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People latched onto the idea that sexuality is genetically determined because it seemed like the only viable way to defend themselves against rampant religious

People latched onto the idea that sexuality is genetically determined because it seemed like the only viable way to defend themselves against rampant religious bigotry and oppression. It was a rope dangling into the well you were trapped in, and the well was filling with acid, but if you could just manage to climb that rope then you'd make it out. The reasoning went something like "if I can prove that sexuality is genetically predetermined then it means that I didn't choose to be this way". As if genetic predestination were the only possible reason to grant protection to a class. Some people fairly quickly saw the problem with this defense and expanded it to include other uncontrollable elements of childhood development, again leaning on the "if I didn't have a choice _then_ it has to be ok". As if choices were still somehow the problem. But that's always been a fucked up idea. It shouldn't matter whether it was predetermined or otherwise not in your control. If it's constructed then it's constructed. If it's not then it's not. People shouldn't be oppressed for their sexuality full stop, regardless of reason. I think the idea of genetic predestination might have been a short-term useful crutch in the past but I hope that we've begun to progress beyond needing people to explain themselves.

memling 6y ago
> But that's always been a fucked up idea. It shouldn't matter whether it was predetermined or otherwise not in your control. If it's constructed then it's constructed. If it's not then it's not. People shouldn't be oppressed for their sexuality full stop, regardless of reason. You are right, I think, to root the conflict in religion. The dominant religion in the West, Christianity, treats the human body as a given. That is to say that while you are more than just your body, you are certainly not less: there is a union of mind and body that separates only at death. If they disagree, a reconciliation must be attempted from the outside (i.e., by God). Of course today we have technology that puts a veneer of science on what is really a religious idea: we are essentially our mind and not our body. When the two disagree, we needn't change our minds because we can alter the body through hormones and surgery. On the face of it, I don't see how you could reconcile these two positions. I think the use of genetic predestination was used as an attempt to do this: if I'm made this way then how can it be wrong to be {gay, trans, etc.}? But in general I think the denominations that were predisposed to blessing homosexuality (for example) were unlikely to need scientific persuasions like that. When it became clear that rigid denominations weren't going to budge, it feels like genetic predestination became unfashionable.
- yters 6y ago
  Plus it doesn't make sense from a Christian perspective. The Roman Catholic branch and derivatives all believe everyone is genetically predisposed to sin through Adam's lineage, and that is a bad thing, and we don't have a choice in the matter. So saying homosexuality is a genetic predisposition just means it gets lumped into the rest of our fallen attributes. Making it a choice doesn't fix things either, since a choice can be intrinsically sinful. There is no other way than to deny that homosexuality is wrong. Yet that is difficult to do, since sexuality has such an obvious role to play in the perpetuation of the human race. If it were normative then the human race would not exist. So the most straightforward explanation is it is a deviation from the way things should be, as is much else in our human nature, which in turn points to a standard that we deviate from.
  - memling 6y ago
    > Plus it doesn't make sense from a Christian perspective. The Roman Catholic branch and derivatives all believe everyone is genetically predisposed to sin through Adam's lineage, and that is a bad thing, and we don't have a choice in the matter. So saying homosexuality is a genetic predisposition just means it gets lumped into the rest of our fallen attributes. Making it a choice doesn't fix things either, since a choice can be intrinsically sinful. I think that's an inescapable conclusion in traditional Christianity. That will or choice is not necessarily a component of responsibility is something we also adopt in law: involuntary manslaughter is different than premeditated murder, even though the outcome is the same. In other words, will is not essential to guilt, although the degree to which we assess punishments certainly is. I don't know what Catholicism says to that, really, but it does seem to me that the arguments concerning genetic predisposition would have failed in most conservative religious approaches because of the premise. Even so, I think that this is a mostly ancillary concern. The real issue is that there are competing and irreconcilable views of what it means to be human. Are we human because of the bodies we inhabit? Are we human because of how we can feel about who we are? Because we can transcend our bodies? I would postulate that answering this question is an essentially religious exercise, whether your narrative comes from a biology textbook, genetic programming manual, or the Bible. But that's an opinion that is perhaps even murkier to plumb than the roots of homosexuality in human experience.
est31 6y ago
