of benefit. The former would be voluntarily pursued by individual parents with the aim of improving their children according to their preferences. This is a form of “privatized” or “free-market” eugenics, so there is of course a financial incentive to promote its use.
In Christian majority countries like the United States and Muslim majority countries, religious beliefs about the immorality of homosexual behaviour are grounded in misconceptions about the facts of nature. Since religion often does have inordinate political influence on politics and is interwoven into the cultural fabric, it is both practical and important to put false religious ideas about human nature to rest. Ideas about human nature form the basis for practical policies in law and medicine, as well as other areas of public life. As such, if homosexuality is more like a third sex or separate category of sexuality, rather than a form of willful rebellion against universal human nature or a ‘defective’ or ‘disordered’ form of heterosexuality, then it is important to disseminate that fact, especially in light of the very real threat posed by the ‘liberal eugenics’ movement.
Though not a Christian invention, the liberal eugenics movement provides an ideological Trojan horse by means of which Christian (or any) eugenics can get a legitimate foothold in a liberal democracy. In the past, religious conservatives who wished to indoctrinate others with their own religious values ran up against the dominant liberal injunction to protect the sovereignty and liberty of the individual to pursue his own vision of ‘the good life’. Soon, they may have at their disposal an ostensibly liberal means of avoiding this obstacle. In the near future, personal reproductive decisions made in the privacy of a consultant’s office could have an irreversible impact on the very nature of future generations. Where liberals once dreaded the invasion by the tentacles of state into the private lives of individuals, now they may have to fear the colonization of their very bodies by the will of others acting “in their best interests”.
Liberal eugenics leaves eugenic decision to the market, driven by parental preferences and consumer demand. Defenders of liberal eugenics are content to transfer the socio-political responsibility for eugenic decisions to the discretion of parents. This seems to qualify as ‘liberal’ because the state does not impose any single vision of ‘the good life’ upon future generations of individuals subject to it. Rather, it leaves individual parents the ‘moral space’ within which to make value judgments for themselves (and for their offspring). Consequently, proponents like Nicholas Agar and Gregory Stock argue that the future direction of human nature will be determined not by a dictator with utopian plans for social engineering, but by parents and what they perceive to be in the best interests of their offspring.
Against this view, it should be noted that allowing a patient’s “disease” status to be defined (and treated without his consent) as any state “to which society takes a negative attitude” not only fails to protect the individual from the tyranny of the majority; it legitimizes subjecting individuals to such a tyranny by new, more powerful, and irrevocable means. Medicine will be enlisted to do the work that punishment and moral exhortation did in the past. By providing new, more efficient and permanent ways of expressing the majority’s intolerance for perceived “social ills” is anything but liberal. The architect of liberal political philosophy, John Stuart Mill, would be rolling in his grave to see the term ‘liberal’ applied to this proposal.
A reprogenetic intervention to prohibit homosexual desire would be comparable to brainwashing; it would constitute a form of social engineering that is not therapeutic in any medical sense, but aims at directing another’s behaviour towards the kinds of life goals that parents prefer. Reprogenetics would furnish a new and more effective means of introjecting conventional social values into others in order to make them conform. Insofar as the goal is to fashion others in our own image, these means also aim at deeply narcissistic ends. Unlike the indoctrinated child who can, if given adequate alternatives, rebel against a controlling parent, the genetically modified child would simply not wish to rebel. Liberal eugenics would provide new means of irrevocably inscribing the fallible social values of some into the very natures of others without their consent. The ultimate consequences would be a socially and biologically engineered tyranny of the majority. Ideologically, this is both paternalistic and authoritarian.
Nor can we relax and rest assured that someone out there is surely looking out for public safety on these matters. The Nuffield Council is effectively the most influential bioethics policy advisory body in the UK. Yet in their Genetic Screening Supplement, its authors are clear that the measures enacted by the Council of Europe to prevent the use of results of genetic tests for non-health reasons would apply only in countries that have ratified the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being With Regard to the Application of Biotechnology and Medicine (a.k.a the ‘Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine’). This does not include the UK. Their language also reflects a distinction they want to make between screening (which is state imposed with the presumption of benefit) and ‘testing’ (carried out when patients are ‘at risk’ and ‘actively seek advice’). This sounds strikingly close to a key distinction made by liberal eugenicists. Buried in an Appendix to the Nuffield Council’s Genetic Screening Supplement (‘Future Considerations’) the authors claim to recognise that there is a whole area of serious concern about genetic screening for human traits that are in no sense diseases. As for recent controversies about gender choice and about the so-called ‘homosexuality gene’ . . . “We do not dismiss these issues. They call for discussion by professionals with skills other than those represented in our Working Party.” (from Section 7.12 of the Nuffield Council’s ‘Genetic Screening Supplement’: ‘Future Considerations’). They also say that “lobby groups” perspectives on screening for particular diseases “may not reflect the overall body of evidence.” This seems to anticipate critics like myself and offers little hope that a bulwark against gay gene eugenics is under construction or even deemed necessary. Indeed it suggests a rather evasive approach to the issue.
Reducing the biological substrate for homosexual attraction (if one exists) will almost certainly reduce homosexual behaviour. The purpose of the reprogenetic interventions will be to eliminate individuals’ voluntary homosexual behaviour by eliminating their involuntary biological predisposition for it. This will happen not by taking away the individual’s free will, but by biologically steering the direction in which it is most likely to be expressed. To deny this is to pretend that voluntary sexual acts are unrelated to involuntary sexual attraction. Francis Fukuyama expressed concern that a new biotechnology powerful enough to reshape what we are will open up once again possibilities that the past century’s utopian planners had given up on. It seems to me he was correct.
T. M. Murray, PhD. is author of Thinking Straight About Being Gay: why it matters if we’re born that way, available at Amazon, Waterstones and other fine book stores.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Thinking-Straight-About-Being-Gay-y/dp/1504943953
[1] Some Considerations Concerning the Response to the Legislative Proposals on the Non-Discrimination of Homosexual Persons I. (2.)
[2] Leon Kass, who headed President (George W.) Bush’s Council on Bioethics from 2002–2005.
Ted Peters, an affiliate of the Centre for Theology and the Natural Sciences and a lecturer at Pacific Lutheran Seminary in CA.
Nigel M. de S. Cameron, President of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies in Washington, D.C. (which partners with over a dozen other organizations, including the Wellcome Trust) and founder of the journal Ethics and Medicine and the Center for Bioethics and Public Policy. In 2008 he was the United States Government’s nominee to the UN Human Rights Council as Special Rapporteur for the Right to Health.
Ronald Cole-Turner is a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion and it’s former V.P. He is author of The New Genesis: Theology and the Genetic Revolution and editor of Transhumanism and Transcendence: Christian Hope in an Age of Technological Enhancement.
Michael J. Reiss is V.P. for Education at the British Science Association, Chief Executive of Science Learning Centre London, Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York, Docent at the University of Helsinki, Director of the Salters-Nuffield Advanced Biology Project, and editor of the journal Sex Education.
Dr. Roger Straughan is Reader in Education at the University of Reading, UK. His earlier areas of research were in Philosophy of Education, with particular reference to moral education and ethical issues in education, and he is the author of a number of books and articles on these subjects. More recently he has worked on ethical issues surrounding genetic engineering, and has again published widely in this area. He is the co-author of Improving Nature? The Science and Ethics of Genetic Engineering (Cambridge University Press, 1996), which has been translated into several languages. He has been a consultant to many organizations, including the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and several EC funded research projects.