Genetic or Not, Gay Won’t Go Away

Genetic or Not, Gay Won’t Go Away

By Frank Bruni | nytimes | Published: January 28, 2012

Excerpts:

“BORN this way

That has long been one of the rallying cries of a movement, and sometimes the gist of its argument. Across decades of widespread ostracism, followed by years of patchwork acceptance and, most recently, moments of heady triumph, gay people invoked that phrase to explain why homophobia was unwarranted and discrimination senseless.

But is it the right mantra to cling to? The best tack to take? Not for the actress Cynthia Nixon, 45, whose comments in The New York Times Magazine last Sunday raised those very questions.

For 15 years, until 2003, she was in a relationship with a man. They had two children together. She then formed a new family with a woman, to whom she’s engaged. And she told The Times’s Alex Witchel that homosexuality for her “is a choice.”

“For many people it’s not,” she conceded, but added that they “don’t get to define my gayness for me.”

The exact dynamics through which someone winds up gay are “still an open question,” said Clinton Anderson, the director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Concerns Office of the American Psychological Association. “There is substantial evidence of various connections between genes, brain, hormones and sexual identity,” he said. “But those do not amount to a simple picture that A leads to B.”

Other research has posited or identified common anatomical and chromosomal traits among gay men or lesbians, and there’s discussion of a gay gene or, rather, set of genes in the mix. The push to isolate it is entwined with the belief that establishing that sexual orientation is like skin color - an immutable matter of biology - will make homophobia as inexcusable as racism and winnow the ranks of haters.

But bigotry isn’t rational. Finding a determinative biological quirk, deviation or marker could prompt religious extremists who now want gays in reparative psychotherapy to focus on medical interventions instead. And a person’s absence of agency over his or her concentration of melanin has hardly ended all discrimination against blacks

What’s more, the born-this-way approach carries an unintended implication that the behavior of gays and lesbians needs biological grounding to evade condemnation. Why should it?

Our laws safeguard religious freedom, and that’s not because there’s a Presbyterian, Buddhist or Mormon gene. There’s only a tradition and theology that you elect or decline to follow. But this country has deemed worshiping in a way that feels consonant with who you are to be essential to a person’s humanity. So it’s protected.

Our laws also safeguard the right to bear arms: not exactly a biological imperative.

Among adults, the right to love whom you’re moved to love - and to express it through sex and maybe, yes, marriage - is surely as vital to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as a Glock. And it’s a lot less likely to cause injury, if that’s a deciding factor: how a person’s actions affect the community around him or her.

I USE the words “moved to love” in an effort to define the significant, important territory between “born this way” and choice. That solid ground covers “built this way,” “oriented this way,” and “evolved this way”; it incorporates the possibility of a potent biological predisposition mingling with other factors beyond anyone’s ready control; and it probably applies to Nixon herself. In a Daily Beast interview after the Times article appeared, she clarified that she has experienced an unforced, undeniable attraction to individuals of both sexes. In other words, she’s bisexual, not whimsical. She just happens not to like that term, she said.

In any case, concentrating on how she ended up like that misses the point.

“Most people’s sexual attractions are pretty much fixed” once they take root, said Jack Drescher, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who has written extensively about homosexuality. In light of both that and the unanswered questions about what fixes them, there’s more wisdom and less harm in accepting and respecting homosexuality than not.

We don’t need to be born this way to refute the ludicrous assertion that homosexuality poses some special threat to the stability of the American family. We need only note that heterosexuality - as practiced by the likes of Newt Gingrich and John Edwards, for example - isn’t any lucky charm, and yet no one’s trying to heal the straights.

We don’t need to be born this way to call out Chris Christie, currently trying to avoid responsibility for a decision about same-sex marriage in New Jersey, for being a political wimp. Andrew Cuomo showed courage and foresight in fighting successfully for such legislation in New York. Christie, who fancies himself a dauntless brawler, should do the same in the state next door.

I honestly have no idea if I was born this way. My memory doesn’t stretch to the crib.

But I know that from the moment I felt romantic stirrings, it was Timmy, not Tammy, who could have me walking on air or wallowing in torch songs and tubs of ice cream. These feelings gelled early, and my considerable fear of society’s censure was no match for them.

I know that being in a same-sex relationship feels as central and natural to me as my loyalty to my father, my pride in my siblings’ accomplishments and my protectiveness of their children - all emotions that I didn’t exit the womb with but will not soon shake.

And I know that I’m a saner, kinder person this way than trapped in a contrivance or a lie. Surely that’s not just to my advantage but to society’s, too.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/o...-go-away-genetic-or-not.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
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A truly remarkable article that raises some very good questions about how homosexuality and heterosexuality are treated that need to be answered. The actions of heterosexual thrice married Newt Gingrich who is a serial adulterer, husbands that murder their wives because the wife wants a divorce, married men that frequent strip clubs on Saturday night, confess to the pastor on Sunday morning, then cannot wait for next Saturday night to get the next lap dance.