I agree that one shouldn't support the genetic predetermination theory of sexuality just as a defense for oppression. That's not how science should be done. That being said, I still doubt that people really have a choice over their sexuality. Otherwise there would be far more stories from people who have "successfully" turned straight or something, instead of stories from people who have tried to suppress their true sexuality for years and who just turned sad in the process. It might not be genetically determined, but there are so many more immutable determinants to our behaviour that are outside of our control. The brain is a giant state machine and not all of that is plastic all of the time. It might be determined before you are even born, in the womb. It might be determined in your first few years of life. Or it might actually be genetically determined but through a complex interplay from multiple genes, something that our statistical tools can't catch yet, especially as we don't have an objective measure for gayness. Last, there might be multiple ways someone turns gay.
- bsder 6y ago
  > That being said, I still doubt that people really have a choice over their sexuality. My response to people who argue about this is generally: "So, when did you decide you liked long legs more than large breasts?" Choose whatever pairing of sexual characteristics drives home the choice to the person involved. Like so many things about "sexuality", at some point we notice them, but rarely do we actively choose them.
  - Pet_Ant 6y ago
    > My response to people who argue about this is generally: "So, when did you decide you liked long legs more than large breasts?" Choose whatever pairing of sexual characteristics drives home the choice to the person involved. I feel like there is a clear middle ground. I cannot choose to believe in God, but I wouldn't call it in in-born either. It seems like some things develop through a myriad subtle interactions and subconscious inferences that in their totality add up to a sexuality. I know my taste in women has definitely changed without a change in DNA.
    - 6y ago
ian-g 6y ago
I think there's also an element of constructed boxes to put people into as well. Would I rather say to you, some random person, "I'm gay" and move on? Or do I want to get into "I'm gay, it's complicated" and have to explain more? Most of the time I just don't want to get into it further. And I've had conversations with some folks who outwardly say they're straight but privately have described themselves pretty similarly to "Well mostly straight, it's complicated." It's tiring, and I'd like it if we all came to an agreement that it's complicated, the edges don't line up nicely, and we should all just accept that it's weird. It'd make my life way easier
renewiltord 6y ago
Amusingly, before I moved to America and understood it, I thought "sexuality is a choice" was a defence of homosexuality because I believed Americans believed "humans should be free to make choices about themselves". Funny, eh? But it seemed obvious to me. After all, maybe some people are genetically predisposed to eating babies. Doesn't mean I'm going to be okay with that. Sucks for them but they can either suppress the baby eating or go to prison.
- suizi 6y ago
  It's more that some people think "people choose to do things society greatly disapproves of", that is going out of their way to be difficult, and they want to punish them for this. But, then you would have to consider why it is they greatly disapprove of it in the first place, is it as unhealthy and dysfunctional as they think? Is it even their place to complain about someone else's affairs?
- p1mrx 6y ago
  I'm just waiting for the Impossible Baby.
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    The Other Other Other White meat?
    - rdevsrex 6y ago
      Jonathan Swift approves.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
LudwigNagasena 6y ago
> But that's always been a fucked up idea. It shouldn't matter whether it was predetermined or otherwise not in your control. Yep, that’s why I simply don’t care anymore what rhetoric modern social movements use. Not only usually it makes zero sense, they are ready to ditch it anytime it benefits them. There is no point in having a serious discourse with anyone who treats it only as a weapon to achieve their goals.
- xxpor 6y ago
  What does anyone ever do if not in service to means to an end?
bostonsre 6y ago
> People shouldn't be oppressed for their sexuality full stop, regardless of reason. Completely agreed. I don't think we should shy away from trying to understand and explain it though. It's been a puzzling question that people have tried to grapple with for a long time now. I think it would be interesting to understand humans better. And.. if it is definitively proven that it is nature and not nurture, it might make the lives of individuals easier by not having to deal with as many attacks from those that were intolerant but have changed their minds when exposed to the science. I agree that ideally, those individuals wouldn't be discriminated against in the first place, but that's not the world we live in right now. I would argue that if anyone could do anything to alleviate some of that discrimination with science, it would be an incredibly worthwhile endeavor.
- throwanem 6y ago
  If people changed their minds in the face of the science, we'd have been putting real work into decarbonization since 10 years ago at least.
  - kergonath 6y ago
    Make that 40 since it was considered a serious danger by scientists. The effect itself was known for more than a century. But yes, you’re obviously right and there is always a strong tendency to dismiss science to avoid cognitive dissonance.
  - Zardoz84 6y ago
    Or people wouldn't elect well know corrupt politicians...
  - bostonsre 6y ago
