Overview

This majority of the text below was written in 1999 as part of a project for one of my undergraduate Philosophy seminars. It was later submitted and reviewed by the American Philosophical Association, who considered publishing it in one of their journals—Philosophy of the Gay and Lesbian Experience, I believe it was called—but those plans eventually fell through due to length and other issues. (In other words, there are no copyright issues with me posting it here.)

The paper is recreated below with its original title, but I have edited some of the content for relevance and to bring it a bit more up-to-date. However, most of the issues I discussed in 1999 are still quite palpable today, especially in the South.

The crux of this essay is this: For some time, the main argument against religious fundamentalists and in defense of gay rights has been, essentially "Hey, we're born this way, so screw you." While this argument does raise a few interesting points (e.g. if we do not accept that a loving God would create people who are hardwired to sin, then perhaps homosexuality is not a "sin" at all), it is no where near adequate for addressing the issue and, in my opinion, it does more harm than good.

There are several reasons why this argument is a bad one, the least of which not being that it provides little or no shelter for members of the bisexual and transgendered communities. If, as the argument implies, it is okay to be gay because one is "born that way," then the contrapositive must also be implied: if one is not "born gay," then s/he has no moral basis for justifying a lifestyle other than plain old vanilla heterosexuality. By ascribing the moral acceptability of certain sexual orientations to a gene (or set of genes), we continue the perception that there is a "natural way" to have sex and, depending on one's genome, deviance from that natural way is grounds for being branded immoral.

Furthermore, the Argument from Genetics (as I will come to call it) ignores the fact that many fundamentalist Christian organizations (such as P-FOX) already accept that sexuality is ingrained within our genes, making them immune to any persuasive powers this argument might have had. In the end, the argument is divisive (drawing lines between who has the "gay gene" and who does not) and accomplishes little, which leads me in the end to suggest that it be abandoned altogether.

In an attempt to mold a competing argument, I reach back to one of my favorite philosophers, John Stuart Mill, and invoke his Harm Principle, which basically states, "It is ethical to do X if and only if X harms no one else. Furthermore, it is unethical to stop a person from doing X if X is not harming anybody." I will later refer to this argument as the "Argument from the Lack of Harm" (in retrospect, a fairly boring name, I must admit), suggesting that gay rights advocates cling more to the ethos of Mill's Harm Principle than to the shaky foundation provided by the Argument from Genetics.

In the end, the point of this exercise is to determine (1) despite its early success in persuading individuals that homosexuality is not a sin, does the Argument from Genetics continue to serve a useful purpose; and (2) does an alternate argument exist that can be used to both further the agenda of human rights activists and persuade individuals who haven't yet made up their minds to move toward tolerance, without unnecessarily dividing the gay/les/bi/trans communities?