Heterosexual men feel that marriage is meant to be between a man and a woman forgetting that they have a marriage with one woman but have sex with many women, and they don’t want anything to disturb the sanctity of that marriage...or the sex with other women.

Homosexual men are happy with one lover but are not ‘allowed’ to marry because heterosexuals say that they know God meant that marriage is to be between one man and one woman. This is nothing but discrimination because of what their pastors are telling them from the pulpit.

Nobody should be alone in this life, and it matters not what sex the other person is, but only that they love you back to the exclusion of everyone else. Gays achieve that much more readily than straights.

 

If there is a defective homosexual gene gays better watch out.

As DNA testing advances and abortion on demand becomes more common parents may decide they don't want to bother with having gay children.

 

And that is their choice..(if such a test did exist).

 

When trash dumpsters begin to fill up with aborted homosexual fetuses libs may see the issue differently.

 

Hell we should just abort everyone. We start bombing in 5 minutes.

 

I doubt it. They'd just hire illegal immigrants to clean up the mess for $2 an hour. Because those Occupier bums sure as hell aren't going to do it.

 

Are you saying that abortion in the case of a homosexula child is acceptable? It sounds very much like you are saying this.

Please answer this, I think it's critical to this debate.

 

...it won't because people like you won't let it...



Kabuki Joe

 

It's not a matter of will gay go away or not, it's a question of should a nation change its morality for a tiny percentage of affluent, politically-connected homosexuals who are the current darlings of the progressives. No one wants gays to "go away"; they want them to get their activists away from the school kids and the marriage chapel.

_

 

Exactly right. There is more evidence its harder for pedophiles to change than there is for homosexuals but no one or at least very few are championing their cause because the morality to protect children is still in place although like homosexuality 30 years ago, it is being challenged by some.

I don't care if you are homosexual. Makes no difference to me. Just don't pretend you equal heterosexuals in genetics or "born this way" arguments because you aren't and never will be.

 

what an absolute and utter crock of horse manure

who cares how you have sex!!!!! So you like John instead of Joan. Now, according to you, because you have gay sex that means that you will never ever stray nor will anyone else who has gay sex.

Well good golly I must be a a rare breed because I have never ever strayed from my wife and I know many couples just like us.

But, according to the garbage you spew, only those who engage in gay sex are loyal and those who have gay sex never ever have it with more than one person................

 

...all I know is that yesterday I was passing the tv where one of my 9 year old daughters was watching "The Sweet Life of Zack and Cody" and they had this flame on there swishing around in bright red pants bending his wrist and lisping at every turn...speaking of turn, I turned the channel for her. That program was inappropriate at best.

 

Nice bit of spin there.

So what you're really saying is that you fear people being able to make choices for themselves.

 

Scientists Find 'Liberal Gene'

 

Basically reminding us that as of this story, there still is no genetic link to being gay...so it's fair to think that it simply might be something some people try and find they like.

This is all fine and dandy of course..more power to them, although on that same line of thought, it doesn't mean we should change definitions of Marriage as an example to fit this choice anymore than we should for a person who likes bungee Jumping or Skydiving and the related thrills who wish to simply get Married on thsoe grounds..

 

Sexuality is a spectrum. A bisexual has more ability to "choose" their lifestyle than someone strongly hetero or gay.

I'm pretty hetero myself, but I didn't choose to find women attractive, I just do.

If I was bi, it would be more of a matter of deciding which way I want to lean.

 

.....

1) You need to read the whole article where scientists have found twins both being gay...cousins in family lineage being gay. But what difference should it really make, it is merely a slightly different form of expressing one's sexuality.

2) Our foundig fathers drew up the marriage contract to protect the participants and children in a marriage. They also talked about the right to the pursuit of happiness. Marriage should be automatic for all that choose to partake of that institution.

 

Why would this be any more relevant than say Twins who like to Scuba Dive, or Parachute, or eat Lobster?

Pursuing your happiness, and asking the world to change customs around to suit your idea of Happiness, where it doesn't fit...are two different things.

By all means, if having sex with your same gender makes you happy...then go to town, but lets not pretend it's deserving of anything further. It's no more deserving of any special attention or validation than the people who love to smear feces on themselves when having sex are.

 

Maybe you should try this:

 

.....

1) That is exactly what my article defines...the author says that as soon as he had sexual thoughts, he preferred males. That proves to me that it is, in some way, genetic in humans.

2) If you were bi, there would be no "deciding"..as both the female and male bodies you would find exciting.

 

Not a chance. You take nothing into account of his experiences that played a key role into that train of thought nor the influences he had in his life.

Thoughts and feelings that translate into patterns of behavior don't even come close to proving "born that way" and certainly not "genetic"

 

A lot of homosexual men are happy with more than one lover. Where did you come up with the ridiculous assumption that homosexual men are all monogamous?

Have you familiarized yourself with the definition of marriage? It's the formal union of a man and a woman.

I'm all for gay/lesbian civil unions, but I don't think homosexuals are entitled to redefine the nature, definition and, for some, sacrament, of marriage.

 

I dont think that works for lesbians...

 

well said!