    Not saying all or even a majority of people would or do change their minds based on research, but I would expect there to be at least some open minded people that are just on the other side of the fence on the issue that would change their minds given evidence supporting the opposing viewpoint.
tgb 6y ago
There's also the other side: if someone is a homicidal psychopath due to their genetics, then I still do not want them to roam free. So genetically predetermined is not a good argument to use in favor of gay rights. People should be allowed to determine their own sexuality, regardless of whether that determination was preset by their genetics or not, just as people should not be allowed to commit murder regardless of whether that was preset by their genetics. (Same goes for other possible sources of determination.)
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  That's cheating. A person is only a homicidal psychopath after they have committed homicide. Locking up a psychopath who has committed no crimes is just as fucked up as locking up someone for being gay.
  - suizi 6y ago
    I presume they meant ones who have committed crimes, rather than ones who roughly fit a profile of who might commit homicide. I agree that profiling someone like this could lead into some serious Minority Report territory where you try to arrest someone "before they commit a crime", which will inevitably sweep up a lot of people who wouldn't have committed such a crime. Having such a deficit in empathy could be considered a disability, like many others, although not one the individual would necessarily be able to recognise, because to them, an absence of empathy would be "normal".
  - xxpor 6y ago
    I've got bad news for you then, that's basically what the Baker act does.
    - klmadfejno 6y ago
      Google suggests its mostly used to remove unruly kids from school. So... yeah... that does sound bad.
  - exporectomy 6y ago
rayiner 6y ago
You're collapsing a huge societal design space into a narrow, ultra-individualistic western viewpoint. Your point only makes sense in societies that take it as a given that individual autonomy trumps the right of society to enforce behavioral, moral, and social norms. That approach is not morally required and almost no non-western society embraces that viewpoint. Almost all of Asia and Africa accepts that requiring conformity in voluntary lifestyle and personal expression is legitimate. There is nothing special about sexuality in that respect--nearly everyone in the world thinks its perfectly legitimate for societies to, for example, impose taboos on sexual activity outside the bounds of some marriage-like relationship. By your reasoning, modern western sexual permissiveness is morally required--even when it comes to voluntary choices. That's a radical (and quite ethnocentric) claim. In that context, whether something is a choice, versus a characteristic that cannot easily be changed, is tremendously important. It elevates the issue from ordinary policing of norms into the realm of human rights. And of course, it's ridiculous to say that people "latched on" to sexual orientation being immutable to appease "bigots." Sexuality being immutable (or at least not easily changed) is an observation that rests on the experience of countless individuals who suffered tremendous pain and suffering trying to deny their sexual orientation. And the article, of course, nowhere suggests that sexual orientation is a choice. Many things are immutable characteristics, or at least not easily changeable--without being traceable to a specific gene.
- imnotlost 6y ago
  There's a huge difference between "policing of social norms" and equal rule of law for all regardless of who they choose to have sex with. Maybe you can argue that it's fine for someone to choose not to be friends with gay people but it shouldn't be OK for the government withhold rights/law/healthcare/social security/education/electricity/water/etc because of it. Who cares if it's genetics or a choice.
  - threatofrain 6y ago
    > Who cares if it's genetics or a choice. Society cares, that’s the point. Society cares about who you have sex with, and society cares about whether something is genetic. If society didn’t care we’d be having a different discussion.
klmadfejno 6y ago
I read this as well intentioned but ultimately poor reasoning. Things that are intrinsic about a person are a good baseline, no-question quality that we should not antagonize people for. Sexual orientation, race, disabilities, gender, appearance etc. These seem like important issues to get right on civic protections. Saying we must offer respect to everyone's choices is just wrong. We certainly don't want to ensure someone's right to be a homophobic asshole in a workplace for example. And it's not as simple as just saying being LGBTQ is a private thing that doesn't affect others either. Trans bathroom rights, marriage license rights, adoption rights, etc.. The argument to ban gay conversion camps seems much harder to make if one believes identity is purely a choice. If homosexuality is perceived as a choice, then onlookers will wonder who influenced someone to make a choice to be gay, which muddies the perception of being gay being a personal private thing. Homophobia is bad, but wishing it weren't a thing doesn't change the reasoning that intrinsic qualities are a lot more important to protect than choices. Sexual orientation is more deserving of protection than, say, holocaust denialism. Religion is the only protected class that is a choice, but for many people, it's not so much a choice as an inherited identity and similarly fixed.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  To go further, Veteran status is a choice, but we choose to protect it in order to encourage that choice.
