I moved to Kentish Town in 2009. Having lived just about everywhere else in London over the past 24 years – from Hounslow to Walthamstow – I can say with some authority that, when I finally moved to NW5, I knew without doubt that I had found a part of London that I felt truly comfortable in.
Not to mention the fact that, as a writer, it’s also incredibly near the British Library’s vast collection of books and journal articles (although I particularly love the nearer Owl Bookshop on Kentish Town Road, too).
I started to look into the topic of my book, Thinking Straight About Being Gay: Why It Matters if We’re Born That Way, six years ago. The research is largely taken from my PhD, which I finished at Oxford Brookes University in 2012. I had been interested in how the religious right, especially in the US, had framed their homophobic discourse since the early 1980s.
Like many LGBT people of my milieu, I had grown up in a frighteningly homophobic small town culture in the 1970s and 80s when LGBT people stayed in the closet, or risked brutal assault.
Having moved to New York City as the right were stepping up their anti-gay rhetoric, I kept a close eye on how it was developing and decided I would study theology, so that I could know my enemy, so to speak. It was obvious to me that most homophobia was Christian in origin, and I felt that this was partly a distortion of Christian teaching and ethics, since I was still a believer back then.
I have since graduated to humanism, but I still feel that my upbringing allows me to comprehend religious homophobia in a way that perhaps non-religious people cannot. Whereas Europeans or Brits tend to dismiss religion as irrelevant, Americans see the power it can exert over politics and public policy. I felt that my homophobic opponents could be defeated on their terms, not on secular ones, and my book aims to do just that.
So does it actually matter whether homosexuals are born that way? Well, no…and yes. No, because nature does not dictate morals. We cannot derive ethical imperatives simply from observing empirical facts. Furthermore, in liberal democracies being ‘born that way’ is not a necessary condition for granting full legal acceptance of homosexual behaviour. People not born gay ought to be allowed to participate in homoerotic (or any) sexual activity, so long as it is consenting and between adults.
However, religious homophobes have assumed that nature dictates morals. The scientific evidence strongly suggests that there is a biological basis for sexual orientation and, if true, this would completely demolish both Christian evangelical and Roman Catholicism’s traditional teachings about the immorality of homosexual behaviour. That matters.
The idea that gays are ‘born that way’ is potentially dangerous too, since it could lead to a homophobic eugenics of sorts. Christian homophobes have responded to the scientific evidence much more effectively than LGBT rights activists, who have remained in denial because of that (quite realistic) worry. Homophobic Christian ethicists have already changed their rhetoric about homosexuality. In my opinion 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.
They’ve also done well to avoid any language that might sound openly eugenic. LGBT rights advocates need to catch up. Where once Christian homophobes defined homosexual behaviour as a voluntary (and ‘sinful’) rejection of nature, now they say it is an innate predisposition to immoral behaviour (i.e. a defect in the very nature of the person). So they’ve have backpedalled on their past traditions.
Now, instead of describing the given aspects of natural ‘creation’ as the very benchmark of God’s design and plan, Christian bioethicists emphasize how biotechnology might facilitate human interventions into creation in order to ‘restore’ it to ‘its full glory’. In the future, these value judgments could figure in eugenic uses of biotechnology, under the auspices of ‘liberal’ (free market) eugenics. My book urges LGBT rights advocates to anticipate this possibility and to address the ethical and legal issues it raises. I’ve provided a few arguments that I hope might be used as a starting point.
Consequently, there has been ample discussion, even if misguided or fantastical, about whether gay identity can be ‘mapped’ onto a set of genetic or biological markers. This book presents a survey and analysis of recent Christian and non-Christian bioethicists’ arguments about the potential uses of reprogenetics, and reveals that they will not rule out treating homosexuality as a ‘disorder’ in need of fixing or simply as a trait that parents can choose to edit out of their children before birth. Instead of denying the scientific evidence, gay rights activists need to begin to engage their opponents with better arguments because, if homosexuality does have a genetic basis, legal guidelines for ‘treatment’ need to be put into place.
I have put forward my own suggestion about how we can draw this line between conditions that warrant genuinely ‘therapeutic’ biotech interventions and those that would count only as an attempt to ‘design’ or ‘improve’ a future person according to narcissistic ideas about what kinds of persons are socially acceptable. But I don’t want to give away my book’s punch line here.
