The comparison is inapt because most of those reasons have to do with the convenience and happiness of the parents. It is only in the case where people take the anti-female pill for the benefit of the child that the comparison holds water - and, while it is possible some may, your link doesn’t demonstrate that this is the majority position, or even a significant one.
This is a potential detriment to be sure, but even if it occurs, it is a detriment to society as a whole, not to the individual child receiving the shot - who will, of course, not personally suffer from that increase in bigotry.
By contrast, having too disproportinate a number of males around is a detriment to the individual males, as they will face increased competition for mates (assuming same distribution of hetero, etc.).
Racial and ethnic issues are different, for the reasons I’ve already stated - namely, that parents have an interest in having children who at least somewhat resemble them, and children have that interest as well. Many children would find it upsetting to be (say) Black if their parents were White, or vice versa - nothing to do with racism, more to do with family legacy.
I strongly feel that the proper societal response to bigotry is to try to educate people and stamp out bigotry. We don’t win by caving in to the bigots’ demands.
Also, having an injection to “cure” or prevent homosexuality would not decrease anti-gay bigotry overall. If anything, it would increase the amount of bigotry. Imagine what will happen to the gay kids whose parents didn’t want or didn’t have access to the shot. It’s horrible enough being bullied or persecuted because you are gay - now imagine if the bigots feel “justified” in their harassment, because hey! you could have prevented this if you wanted!
I think the proper way to stop being feeling wrong or ashamed due to those “hardships” is to change the environment and decrease the amount of bigotry and hate in the world, not tinkering with fetal physiology.
I’d say the time isn’t behind us yet. But if this shot came into being, it would never be behind us. I would raise my hypothetical child in a loving environment regardless of their sexuality, and I avoid socializing with homophobic assholes, and as I live in Canada that has had gay marriage for quite some time without the world ending and I think the future will trend even more towards equality for all sexual orientations, why would I want to do something that’s a backward step?
IANA Christian - in fact, I’m an agnostic/atheist (depending on the your semantic bent). As has been well-documented, in America atheists are viewed with much suspicion, the majority of Americans would not vote for one for President and there are numerous examples of atheists being subject to social ostracism and opprobrium just for having the nerve to not believe in God.
Now, it is entirely possible that someday my daughter may live in the US (she is a US citizen as well as a UK one). By the OP’s reasoning, in order to save my daughter from future bigotry I should be raising her as a devout Christian. As long as she’s not part of an extreme church she should be fine - a member of the majority and part of the default belief structure of the nation. With no real worries about actual persecution or bigotry, she’d be set for life.
Never mind that from my point of view it would require lying to her about some rather fundamental views of my own, nor that I would rather she grow up to make up her own mind about what she believes. Nope - I can’t take that chance. It’s off to Bible school now, lest she start doubting the True Word of God and thus jeopardizing her future happiness.
And the best part is that it doesn’t even require a magic injection. **I could literally do this now! ** What a terrible parent I am, that I haven’t done this already.
Some of them do and those also translate into inconvenience to the children. Since this whole discussion is predicated on the notion that if a parent feels that a homosexual child will potentially be more unhappy than a hetero child, all one needs to do is to say that in a society where the parents could potentially feel that a female child would be potentially more unhappy than a male one and then that justifies their choosing the all male pill.
So the comparison does hold water - the fact of the matter is that for this discussion it doesn’t matter at all what the majority reason the people in those societies make their choices. It’s a red herring, really, since one could simply say that they feel that being a female in those societies is a detriment and that a loving parent would want to ensure their child to have as many opportunities as possible. So a loving parent would pick the all male pill.
This position undermines your prior contention since it emphasizes that all that is important is the individual faced with the choice of the shot. If the individual feels that a female child would be less happy, then the all male shot is the way to go.
Further, your point that I was responding to was with regard to society as a whole (not the individual homosexual, as getting rid of undesirables could translate to increased bigotry towards more than just homosexuals), which you again emphasize in your next paragraph below:
This presupposes that males and females would perfectly pair up, which isn’t simply isn’t the case. In 50/50 distributions (or near enough) there is already competition for mates.
So this doesn’t seem to be a real factor.
They are different in this society, which underscores the point. In 100 years there could be no bigotry towards homosexuality at all, therefore no one would think about taking the shot. My point is that you are being subjective - introducing your specific cultural baggage and ignoring the ramifications of other cultural baggage (ie, societies where it’s disadvantageous to be a women).
Further, we are talking about subjective values, so your point about what some parents might value is negated since some parents might value white children higher - say in an 1800’s society.
At the end of the day you are filtering your views through that of what you perceive your culture to be. If you introduce these miracle pills to other times/periods with other cultural views you throw up arguments that do not stick - or at least they would not appear to stick to a large portion of the population.
This is a salient point. Instead of trying to actually do something to help society accept a potentially homosexual child (or an undesirable child of some other trait), what some people are advocating is to accept the bigotry - to not accept your child as they are. I can only see this as leading to further and further ‘selections’. I cannot see how overall bigotry of not only homosexuals but of other undesirable traits would not increase.
We should not put such irrational qualifiers on what constitutes ‘our children’ for us to love them. All such a pill would be doing is gambling on the child’s potential happiness and increasing overall bigotry (at best as far as I can see).