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    That is true I forgot that one.
- suizi 6y ago
  Is there any reason they shouldn't have adoption rights? What's the harm in that?
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    In the INCORRECT alt world where being gay is a choice? The implication is that gay parents would demonstrate parenting that encourages gay children. spiraling into some stupid ideas about feedback loops which can't be supported by real world data because this isn't a real thing. The real world just can't be explained by plausible mechanics with homosexuality secretly being a choice without some fairly extreme side effects. Imagining it were a choice has so many additional implications, which, while dumb, are genuine fears of some conservative worldviews, but I guess would be real problems. Frustrating, circuitous logic.
dwohnitmok 6y ago
The big question that this viewpoint misses is what to do with fears that certain things "turn people gay" and the flip side of that fear: that the straight community might use successful conversion therapy to eliminate the gay community. All of a sudden both of those camps have ammunition for their points. Saying that it's "genetically determined" (or at least innately determined) very nicely sidestepped that. To the extent that that is not true, then you have to grapple with those other questions.
- suizi 6y ago
  I don't think it is possible to turn someone who is straight gay, anymore than it is possible to turn someone who is gay straight. The exception would be where they're bi, but they would already have had some interest in the same sex, and it wouldn't have come from social conditioning.
  - dwohnitmok 6y ago
    > I don't think it is possible to turn someone who is straight gay, anymore than it is possible to turn someone who is gay straight. Indeed if that's true, i.e. that there is an innate immutability between the two, then the whole question is conveniently moot and we can instead turn our attention to figuring how to combat these fears at a rhetorical and cultural level (still a Herculean task but at least a step forward). The fear, on both sides of that coin, comes from if that's not true.
  - tomp 6y ago
    Why do you think that? I’d say it’s very much cultural... these days, bisexuality is much more acceptable for women than for men, and more women identify as bisexual... in Ancient Greece, men having sex with men were much more common than these days (AFAIK).
    - danbolt 6y ago
      I feel like the culture seems to be the big variable there than the preferences, to be honest. Or, people are going to express what they like based on their environment and how they perceive it will respond.
causality0 6y ago
People have very strong feelings about self-categorization, whether or not the person's feelings are "accurate". We struggled with accepting gay people. We're struggling now with accepting transgender people. In twenty years the big culture war might be about people who think they were born the wrong ethnicity, or otherkin, or some other area in which our failure to produce an indiscriminate society runs up against the rules of behavior to which we've limited them.
lordgroff 6y ago
It never made sense. Hitler (yes, sorry to go there) also thought that homosexuality was genetic, which is why it made sense to him to mass murder homosexuals. Something being genetic/inherent has very little to do with whether it should be viewed as morally acceptable. Of course, I am well aware of how troublesome it is to find empirical grounding in morality, but it always seemed to me that sexual relationship between two consenting partners was nobody else's business, least of all mine. Choice, genetics, curiosity, etc: what difference does it make? I am about as "straight" as it comes: I for the life of me can't figure out the sexual appeal of men, but it also isn't at all obvious to me why I should be offended by the idea that there are people that think otherwise. And even if tomorrow Casanova came out and decided publicly that he is making a conscious choice to from now own only sleep with men, after decades of sexual adventures with women--well, what difference does it make?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
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robin21 6y ago
It’s very common for people to make decisions that they regret for the rest of their lives. If someone is straight and they have a gay experience that is something that could haunt them for the rest of their life. This seems to be less of a thing in the other direction. Maybe this is societies fault though. The lack of acceptance causes the inner shame. But the notion of letting people be free to choose is pretending that there is nothing that will influence the choices they make. Most people will be straight genetically and that is the way society leans today. Encouraging experimentation can have negative consequences.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
mc32 6y ago
The biggest danger of using genetics as a reason is that at some point someone is going to say, "we have unequivocally ID'd the genes involved and we can ensure your offspring are of the orientation of _your_ choice". Or in more authoritarian regimes, the state's choice.
golemiprague 6y ago
I does have implications though, if it is genetically determined then conversion therapy is less likely to succeed, unless we employ some genetic therapy. But if it is just environmental then conversion might succeed, the same way the environment made the person gay in the first place

