Gay people are not genetic aberrations

If you welcome research that says being gay results from genetic inheritance, don't be surprised when they start offering a 'cure'

By Nick Cohen, in the Observer, 15 February 2014


...If we were more scientifically literate, we would understand that gay equality suffered a second reverse while Putin was playing his propaganda games. Dr Michael Bailey, of Northwestern University, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago that genetics is responsible for determining between 30% or 40% of a population's variation in sexual preference.

That this news was not seen as grim is the result of one of the most curious intellectual somersaults of the past two decades. To generalise, the right once believed that success was down to biological inheritance. If a man became rich, it was because his superior capabilities led him to triumph in life's struggles. The left thought that if a woman stayed poor and her horizons were stunted, it was because society kept her in poverty and sexist prejudice limited her opportunities.

Yet liberals welcomed the announcement by the American geneticist Dean Hamer in 1993 that genes influenced homosexuality in men, and have cheered on variations on his theme ever since. True, the "discovery" perturbed homophobic clerics. You only have to search for "gay gene" and "Christian" or "Islam" to see their discomfort at the thought that homosexuality has "god-given" causes.

Although it is always worth tormenting small minds, point scoring was and remains a dangerous tactic.

I am not qualified to comment on the science. Geneticist Steve Jones is however. I found it hard to keep up as he poured out his scorn.

The "findings" at the American Association for the Advancement of Science were not findings at all. The promoters of the latest gay gene theory had not published a paper and therefore had not submitted their research to rigours of peer review.

[Read the whole article here]