Born This Way?

Scientists may have found a biological basis for homosexuality. That could be bad news for gay rights.

Mark Joseph Stern, 06/28/13

“Baby, you were born this way.” As soon as Lady Gaga sang these words on her smash hit "Born This Way," they became a rallying cry for gay people around the world, an anthem for sexual minorities facing discrimination. The shiny, catchy song carries an empowering (if simple) message: Don’t be ashamed about being gay, or bi, or trans, or anything -- that’s just how you were born. Gaga later named her anti-bullying charity after the same truism, and two filmmakers borrowed it for their documentary exposing homophobia in Africa. A popular "Born This Way" blog encourages users to submit reflections on “their innate LGBTQ selves.” Need a quick, pithy riposte against anti-gay bigotry? Baby, we were born this way.

But were we? That’s the foundational question behind the gay rights movement -- and its opponents. If gay people were truly born that way, the old canard of homosexuality as a “lifestyle choice” (or “sexual preference”) is immediately disproven. But if gay people weren’t born that way, if scientists were unable to find any biological basis for sexual orientation, then the Family Research Council crowd could claim vindication in its fight to label homosexuality unnatural, harmful, and against nature.

In recent years, scientists have proposed various speculative biological bases for homosexuality but never settled on an answer. As researchers draw closer to uncovering an explanation, however, a new question has arisen:

What if in some cases sexuality is caused by an identifiable chemical process in the womb?

What if, in other words, homosexuality can potentially be prevented? That is one implication of one of the most widely accepted hypotheses thus far proposed. And if it’s true, it could turn out to be a blow for the gay rights movement.

Some of the strongest current evidence that some people are born gay is based on a phenomenon called the fraternal birth order effect. Several peer-reviewed studies have shown that men with older biological brothers are likelier to be gay than men with older sisters or no older siblings. The likelihood of being gay increases by about 33 percent with each additional older brother. From these statistics, researchers calculate that about 15 to 30 percent of gay men have the fraternal birth order effect to thank for their homosexuality.

The fraternal birth order effect is a little perverse. It means that a disproportionate number of gay men are born into disproportionately homophobic households. Couples with large numbers of children tend to be religious and belong to denominations that are conservative and more homophobic. Consider the numbers: 1 percent of Unitarians have four or more children, while 3 percent of evangelical Protestants, 4 percent of Catholics, 6 percent of Muslims, and 9 percent of Mormons have families that large. At the same time, 64 percent of Evangelicals, 30 percent of Catholics, 61 percent of Muslims, and 68 percent of Mormons believe homosexuality should be “discouraged by society.” (Compare that with 15 percent of Jews.) Big families that disapprove of gay people are likely to have gay people in their own clan.

Perhaps these families would be more accepting if the specific biological basis for the birth order effect were elucidated. We know the effect is biological rather than social -- it’s entirely absent in men whose older brothers were adopted -- but scientists haven’t been able to prove much else. One of the leading explanations is called the maternal immunization hypothesis. According to Ray Blanchard of the University of Toronto, when a woman is pregnant with a male fetus, her body is exposed to a male-specific antigen, some molecule that normally turns the fetus heterosexual. The woman’s immune system produces antibodies to fight this foreign antigen. With enough antibodies, the antigen will be neutralized and no longer capable of making the fetus straight. These antibodies linger in the mother’s body long after pregnancy, and so when a woman has a second son, or a third or fourth, an army of antibodies is lying in wait to zap the chemicals that would normally make him heterosexual.

Or so Blanchard speculates. Although the hypothesis sounds reasonable enough, it’s premised on a number of assumptions that haven’t been proven. For instance, no one has shown that there is a particular antigen that controls sexual orientation, let alone one designed to make men straight. And if that antigen does exist, does it control orientation only? Blanchard refers to its antibody attackers as “anti-male,” implying that the antigen controls for various aspects of masculinity. But when I asked him about this, he was noncommittal.

Moreover, the hypothesis proposes a loose, two-way flow of antigens and antibodies between the fetus (whose antigens spread to the mother) and the mother (whose antibodies spread to the fetus). But this exchange has never been observed -- and the antibodies and antigens in question are hypothetical, anyway. If they do exist, there’s no assurance that they perform this placental pirouette.