memling 6y ago

> But that's always been a fucked up idea. It shouldn't matter whether it was predetermined or otherwise not in your control. If it's constructed then it's constructed. If it's not then it's not. People shouldn't be oppressed for their sexuality full stop, regardless of reason. You are right, I think, to root the conflict in religion. The dominant religion in the West, Christianity, treats the human body as a given. That is to say that while you are more than just your body, you are certainly not less: there is a union of mind and body that separates only at death. If they disagree, a reconciliation must be attempted from the outside (i.e., by God). Of course today we have technology that puts a veneer of science on what is really a religious idea: we are essentially our mind and not our body. When the two disagree, we needn't change our minds because we can alter the body through hormones and surgery. On the face of it, I don't see how you could reconcile these two positions. I think the use of genetic predestination was used as an attempt to do this: if I'm made this way then how can it be wrong to be {gay, trans, etc.}? But in general I think the denominations that were predisposed to blessing homosexuality (for example) were unlikely to need scientific persuasions like that. When it became clear that rigid denominations weren't going to budge, it feels like genetic predestination became unfashionable.

yters 6y ago
Plus it doesn't make sense from a Christian perspective. The Roman Catholic branch and derivatives all believe everyone is genetically predisposed to sin through Adam's lineage, and that is a bad thing, and we don't have a choice in the matter. So saying homosexuality is a genetic predisposition just means it gets lumped into the rest of our fallen attributes. Making it a choice doesn't fix things either, since a choice can be intrinsically sinful. There is no other way than to deny that homosexuality is wrong. Yet that is difficult to do, since sexuality has such an obvious role to play in the perpetuation of the human race. If it were normative then the human race would not exist. So the most straightforward explanation is it is a deviation from the way things should be, as is much else in our human nature, which in turn points to a standard that we deviate from.
- memling 6y ago
  > Plus it doesn't make sense from a Christian perspective. The Roman Catholic branch and derivatives all believe everyone is genetically predisposed to sin through Adam's lineage, and that is a bad thing, and we don't have a choice in the matter. So saying homosexuality is a genetic predisposition just means it gets lumped into the rest of our fallen attributes. Making it a choice doesn't fix things either, since a choice can be intrinsically sinful. I think that's an inescapable conclusion in traditional Christianity. That will or choice is not necessarily a component of responsibility is something we also adopt in law: involuntary manslaughter is different than premeditated murder, even though the outcome is the same. In other words, will is not essential to guilt, although the degree to which we assess punishments certainly is. I don't know what Catholicism says to that, really, but it does seem to me that the arguments concerning genetic predisposition would have failed in most conservative religious approaches because of the premise. Even so, I think that this is a mostly ancillary concern. The real issue is that there are competing and irreconcilable views of what it means to be human. Are we human because of the bodies we inhabit? Are we human because of how we can feel about who we are? Because we can transcend our bodies? I would postulate that answering this question is an essentially religious exercise, whether your narrative comes from a biology textbook, genetic programming manual, or the Bible. But that's an opinion that is perhaps even murkier to plumb than the roots of homosexuality in human experience.

est31 6y ago

I agree that one shouldn't support the genetic predetermination theory of sexuality just as a defense for oppression. That's not how science should be done. That being said, I still doubt that people really have a choice over their sexuality. Otherwise there would be far more stories from people who have "successfully" turned straight or something, instead of stories from people who have tried to suppress their true sexuality for years and who just turned sad in the process. It might not be genetically determined, but there are so many more immutable determinants to our behaviour that are outside of our control. The brain is a giant state machine and not all of that is plastic all of the time. It might be determined before you are even born, in the womb. It might be determined in your first few years of life. Or it might actually be genetically determined but through a complex interplay from multiple genes, something that our statistical tools can't catch yet, especially as we don't have an objective measure for gayness. Last, there might be multiple ways someone turns gay.

