2:00pm | No one really knows how specific sexual preferences are formed. There is no doubt that the sex drive is instinctual, a necessary evolutionary mechanism for almost every animal species. But that tells us only about the feral drive to “do it,” and not so much about with whom.
The “nature versus nurture” debate is over. Animal brains are shaped through a combination of gene formation and response to environmental stimuli, with the latter literally affecting how neurons grow and array themselves. The more complex the animal’s brain, the greater the factor played by this epigenetic influence.
Needless to say, the human brain is as or more complex than any on Earth. This means that for us there is no avoiding the predicament of contingency. We are largely the product of our experiences. Had our experiences been different, so would we. Example: I speak English with relative ease. Yet there’s no “English-speaking” gene. I speak English for two reasons: 1) I was born with the genetic predisposition to acquire language (sometimes referred to as the “language faculty”), and 2) from earliest infancy English was the language of my milieu. All other things being equal, had I been raised in Japan I would speak Japanese with the same ease with which I do English; but as it happened not only do I speak no Japanese, but experience has “hard-wired” my brain so that many of the subtle sounds vocalized in the Japanese language are not fully salient to me1.
The implications for sexuality are obvious, at least if you grasp that the brain is an integrated whole, and that despite its having specific areas dedicated to certain functions (e.g., Wernicke’s area for sound perception) there is no specific “language area,” “sexual-preference area,” etc. Complex cerebral phenomena are (in the parlance of neuroscience) global phenomena.
Is there (to use a current colloquialism) a “gay gene”? We don’t know. But really, beyond scientific inquiry, we shouldn’t care. I cringe a bit whenever I hear proponents of gay rights talking about individuals being “born gay.” It’s not because I find the possibility dubious, but because it’s rather beside the point. Let’s say, for example, that indeed there is a genotype that tends to express as men exclusively finding men attractive2. Call this genotype G. In this hypothetical, while there is little doubt we would find that the majority of homosexual men have G, presumably on a planet of six billion people we would find at least some men lacking G who find only men attractive, just as we might find some men with G who fail to find men attractive, and yet more who might be asexual. This is to say nothing of the entire middle swath of the spectrum—men who are mostly attracted to women but attracted to certain men, and vice versa, etc.
An appropriate question here is: If G were proven to exist, would there be proponents of gay rights who would advocate for marriage equality only for persons who have G? I would hope not. That is discrimination based on birth traits—exactly the kind of bias I hope we are striving to escape.
For me the issue at the heart of Proposition 8 is not about genes but about all persons and peoples getting an equal shake from the government concerning life partnership.
In considering this issue, let’s wipe the marriage-qua-religious-institution argument off the slate—not because I’m mounting a contra argument about whether marriage innately is a religious institution (I would argue that marriage is what you make of it, as well as point out that a significant percentage of government-recognized marriages have no religious connotations whatsoever, but never mind), but because for the purposes of law it cannot be. While many religious adherents in the United States don’t like to hear it, our Founding Fathers explicitly intended that the government not involve itself in religious matters3.
To be sure, if we take the long view of history, traditionally marriage has been a religious institution. One might argue, then, that our government never should have gotten into the marriage business. If it hadn’t, then marriage could be a purely private matter, with some faiths willing to sanctify same-sex marriage, some not. But that ship has sailed. The government is firmly in the business of recognizing pairs of adults as a type of single entity, and thereby extending those pairs certain rights vis-à-vis each other, certain rights as a unit vis-à-vis the government, etc.
Why not be satisfied with “domestic partnership” or “civil unions” for same-sex couples? Because the “separate but equal” doctrine advanced in Plessy v. Ferguson is nearly as problematic in the world of government-recognized coupling as it was in the world of public education. The core problem here is simple: our system of government is set up on the premise that “all men are created equal,” and that there is one law common to us all. As soon as you place some individuals in one category and some in another concerning their participation in the exact same aspect of civic life, you are violating the praxis of all Americans enjoying and being subject to a single system of rights and laws.
Our American journey has gone in one overall direction here: refining our system so that equality is ever more broadly applied and available. “All men” has come for us to mean “all people.” We no longer extend voting rights only to males. We no longer suffer separate laws and codes for blacks and whites. We have enacted numerous pieces of legislation to protect individuals from institutional discrimination4. There is one Law of the Land, and it is meant for all.
Marriage is part of that Law of the Land, and thus it must be available equally to all. And since in the eyes of the legislature gender is irrelevant, gender cannot be brought into play when one individual becomes two, any more than there can be a different freedom of assembly for single-gender groups than there is for mixed-gender groups. There is simply a freedom of assembly that applies to all, because when the government extends a right, it does so irrespective of gender. So, too, with marriage. If it is a right, it is a right for all.
That is why the overturning of Proposition 8 is something to be gay about indeed, in Long Beach and throughout the country, your own sexual preference(s) notwithstanding. In the United States we celebrate not only the mere existence of diversity, but also that the elements making up that diversity are treated with inherent equality. That is our rainbow. That is the American dream. And last week we inched a little closer to it.
Footnotes
1 Although we now know that the brain remains plastic (as in ‘plasticity’) throughout life, the most up-to-date research seems to confirm that there are crucial windows for activating both the language facility in general and our abilities to grasp certain nuances of sound comprehension and formation idiosyncratic to each language, windows that close partway or even entirely relatively early in life.2 The near-uselessness of a generality such as “finding men attractive” serves to underline what a huge role contingency must play in sexuality, whether there is a “gay gene” or not, because of course no man finds all men (or all women, for that matter) attractive, but only specific individuals, types, etc.
3 On New Year’s Day of 1802, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the First Amendment “buil[t] a wall of separation between Church & State.” Of course, the First Amendment was penned by James Madison, so we ought to consider whether his take coheres with Jefferson’s. And what do you know? It does! For example, in 1820 he warned of “the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies” even “Strongly guarded as is the separation between religion and & Gov’t in the Constitution of the United States […].”
4 For various not-so-controversial reasons our system allows some age discrimination against minors to exist.