Objectify This

Homosexuality has come up in some odd places recently.  One of them is over at $3.60, where my attention was brought to a CBS special on a new strategy by the Federal Government to create a Gay Bomb which would release a chemical hormone that would make enemy combatants irresistably attractive to one another.

For more on the story, check out the Pop+Politics version - or, as BigYellowTaxi points out, the two-year-old BBC and Telegraph stories, or see the video after the jump.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK1yx8KVh7c]

New York Magazine ran an article on “the Science of Gaydar” which concludes that the likelihood that a person is gay can be assessed by such factors as the direction of hair growth on the head, the relative proportions of fingers, fingerprint density, and hand preference. For example, gay men and lesbians have a 50 percent greater chance of being left-handed or ambidextrous than their straight counterparts. While this correlation of sexuality with biology suggests a biological cause of homosexuality, (and therefore another reason that antigay bigotry needs to check itself before it wrecks itself) some scientists aren’t so sure.

In New York Magazine, David France writes, “One of the riddles still vexing geneticists is why only 50 percent of gay identical twins share a sexual orientation with their sibling, despite being genetically identical. “We know from all sorts of research that it’s not your upbringing, not relationship with parents or siblings, not early-childhood sexual experiences and whether you go to a Catholic school or not,” says Sven Bocklandt, a geneticist at UCLA. “What I believe is that it is the ‘epigenetics environment,’ meaning the environment on top of our DNA—meaning the way that the gene is regulated. If you have identical twins, the genes are identical, but they are used differently. Every man and every woman has all the genes to make a vagina and womb and penis and testicles. In the same way, arguably, every man and woman has the genetic code for the brain networks that make you attracted to men and to women. You activate one or the other—and if you activate the wrong one, you’re gay.”

Or the right one, right? I mean, wouldn’t the appeal of knowing that sexuality is biologically determined be that it was therefore not a moral issue, anymore than being freckled or right-handed? But does, and can, biology really understand sexuality? (In this article on gay animals, Joan Roughgarden argues that Darwin didn’t.)

The article continues, “Of course, biology doesn’t determine everything. And some critics of sexual-orientation researchers blame them for minimizing the role of experience in determining our affectional course in life. The feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has waged a constant battle against their research, which she calls “a big house of cards” that ignores the power of environment in creating personality. Nurture, she argues, can and should be studied as a link to sexual orientation. The baby penguin raised by her two dads is a potential case study—though genetically unrelated to either parent, in the last few mating seasons she has mated with another female.

The rush to declare a biological mandate is motivated by a political agenda, says Fausto-Sterling, the author of Sexing the Body, who is married to a woman after a marriage to a man. “For me and for any feminist, I think it’s a pretty fragile way to argue for human rights. I want to see the claims for gay rights made on moral, ethical, legal, and constitutional bases that don’t rely on a particular scientific view of sexual development.”

Especially if that view invites the opponents of gay people to consider dramatic interventions meant to stop the development of homosexual orientation in a fetus. What if prenatal tests were able to show a predisposition to gayness? How long would it be before some pharmaceutical company develops a patch to regulate hormone flow and direct the baby’s orientation? Michael Bailey, for one, isn’t troubled by the moral implications any more than he would oppose fetal screens for potential birth defects, though he quickly adds his personal belief that homosexuality is “a good” on par with heterosexuality. “There’s no reason to ban, or become hysterical about, selecting for heterosexuality,” he says. “That’s precisely what parenting is about: shaping the children to have traits the parents value.”

But should sexuality be a trait that we can “shape”? Do we want to? As Oscar Wilde said, “Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.”