There’s a problem with this explanation. Even though the gay rights movement theoretically wants proof that homosexuality is inborn, this particular hypothesis is, unintentionally, a little insulting. “The scientists behind the [maternal immunization] hypothesis talk about it as if they’re not making judgments, but there are implicit judgments,” says Jack Drescher, former chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Issues. Drescher points out, correctly, that the hypothesis is fundamentally one of pathology. If Blanchard is right, then (at least some) gay people are indeed born gay, but there’s still something wrong with them. The hypothesis turns homosexuality into a birth defect, an aberration: Gay people are deviants from the normative mode of heterosexuality. We may have been born this way, the hypothesis implies, but that’s not how it was supposed to happen.

Drescher is skeptical that scientists will ever uncover a single biological basis for homosexuality -- he suspects the root causes are more varied and complex -- and suggests that it’s the wrong question to ask in the first place. But the hunt will go on. The gay rights movement, like the black civil rights movement before it, begins with the proposition that we should not discriminate against people because of who they are or how they were born. That’s a belief most Americans share, and it explains the success of the “born this way” anthem. If homosexuality is truly biological, discrimination against gay people is bigotry, plain and simple. But if it’s a birth defect, as Blanchard’s work tacitly suggests, then being gay is something that can -- and presumably should -- be fixed.

That’s a toxic view, and one that must be abandoned. We might not yet understand the exact biological mechanisms underlying sexual orientation, but we will one day soon. And if, at that point, homosexuality is seen as a disorder, the next step will be a search for a cure. That would be a tragedy -- for society and for science. There’s nothing wrong with being gay: You know it; I know it; the Supreme Court knows it. But so long as large swaths of the country believe otherwise -- places where homophobic families still ostracize their gay sons and brothers -- any research into its biological origins is fraught with peril for the cause of gay rights.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/06/biological_basis_for_homosexuality_the_fraternal_birth_order_explanation.html

Marriage Is Dead and the Church Is Next

Pat Archbold, National Catholic Register, 06/26/13

DOMA is dead.

And, technicalities aside, Prop 8. in California is dead, paving the way for same-sex marriage there. 

While many people will try to dissect these opinions and look for legal silver linings based on the narrowness of this or that part of the rulings, make no mistake, as a practical matter marriage as we knew it is over. The dam has burst even if all the water has not yet traversed the breach.

Marriage, as the union of a man and woman for the purposes of raising children and for mutual support as recognized in culture and law, has ceased to exist. The only reason that marriage needs be recognized by law is that previous generations understood its value and wished to confer certain legal and societal privileges to it so as to encourage it. They rightly understood that marriage is the cornerstone of a society.

Advocates have used those legal and societal privileges to beat, twist, and deform the very meaning and purpose of marriage. We now view the purpose of marriage solely as the conferring of these legal and societal privileges, and thus they can be granted to anyone and anything.

While many states have sought to forestall the redefinition of marriage in their states by statute or constitution, today's ruling basically invalidates their efforts and has opened the floodgate to approval of same sex marriage across the nation with no reasonable recourse. Marriage as we knew it is dead.

With the universal legal recognition of same-sex marriage a fait accompli, the next fight will on the Church doorstep. The next battle will be to force Churches, most particularly the Catholic Church, to recognize and conduct same-sex marriage. The refusal to do so will result in a series of escalating legal and financial ramifications.

Eventually, becuase of its refusal to recognize immoral unions as marriage, the state will refuse to recognize Church marriages. As a result, more and more people will bypass Church marriage altogether, further marginalizing faith in this country. This effort is and has always been a war against religion and in particular a war against the Catholic Church. Right now, it is a war we are losing and after today, perhaps it is fair to say that we lost.

Yes, the Church has the guarantee that it will ultimately prevail, but that does not mean it will prevail in the United States. The failure to see the real target of this war and frankly the weak response to the threat by Church leaders and rank and file have doomed marriage and put the target squarely on the sanctuary.

I don't know if religious liberty can be saved in this country, but it is worth fighting for. I for one will continue to fight, but at least now everyone should understand that the battle is real and we are losing. I just hope that we haven't already lost.

UPDATE:

For those who think I am wrong about what is next.  The first thing out of Obama's mouth on this topic was a denial that this is what he will try to do. Right on the tip of his tongue.

“On an issue as sensitive as this, knowing that Americans hold a wide range of views based on deeply held beliefs, maintaining our nation’s commitment to religious freedom is also vital,” Obama said. “How religious institutions define and consecrate marriage has always been up to those institutions.  Nothing about this decision — which applies only to civil marriages — changes that.”