So many Dopers talk about their tormented childhoods of nerddom and geekery as they were bullied and harassed constantly, and a lot of those Dopers ascribe the horrible treatment to how smart they are. So, if we’re making sure to avoid that trauma, maybe we need to make sure our kids are completely average in intelligence, and we need to burn every copy of LOTR.
Disagree. The issue really boils down to this: ‘should I do what I think will give my child on average the best chance of happiness, or should I do what I think is best for society as a whole and my own concience?’
So motives matter, very much.
Again, I state that the debate basically boils down to what’s best for society/concience vs. what’s best for the individual child.
This is just plain factually wrong. Gender imbalance is already a serious concern in places like China.
Well of course this discussion is taking place in our society complete with its social baggage, and not in some hypothetical other society in which bigotry doesn’t exist.
The influences at work here is stuff like Dan Savage’s campaign to reduce the plague of gay teen suicides and the like.
According to Dan, gay teens are four times more likely than non-gays to attempt suicide. Obviously, that isn’t any sort of immutable law, it’s the result of the imperfections of our society; when our society changes, that number will, hopefully, also change and indeed any such distinction become irrellevant.
The argument is that it is better to work towards eliminating bigotry altogether than to cave to it by eliminating the chance that your kid would face it - and indeed, by caving to it, one is to an extent perpetuating it.
That argument is perfectly valid, but it presupposes putting the best interests of society as a whole over those of one’s kid.
I can see reasonable arguments in either direction, but to my mind - having a kid - the interests of the child should come before those of society.
It would be no different if (for example) there was an unreasonable, irrational prejudice in some society against red hair. Having a kid with red hair would presumably go some way towards fighting that prejudice, but the cost (if any) would be mostly borne by the kid. Since presumably most people have no particular interest in ensuring hair-colour - no ancestral inclination like ethnicity - why not have a blonde or brunette, if the choice was magically yours without any consequence?
Does it really have to be an either or position? Can’t I live in acceptance in my part of the world, even if I prefer my own kid did not have to face bigotry from something I could have prevented?
No, the enlightened people who invented this treatment will just eliminate prisons and re-institute penal slavery instead; and give them an injection that makes them into happy slaves.
I’m not sure sticking to either one helps your case. If it’s the former, then obviously a parent could justify the male only shot. If it’s the latter, then a person could say they shouldn’t administer the shot because it would ultimately be detrimental to society.
Okay?
For the individual, one could rationalize a male only pill as being best for their child.
For society, it could be best not to administer the hetero pill, since it could lead to increased bigotry.
It’s plain wrong, eh?
So everyone who wants a mate has one?
If I go out to a club to pick up a mate, I have no competition for that mate?
After all, I specifically said:
*This presupposes that males and females would perfectly pair up, which isn’t simply isn’t the case. In 50/50 distributions (or near enough) there is already competition for mates. *
My point was that just because there is a 50/50 split, that doesn’t mean you are going to get a mate or have no competition for a mate.
So then why encourage the bigotry? I don’t see a reason to.
I’m aware of this and I’m aware of bigotry in society.
Sort of, it’s not clear that just because a kid is a homosexual therefore he/she will be suicidal, even if the rates is 4 to 1.
Okay, then by this rational, one is perfectly fine in choosing to have the all male pill.
In 1800’s America, one would be perfectly fine in choosing to have the all white pill.
I suppose my concern is not the red hair, but why the irrational prejudice exists. Just because we eliminate red hair, doesn’t mean we’ve eliminated irrational prejudice.
If not red hair, then perhaps it would move to blonde hair. Then we develop a pill to get rid of blonde hair.
In the end, I just want to love my kid, I do not want to the bullies in society to influence my decision.
That’s on you. I cannot speak for you.
Suppose for a moment that there was such a pill, you gave it to your child, and the pill didn’t work.
I did this, in a way. Due to a genetic disease, my husband felt pretty strongly about not biologically contributing to our son. We used a sperm donor to conceive him. You get a lot of information from the sperm bank, though not sexual orientation (which, now that I think about it, is interesting). I did deliberately chose a white, highly educated donor with good test scores and degrees in the sorts of subjects that my husband and I study. But I also chose a thin donor, because I have trouble managing my weight and I wanted to spare my son that if I could. I’d like to say that was because of the health implications, but even putting those aside, I still would have chosen a thin donor: the social burden of being fat is enough for me to prefer to stack the odds against it.
I am not sure if I’d get a “gay shot”–I agree with Dseid that you’d need to talk to a lot of gay people to see what the consensus there is–but I wonder if the people that are so appalled at the idea also think I should have refused to read the dossiers of all those donors and just rolled the dice. What criteria are ok to screen for and which mean your love is conditional?
This reminds me of the story where the king was naked and only a child could supposedly see it. Gays deserve equal everything including respect. But I still see it as a defect. If you are born with certain equipment and the brain doesn’t want to run it then something got shorted out. No fault, gays seem to have a multitude of blessings that go with this, intelligence, creativeness etc. But something still is out of wack, I want my child in wack if possible.
I wonder if there are people in this thread who would purposely have a gay child. As in, somehow select it. Some deaf parents have deaf children on purpose…and it made me wonder if there were gay people who would have gay children.
Huh. I would have said, if there was a shot for making my kid left-handed, I’d take that one. All the left-handers I know are crazy brilliant.
(What’s that? You say I’m reasoning from anecdotal evidence and a biased sample, and correlation doesn’t imply causation? Ah, I say. That’s because I’m right-handed!)