bsder 6y ago
> That being said, I still doubt that people really have a choice over their sexuality. My response to people who argue about this is generally: "So, when did you decide you liked long legs more than large breasts?" Choose whatever pairing of sexual characteristics drives home the choice to the person involved. Like so many things about "sexuality", at some point we notice them, but rarely do we actively choose them.
- Pet_Ant 6y ago
  > My response to people who argue about this is generally: "So, when did you decide you liked long legs more than large breasts?" Choose whatever pairing of sexual characteristics drives home the choice to the person involved. I feel like there is a clear middle ground. I cannot choose to believe in God, but I wouldn't call it in in-born either. It seems like some things develop through a myriad subtle interactions and subconscious inferences that in their totality add up to a sexuality. I know my taste in women has definitely changed without a change in DNA.
  - 6y ago

ian-g 6y ago

I think there's also an element of constructed boxes to put people into as well. Would I rather say to you, some random person, "I'm gay" and move on? Or do I want to get into "I'm gay, it's complicated" and have to explain more? Most of the time I just don't want to get into it further. And I've had conversations with some folks who outwardly say they're straight but privately have described themselves pretty similarly to "Well mostly straight, it's complicated." It's tiring, and I'd like it if we all came to an agreement that it's complicated, the edges don't line up nicely, and we should all just accept that it's weird. It'd make my life way easier

renewiltord 6y ago

Amusingly, before I moved to America and understood it, I thought "sexuality is a choice" was a defence of homosexuality because I believed Americans believed "humans should be free to make choices about themselves". Funny, eh? But it seemed obvious to me. After all, maybe some people are genetically predisposed to eating babies. Doesn't mean I'm going to be okay with that. Sucks for them but they can either suppress the baby eating or go to prison.

suizi 6y ago
It's more that some people think "people choose to do things society greatly disapproves of", that is going out of their way to be difficult, and they want to punish them for this. But, then you would have to consider why it is they greatly disapprove of it in the first place, is it as unhealthy and dysfunctional as they think? Is it even their place to complain about someone else's affairs?
p1mrx 6y ago
I'm just waiting for the Impossible Baby.
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  The Other Other Other White meat?
  - rdevsrex 6y ago
    Jonathan Swift approves.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

LudwigNagasena 6y ago

> But that's always been a fucked up idea. It shouldn't matter whether it was predetermined or otherwise not in your control. Yep, that’s why I simply don’t care anymore what rhetoric modern social movements use. Not only usually it makes zero sense, they are ready to ditch it anytime it benefits them. There is no point in having a serious discourse with anyone who treats it only as a weapon to achieve their goals.

xxpor 6y ago
What does anyone ever do if not in service to means to an end?

bostonsre 6y ago

> People shouldn't be oppressed for their sexuality full stop, regardless of reason. Completely agreed. I don't think we should shy away from trying to understand and explain it though. It's been a puzzling question that people have tried to grapple with for a long time now. I think it would be interesting to understand humans better. And.. if it is definitively proven that it is nature and not nurture, it might make the lives of individuals easier by not having to deal with as many attacks from those that were intolerant but have changed their minds when exposed to the science. I agree that ideally, those individuals wouldn't be discriminated against in the first place, but that's not the world we live in right now. I would argue that if anyone could do anything to alleviate some of that discrimination with science, it would be an incredibly worthwhile endeavor.

throwanem 6y ago
If people changed their minds in the face of the science, we'd have been putting real work into decarbonization since 10 years ago at least.
- kergonath 6y ago
  Make that 40 since it was considered a serious danger by scientists. The effect itself was known for more than a century. But yes, you’re obviously right and there is always a strong tendency to dismiss science to avoid cognitive dissonance.
- Zardoz84 6y ago
  Or people wouldn't elect well know corrupt politicians...
- bostonsre 6y ago
  Not saying all or even a majority of people would or do change their minds based on research, but I would expect there to be at least some open minded people that are just on the other side of the fence on the issue that would change their minds given evidence supporting the opposing viewpoint.

