Into the Fray

Daffyd has posted a provocative piece about gay marriage.  He suggests that legalizing gay marriage is a mistake and supports the idea that there are predictable unintended consequences that make it problematic for society over-all.  He raises questions about some of the postulates of the gay marriage proponents:

Here are the myths:
1. Allowing same-sex couples to marry will extend the same civilizing effects of marriage to gays; isn't that good for society?
2. Gays don't choose their sexual orientation any more than straights do, so a ban on same-sex marriage is just as discriminatory as a racial ban.
3. You can't point to any specific marriage that will be damaged by allowing gays to marry, so obviously it won't have any impact on society at large, either; there is a natural tendency to pair up; people will still get married, so what's the big deal?

I have already pointed out in long ago posts that the second point produces a logical inconsistency at the heart of PC-thought which has never been addressed by its proponents.  In Political Religion, I wrote about the contradiction between asserting (with no apparent evidence) that homosexuality is an in-born, genetically determined orientation and the feminist assertion that gender is a social determined construct. 

Both ideas can't be true (and in fact, gender orientation is an extremely complex outcome of the interplay of innate constitutional characteristics and the vicissitudes of psychological development):

In effect, the meme suggests that there are no inherent differences (Nature) between men and women and all differences in outcome can be attributed to social influences (Nurture).  If you have any doubts that this is a religious belief rather than a fact based opinion, do the following thought experiment.  Imagine yourself in a room full of Homosexual activists.  Imagine yourself giving a talk in which you suggest that Homosexuality is the outcome of a complex interaction between a child's inherent constitutional make up (Nature), including the structure of his brain, and his emotional development in relation to his early childhood and parenting experiences (Nurture).  The idea that Homosexuality is genetic (any time you read that something is "genetic" take it with  a large grain of salt; as I once read, genes encode for proteins, not behavior) is a "given", scarcely more open to discussion than the idea that women and men are not equal.

In Proof of the Obvious, I returned to the theme of gender differences.  While the research I cited from a summary article in Scientific American does not directly relate to the question of genetic predispositions to homosexuality, it does give a sense of the differences in mental and neurological orientation of men and women and should give some pause in assuming that we can ever easily answer the question of the etiology of homosexuality.

There is no question boys and girls are wired differently.  We pay attention to different things, from birth, and organize our perceptions in different ways.  We think differently.  In some areas, it is almost certain men think, and problem solve,  more effectively; in other areas, it is almost certain that women think, and problem solve, more effectively.  The feminists would have it that we can not look at these differences or discuss these differences, but this approach will lead us to neglect what should be the obvious outcome.  We need to know better how men and women think; only then can we discover how to maximize the brainpower both bring to the table.