Nature/Nurture and Moral Judgments

Andrew Koppelman has an interesting post from last weekend over at Balkinization on the 'ex-gay" movement and how it may be subverting the anti-gay Chistianists.

The article, unsurprisingly given its venue, takes as unquestioned premises that homosexual desire and homosexual conduct are always evils to be avoided. It notes an important shift in the claims being made by the “ex-gay” movement, a primarily Christian movement that has been around for some decades now, promising to lead gay people away from homosexuality. In the early days of the movement, it claimed that a gay person could transform him- or herself into a heterosexual through a pure act of will. Those claims have now disappeared. The article reports that “[e]arly hopes for instant healing have given way to belief that transformation occurs through a lifetime of discipleship.”

Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International, the largest of the ex-gay groups, “is frank that change does not eradicate temptation. He wonders if change is ever 100 percent complete in this life. ‘One thing we can expect as Christians is a life of denial,’ he says. ‘I don't think we're afraid to tell people that they may have a lifetime of struggle. Freedom isn't the absence of struggle, but the life of struggle with joy in the process.’”

“The ex-gay movement seeks to integrate the reality of same-sex attraction into a life of discipleship. In that lifelong journey, they expect many changes, including changes of feeling and attraction. But they emphasize that each person's experience is different, and that instant transformation is extremely rare.”

In effect, the claims of a "cure" are gone, except among the most unhinged. What's left is simply the acknowledgment that leaving the "gay lifestyle" (and no one has ever really explained exactly what that is -- there's only been the caricature of the club culture put out by the likes of Peter LaBarbera, which doesn't seem to include jobs and grocery shopping and laundry and, you know, normal life) is a matter of choice. I find that deliciously ironic, insofar as the whole "choice" question got moved to an entirely different arena. The choice is now not to be gay, or not to follow one's natural instincts in terms of partnering.

One of Koppelman's commenters, Robert Link, brings up a terrifically important point in the first comment:

It's a big can of worms you offer up. I have some thoughts on the general correlation of belief in innateness to support for gay rights. To make my argument a bit more palatable, I include two other types of deviance: alcoholism and left handedness. I have seen parallel thinking processes applied to all three groups.

The first premise, held deeply and widely in the society at large and accepted consciously or unconsciously by the deviant herself is that said deviation is bad, a matter of deep personal shame. To take the seemingly trivial case of left-handedness, note that "the collective unconscious," as manifest in language, denotes left as both gauche and sinister. That's makes for a cute joke, but it remains fact that "the left hand path" is a euphemism for Satanism in the minds of many people who are afraid to explore it.

So, start with the premise that what you are, what makes you different is bad. Now add the premise that you can't change it. Left-handedness used to be trained out of all but the most incorrigible, and the numbers for earlier generations claim no more than 1 in ten were lefties. With the permissive teaching systems of the second half of the 20th century we've seen a rise in the incidence of left-handedness, and in this case there's plenty of reason to assume that the correlation highlights causation as well. Before the permissive trend in education, for 1-in-ten this affliction was not curable.

I think, actually, that his introduction of alcoholism and left-handedness obscures the issue, which is simply that we need no justification for being the way we are. The much better position, which undercuts the Christianist dogma, is that being gay is simply another way of being human. It's just there -- deal with it. The point is stated more clearly by Gary Chartier a few comments down:

For gay rights activists to stake their claim on the assumption that innateness is important here is, effectively, to suggest that there is something wrong with same-sex desire and sexual contact, but that innateness provides an excuse of some kind. If, as seems clear, same-sex sex isn't inherently harmful to the participants or to others, that ought to be sufficient reason to regard it as morally acceptable and legally protected. People concerned about gay rights needn't be--shouldn't be--concerned either about whether sexual orientation is narrowly focused (to that few or no people are actually bisexual) or invariant (so that it doesn't change over time).

That is where our arguments need to be coming from. That's been my intuitive position, being the in-your-face hillbilly that I am, but I've seldom been able to articulate it clearly.