tgb 6y ago

There's also the other side: if someone is a homicidal psychopath due to their genetics, then I still do not want them to roam free. So genetically predetermined is not a good argument to use in favor of gay rights. People should be allowed to determine their own sexuality, regardless of whether that determination was preset by their genetics or not, just as people should not be allowed to commit murder regardless of whether that was preset by their genetics. (Same goes for other possible sources of determination.)

klmadfejno 6y ago
That's cheating. A person is only a homicidal psychopath after they have committed homicide. Locking up a psychopath who has committed no crimes is just as fucked up as locking up someone for being gay.
- suizi 6y ago
  I presume they meant ones who have committed crimes, rather than ones who roughly fit a profile of who might commit homicide. I agree that profiling someone like this could lead into some serious Minority Report territory where you try to arrest someone "before they commit a crime", which will inevitably sweep up a lot of people who wouldn't have committed such a crime. Having such a deficit in empathy could be considered a disability, like many others, although not one the individual would necessarily be able to recognise, because to them, an absence of empathy would be "normal".
- xxpor 6y ago
  I've got bad news for you then, that's basically what the Baker act does.
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    Google suggests its mostly used to remove unruly kids from school. So... yeah... that does sound bad.
- exporectomy 6y ago

rayiner 6y ago

You're collapsing a huge societal design space into a narrow, ultra-individualistic western viewpoint. Your point only makes sense in societies that take it as a given that individual autonomy trumps the right of society to enforce behavioral, moral, and social norms. That approach is not morally required and almost no non-western society embraces that viewpoint. Almost all of Asia and Africa accepts that requiring conformity in voluntary lifestyle and personal expression is legitimate. There is nothing special about sexuality in that respect--nearly everyone in the world thinks its perfectly legitimate for societies to, for example, impose taboos on sexual activity outside the bounds of some marriage-like relationship. By your reasoning, modern western sexual permissiveness is morally required--even when it comes to voluntary choices. That's a radical (and quite ethnocentric) claim. In that context, whether something is a choice, versus a characteristic that cannot easily be changed, is tremendously important. It elevates the issue from ordinary policing of norms into the realm of human rights. And of course, it's ridiculous to say that people "latched on" to sexual orientation being immutable to appease "bigots." Sexuality being immutable (or at least not easily changed) is an observation that rests on the experience of countless individuals who suffered tremendous pain and suffering trying to deny their sexual orientation. And the article, of course, nowhere suggests that sexual orientation is a choice. Many things are immutable characteristics, or at least not easily changeable--without being traceable to a specific gene.

imnotlost 6y ago
There's a huge difference between "policing of social norms" and equal rule of law for all regardless of who they choose to have sex with. Maybe you can argue that it's fine for someone to choose not to be friends with gay people but it shouldn't be OK for the government withhold rights/law/healthcare/social security/education/electricity/water/etc because of it. Who cares if it's genetics or a choice.
- threatofrain 6y ago
  > Who cares if it's genetics or a choice. Society cares, that’s the point. Society cares about who you have sex with, and society cares about whether something is genetic. If society didn’t care we’d be having a different discussion.

klmadfejno 6y ago

I read this as well intentioned but ultimately poor reasoning. Things that are intrinsic about a person are a good baseline, no-question quality that we should not antagonize people for. Sexual orientation, race, disabilities, gender, appearance etc. These seem like important issues to get right on civic protections. Saying we must offer respect to everyone's choices is just wrong. We certainly don't want to ensure someone's right to be a homophobic asshole in a workplace for example. And it's not as simple as just saying being LGBTQ is a private thing that doesn't affect others either. Trans bathroom rights, marriage license rights, adoption rights, etc.. The argument to ban gay conversion camps seems much harder to make if one believes identity is purely a choice. If homosexuality is perceived as a choice, then onlookers will wonder who influenced someone to make a choice to be gay, which muddies the perception of being gay being a personal private thing. Homophobia is bad, but wishing it weren't a thing doesn't change the reasoning that intrinsic qualities are a lot more important to protect than choices. Sexual orientation is more deserving of protection than, say, holocaust denialism. Religion is the only protected class that is a choice, but for many people, it's not so much a choice as an inherited identity and similarly fixed.

