How does one jump from the observation that there is no evidence of a genetic component to homosexuality to the claim that there is no genetic component? Is it fair to say that no aspect of a human can have a genetic source unless we have identified the gene? Does this mean the operations of genes is a function of how much we know?
Well logically one doesn’t jump to that conclusion as it is also illogical. And history also says otherwise but:
I think maybe what he is saying is that there is no proof at this time that there is a genetic component therefore we must behave as if there is no genetic component because that is the best we can do with knowledge that we have.
When I say history I mean this- another awful example:
for many years schizophrenia eluded people. The sufferers were banned from society and locked up and earlier they were they were burned at the stake by frightened Puritans.
There were later many practices of trying to get the schizophrenic to change by insisting that all they had to do was want to badly enough.
By the sixties, people were getting the idea that it was a mental illness, not a spoiled personality that needed punishment, and schizophrenics were heavily medicated in the early sixties with pheno barbitols.
Mid sixties they were given electro shock and hot/ice bath treatments in state hospitals and sanatoriums.
By the eighties, it had occured to researchers that it was a chemical imbalance in the brain and drugs were developed that actually allowed schizophrenics for the first time ever to live happy productive lives as long as they were on medication.
By the nineties, researchers were looking for the genetic component. I am not sure that they have actually identified the component but there is reasonable certainty that it is a hereditary disease.
Now, being hereditary or a chemical imbalance permanent but treatable, does not make it okay to run around having psychotic hallucinations. But it does mean that the person can be treated effectively.
Homosexuality is not a mental illness. The Psychiatric Association has made that clear.
But my point is is that it is a lot easier to deal with something when you know exactly what it is.
But it is more difficult to get to the root of something when that thing generates extreme fear in society. Homosexuals now, just as schizophrenics then, generate a lot of extreme reaction and fear in our society and it cripples the research process and retards progress toward understanding it.
Eventually, a genetic component may be found. And that would be good because we could stop saying to homosexuals that all they have to do is stop being homosexual. Most claim they have no choice as to their sexual preference. That may well be true. But the fact remains that they have a choice as to whether they
exercise that preference or not and that does not change whether it is genetic or not.
Something being genetic does not make it a preferable lifestyle. For instance down’s syndrome is genetic. Diabetes is genetic. We do not ask to have these genetic anamolies. But we have a different view of how to respond when we discover that they are in fact genetic. But for now, society will probably resist the idea of a genetic inheritance of homosexuality as we are still in the early stages of charity.