This is all the confmation I need that this is exactly what they will do.

"They will ridicule Christian simplicity; they will call it folly and nonsense, but they will have the highest regard for advanced knowledge, and for the skill by which the axioms of the law, the precepts of morality, the Holy Canons and religious dogmas are clouded by senseless questions and elaborate arguments. As a result, no principle at all, however holy, authentic, ancient, and certain it may be, will remain free of censure, criticism, false interpretations, modification and delimitation by man." - Ven. Bartholomew Holzhauser.

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/pat-archbold/marriage-is-dead-and-the-church-is-next

DOMA: Defense of Marriage Act美國聯邦法案，規定美國中央政府在福利給付上，只承認異性婚姻。其主要條款已被美國最高法院認定違憲。-- 卜凱

Marriage Wins, Scalia Loses

The Editor, The Bloomberg View, 06/27/13

It didn’t take long for the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision affirming same-sex marriage to be dismissed as “legalistic argle-bargle.” It’s right there on page 22 of Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent, which shows that the debate is far from over.

Leave it to others -- such as President Barack Obama, the hundreds gathered outside the court, the millions of same-sex couples who will now have marriage rights, and the majority of Americans who support the right of gay people to marry -- to celebrate the court’s decisions today. Celebrate they should: By invalidating a federal law that denied benefits to same-sex spouses and allowing same-sex marriage to proceed in California, the court took a momentous step forward for the cause of civil rights and equal treatment under the law.

Scalia is having none of it. The court’s 5-4 decision in the case striking down the federal Defense of Marriage Act, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, reduced Scalia to fits of italicized rage.

The first half of his remarkable 26-page dissent is a sarcastic yet principled complaint that the court shouldn’t have taken the case of U.S. v. Windsor in the first place. Both the U.S. (in the form of the Justice Department) and Windsor (Edith Windsor, a married lesbian who won her suit against the U.S. over a tax she wouldn’t have had to pay if her spouse had been a man) “agree that the court below got it right; and they agreed in the court below that the court below that one got it right,” Scalia writes. “What, then, are we doing here?”

Moral Judgment

He’s just warming up. Once Scalia wades into the merits of the case, besides making sophisticated legal arguments about argle-bargle (if you don’t have your copy of the OED handy: “disputatious argument, bandying of words, wrangling”), he mostly disputes the majority’s characterization of his view. He and his fellow opponents of same-sex marriage are not “unhinged members of a wild-eyed lynch mob.” They are not “enemies of the human race.” He resents having to listen to “a lecture on how superior the majority’s moral judgment” is.

Thus does Scalia capture two strains of the argument made by opponents of same-sex marriage: One, why are you forcing this issue on me? And two, why do you assume that I am a bigot?

On the first count, he may have a point, albeit a legalistic one. And at least he is consistent: He joined the court’s other decision today about same-sex marriage, in which it declined to rule on the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage. A federal judge had already overruled the ban, so in effect same-sex marriages will be allowed to proceed in California.

Outside the realm of the law, it’s pretty hard to make the case that same-sex marriage has forced its way onto the public agenda. It has been gaining public support, especially among the young, for more than half a decade.

Scalia’s larger worry, if that is the correct term, is that the court’s rulings will result in “a judicial distortion of our society’s debate over marriage.” It’s a cousin to the argument Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made last year about Roe v. Wade: that the 1973 decision legalizing abortion “moved too far, too fast,” short-circuiting the political process.

The more likely peril for the future of the marriage debate is the one Scalia’s dissent so vividly illustrates: that it will be reduced to name-calling and motive-questioning.

Dignity Matters

Same-sex marriage is more than just a legal or political issue. As Kennedy’s decision is at some pains to explain, it is also a matter of dignity -- he uses his favorite word nine times -- and, not to put too fine a point on it, morality. One of Congress’s purposes with the Defense of Marriage Act, he writes, was to express a “moral disapproval of homosexuality.”

Not every public-policy debate can be reduced to questions of morality. But some can, and the one about same-sex marriage comes close. Scalia’s dissent gets it exactly wrong: If anything, Kennedy’s opinion doesn’t go far enough. If gay people deserve the right to marry, why should that right be restricted to only 12 states plus the District of Columbia?

The answer, of course, is that the politics of civil rights are messy, and progress isn’t always linear. The same applies to judicial logic. As the debate about marriage proceeds, all sides would do well to remember that.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-26/marriage-wins-scalia-loses.html