InitialLastName 6y ago
To go further, Veteran status is a choice, but we choose to protect it in order to encourage that choice.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  That is true I forgot that one.
suizi 6y ago
Is there any reason they shouldn't have adoption rights? What's the harm in that?
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  In the INCORRECT alt world where being gay is a choice? The implication is that gay parents would demonstrate parenting that encourages gay children. spiraling into some stupid ideas about feedback loops which can't be supported by real world data because this isn't a real thing. The real world just can't be explained by plausible mechanics with homosexuality secretly being a choice without some fairly extreme side effects. Imagining it were a choice has so many additional implications, which, while dumb, are genuine fears of some conservative worldviews, but I guess would be real problems. Frustrating, circuitous logic.

dwohnitmok 6y ago

The big question that this viewpoint misses is what to do with fears that certain things "turn people gay" and the flip side of that fear: that the straight community might use successful conversion therapy to eliminate the gay community. All of a sudden both of those camps have ammunition for their points. Saying that it's "genetically determined" (or at least innately determined) very nicely sidestepped that. To the extent that that is not true, then you have to grapple with those other questions.

suizi 6y ago
I don't think it is possible to turn someone who is straight gay, anymore than it is possible to turn someone who is gay straight. The exception would be where they're bi, but they would already have had some interest in the same sex, and it wouldn't have come from social conditioning.
- dwohnitmok 6y ago
  > I don't think it is possible to turn someone who is straight gay, anymore than it is possible to turn someone who is gay straight. Indeed if that's true, i.e. that there is an innate immutability between the two, then the whole question is conveniently moot and we can instead turn our attention to figuring how to combat these fears at a rhetorical and cultural level (still a Herculean task but at least a step forward). The fear, on both sides of that coin, comes from if that's not true.
- tomp 6y ago
  Why do you think that? I’d say it’s very much cultural... these days, bisexuality is much more acceptable for women than for men, and more women identify as bisexual... in Ancient Greece, men having sex with men were much more common than these days (AFAIK).
  - danbolt 6y ago
    I feel like the culture seems to be the big variable there than the preferences, to be honest. Or, people are going to express what they like based on their environment and how they perceive it will respond.

causality0 6y ago

People have very strong feelings about self-categorization, whether or not the person's feelings are "accurate". We struggled with accepting gay people. We're struggling now with accepting transgender people. In twenty years the big culture war might be about people who think they were born the wrong ethnicity, or otherkin, or some other area in which our failure to produce an indiscriminate society runs up against the rules of behavior to which we've limited them.

lordgroff 6y ago

It never made sense. Hitler (yes, sorry to go there) also thought that homosexuality was genetic, which is why it made sense to him to mass murder homosexuals. Something being genetic/inherent has very little to do with whether it should be viewed as morally acceptable. Of course, I am well aware of how troublesome it is to find empirical grounding in morality, but it always seemed to me that sexual relationship between two consenting partners was nobody else's business, least of all mine. Choice, genetics, curiosity, etc: what difference does it make? I am about as "straight" as it comes: I for the life of me can't figure out the sexual appeal of men, but it also isn't at all obvious to me why I should be offended by the idea that there are people that think otherwise. And even if tomorrow Casanova came out and decided publicly that he is making a conscious choice to from now own only sleep with men, after decades of sexual adventures with women--well, what difference does it make?

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robin21 6y ago

It’s very common for people to make decisions that they regret for the rest of their lives. If someone is straight and they have a gay experience that is something that could haunt them for the rest of their life. This seems to be less of a thing in the other direction. Maybe this is societies fault though. The lack of acceptance causes the inner shame. But the notion of letting people be free to choose is pretending that there is nothing that will influence the choices they make. Most people will be straight genetically and that is the way society leans today. Encouraging experimentation can have negative consequences.

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mc32 6y ago

The biggest danger of using genetics as a reason is that at some point someone is going to say, "we have unequivocally ID'd the genes involved and we can ensure your offspring are of the orientation of _your_ choice". Or in more authoritarian regimes, the state's choice.

golemiprague 6y ago

I does have implications though, if it is genetically determined then conversion therapy is less likely to succeed, unless we employ some genetic therapy. But if it is just environmental then conversion might succeed, the same way the environment made the person gay in the first place