Following on from this thread of Triskadecamus, suppose that a gay gene is isolated and detectable.
Rather than an abort/full-term choice, also suppose that there is a a gene therapy available, which can be effectively administered in utero or to neonates. Moreover it’s effect is permanent and inherited by any offspring, although reversible by further therapy if desired.
Should such therapy be publicly available, subject to restrictions or, outlawed altogether?
What would your attitude be?
What you’re proposing is essentially branding ‘gayness’ as an abnormality or a disease, like smallpox, that we would be able to wipe out/vaccinate against. Which is all well and good, except the world is still full of gay people and you’ve just put back our social acceptance by about 500 years by treating our lives as some kind of disease to be got rid of.
Suppose you could do the same with genes for hair and eye color. We aren’t necessarily talking about branding gayness a disease, as much as we are talking about being able to control the genetics of your child. You can choose blonde and blue eyes and straight. You can choose gay and tall… It depends on how it is treated by society. If society chooses to treat gayness as an abnormality (and, as pro-gay as I am, I hope my children are straight, it isn’t a “choice” I’d make for them - while I have gay friends living wonderful lives, I know that it isn’t pain free)…
I hope, that by the time such therapy is available (if it ever were available) that socieity will have made more progress towards accepting gay people - we’ve made great strides in accepting redheads…
If it’s safe I don’t see a reason to restrict it, as long as it’s not forced on pregnant women.
By “therapy” do you mean you’re fixing or improving something? And, what?
I think at least the 4 major sexual orientations are all necessary. Note that it wasn’t all that long ago that men weren’t a known technical necessity.
>If it’s safe I don’t see a reason to restrict it…
How would we feel about a gene therepy that makes one slavishly devoted to one’s parents? Are we glad such a gene therepy wasn’t available when our own parents conceived?
I think this is a more serious question than you’re giving the OP credit for. This gene “therapy” is coming, sooner or later. Sevastopol is asking a legitimate question about it. Perhaps this would be better in GD, though.
I think the word “therapy” is used in a strictly medical sense here. A procedure is diagnostic, one which you are attempting to ascertain the patient’s state by performing an X-ray or a blood test or a DNA swab or a biopsy, or it is therapeutic, which is an attempt to correct, adjust, change, or affect the patient.
Personally, I think that a so-called “anti-gay” gene therapy should be available to those mothers who want it. Considering that I was born with a genetically defective liver which has cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, kidney failure, two transplant surgeries, and a year on expensive dialysis treatments, I wish someone had been able to spot that earlier and had saved me a lot of trouble in my life.
However, there’s no telling what kind of effect that kind of therapy would have on a society if used on a widespread scale. I believe it should be restricted to treating known conditions that affect health and welfare of the patient, rather than cosmetic adjustments.
Any chance of finding and eliminating the Republican gene? :eek: :smack:
I’m not sure what you mean by this. In the Middle Ages, it was thought that the mass of growth that grows into a child was entirely from the semen and that the woman was merely the incubator.
This is off topic, but I’m looking forward to a world where humans have grown up and don’t care if people are gay, straight or bi.
>wasn’t all that long ago that men weren’t a known technical necessity
I mean several primitive societies still around while I was reading books about them did not completely accept that men were part of the reproductive process. For example, I read that Australian aboriginals did not (at the time of writing of the book) believe men were needed, just that they were often involved playing some kind of helpful influential role. It’s not a trivial thing to figure out that men contribute to reproduction. Females keep getting taller and more experienced and they show secondary sex characteristics and they learn certain roles and they date and they get pregnant. Maybe they have sex, maybe not - there are jealosies to guard against, so maybe you don’t know. In all this mixed bag, which things were needed and which weren’t in order for pregnancy to happen?
So maybe homosexuals play some critical role we still don’t know about in the reproductive process. For example recent research shows that male homosexuality is much liklier in male children who have several older brothers. Something automatically increases the liklihood they are homosexual. Why? They aren’t liklier to miscarry. Apparently they give some evolutionary advantage to the species, but I haven’t heard what.
I’m for creating more gay people. Let’s work on a therapy for that!
That would actually help ease population pressures, if fewer people were having sex that might make accidental babies.
I too think this is a subject of serious debate. I don’t think gayness is a disease or that it should be eradicated, but at a very basic level, it is a sub-optimal condition for one of our two basic urges - survival and making new copies of ourselves.
This reminds me of the discussions we’ve had about deaf people and deaf culture. Normal-hearing people just assume that deafness is a problem, and of course we should fix anybody we can so they aren’t deaf any more (or in utero if we get that far), but members of the deaf community have a very different opinion on “fixing” deafness.
My vote on gay therapy - my jury is still out. It’s much more complicated than “gay is bad and should be fixed.”
I’d argue that we “reproduce” not only by popping out children but by providing services such as education and childrearing.
And: I know a huge number of gay people with children (not to mention bi people). Gay = childles is not at all a tidy correlation.
I’am all for producing more gay people too. Wonderful, self assured , committed gay folks. And I am all for a society that accepts them.
As for the gay gene, I can’t say. If I could choose an olive skinned, raven haired , brown eyed child to look like Naveen Andrews you bet I would do it in a heartbeat. Would I be wrong? I don’t think so.
If there is a therapy in the future to retain/regress gayness I suppose that is up to the parents. And Og have mercy on their souls.
I’ve been thinking this over since my illuminating non-response yesterday. Gene therapy in general I’m happy with. Eliminating the “gay gene,” no.
Either we have a certain number of gay people because our society needs them and our genetics evolved so; or because our genetics evolved so and there is no selective pressure to get rid of them. At best, we need gays; at worst, gays do no harm.
Cold-hearted? Yeah. But who am I to think I know better than 100,000 years of natural selection? God doesn’t consult me about bird calls or mackerel instincts or tiger stripes, either, why should I have a say in this?
A diverse list of responses! A few found things in the op that weren’t even there too. Anyway to simplify: The what-if supposes parents can discover and can select the sexuality of their child.
I think of it like the circumcision question. A cruel and needless act to interfere with the child’s bodily integrity. Just because it’s ‘inside’ and done with a needle wouldn’t make it much different from something outside with a blade.
To continue, when possible it should be a choice left to the child concerned, when that child is competent to make such a choice.
But we play god all the time, though. Everybody with diabetes or who needs surgery or a blood transfusion would die if we didn’t.
That would never be possible. Sexuality is not something determined by genetics alone; it is as complex as anything else about human personality and behaviour. From what I have observed in the world, the majority of people have the capacity for queerness in varying degrees; whether they act on it, and how integral it is to their happiness, is influenced by countless factors, both internal and external.