Homosexual behavior used to be a willful sin; a wicked choice. Now we have “gay science” that says it is not a question of volition and perverted desire. Why? Because gays and lesbians can’t help themselves. They were “born that way.” Period.
One might think that this is the end of the discussion. And for many liberals, it is. Educated awareness. Kindness. Acceptance. This is all that is necessary to afford gays and lesbians the dignity they deserve as members of the human race.
Not so, says philosopher, T.M. Murray, author of Thinking Straight About Being Gay. There is another consideration; a dark, ominous thought that sends toxic darts of anxiety into our souls.
“Born that way” is a double edged sword.
What if the radical Christian Right formed a coalition with other radicals in fundamentalist religions and gained enough political power to exterminate homosexuals through genetic engineering?
Eugenics and Fascism go hand in hand.
First, fascism. Sadly, we are living in an age when a significant number of people prefer theocracy to secular democracy; a ”strong man” instead of a balance between executive, legislative and judicial authority. The bleak prophesies of novelists, Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth about a fascist America could come true.
Westerners worry about Islamic fundamentalism but what about the Christian variety? Twenty-five years ago, when radio and televangelists first spoke of America becoming a Christian nation that would build a global Christian empire, it was silly rhetoric. Today, this language no longer sounds silly. Instead, it describes a very real threat to our freedom and procedural secularism. In American Fascists (2008), Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Chris Hedges, challenges the Christian Right's religious legitimacy and argues that at its core, it is a mass movement fueled by unbridled nationalism and a hatred for diversity and pluralism. Just this week, Arizona state Senator Sylvia Allen said that church attendance should be a requirement for Americans.
Zoom in to a close-up of gays and lesbians.
And now, eugenics. Most of us associate this “racist-science” of gene manipulation with the Nazis when they advocated the biological improvement of Germanic Übermenschen through genetic engineering.
Consider American history, however. Long before the Nazis, eugenics was a respectable idea in the United States; a means to improve the genetic quality of Americans, deemed altogether necessary to preserve our national vitality. Ironically, it was during the so-called “Progressive Era” (1890-1920) when Theodore Roosevelt established the National Heredity Commission. Later came the Human Betterment Foundation (1928-1942). Indeed, many Nazis used this information about America in their defense at the Nuremberg trials.
Darwin was partially responsible for influencing this movement since he had warned about the need to help the species along by breeding genetically dominant individuals. Many American “progressives” believed that the nation’s future depended on physically and mentally robust citizens. Weak and dependent people were a drag on the wheel of progress. It is not a coincidence that this movement coincided with the birth of American imperialism.
Nobody would label America’s “Progressive Era” politics as a form of fascism. Most of what happened was designed to open society, not close it. Reform was the agenda: legal responses to the social and economic challenges of rapid industrialization, i.e., unionization, women’s suffrage, sweatshop working conditions and child labor. Progressives wanted laws to regulate business in order to insure competition by preventing monopolies. It is alarming, however, to think that with labor reform there was also a serious consideration of genetic reform.
Why this is relevant today is because “designer babies” are already in the picture. It is not difficult to imagine a future scenario in which prospective parents - within the privacy of a doctor’s consultation room - will have the option to decide the sexual orientation of their progeny through genome editing.
In the past, writes Rev. Rowland Macaulay, founder and CEO of Rainbow Fellowship, “liberals dreaded the intrusion of a paternalistic state apparatus into the minutiae of people’s private lives. In the future they may have to fear the reverse: that private reproductive decisions will impact the very demographic composition of future generations that make up the public.”
Nowhere does Murray in Thinking Straight About Being Gay claim that the ability to isolate a “gay gene” or a similar genetic marker for homosexuality currently exists. Rather, she demonstrates how Christian bioethics and liberal eugenicists have so far anticipated the seemingly implausible scenario of engineering sexual orientation.
Unfortunately, LGBT activists are in denial about all of this. So says Murray. Her book is a warning.
Homophobic Christian ethicists have already changed their rhetoric about homosexuality because as Murray writes: ”… this is because they have eugenic aspirations, and my book shows how influential Christian homophobes have already prepared a discourse for this use of biotech, so that their arguments are in place.”
As a lesbian, Murray is fierce in her analysis about the “born that way” thesis. She challenges homosexual essentialism and offers a penetrating critique of natural law ethics. She makes no assertions that all people who identify as homosexual, gay, lesbian, bi or transgender are “born that way.” Neither does she suggest that being “born that way” is a necessary condition for granting full acceptance of homosexual behavior.
Murray’s is a razor sharp intelligence, honed by an M.A. in theology and a PhD in philosophy. Her book is dense and scholarly, partially because a significant part of it comes from her dissertation. Parallel to her survey of Christian bioethicists’ responses to the “gay science” of the 90’s is her description of where and how they fit in a well established religious tradition of stigmatizing and pathologizing homosexuals, dating back a long long time, to the first century Christian communities.
She can barely contain her anger as she writes about the history of sexual bigotry; how traditional Christianity considers human sexuality per se; and how it has historically misrepresented the facts of human nature and misjudged their ethical significance.
I have written in a recent diary - my personal opinion - that traditional Christians hate homosexuals because the religion per se essentially detests carnality and feels that sexual acts must have biological consequences to be justified. Since homosexual sex has no biological consequences, it is sex for its own sake; unbridled lust; “animal behavior.” An egregious sin.
Whatever yours views are about LGBTQ, this excellent study will take your understanding to a whole new level.
Murray’s book is substantive. And scary.
