Sexual Reorientation: The gay culture war is about to turn chemical:
If the idea of chemically suppressing homosexuality in the womb horrifies you, I have bad news: You won’t be in the room when it happens. Parents control medical decisions, and surveys indicate that the vast majority of them would be upset to learn that their child was gay. Already, millions are screening embryos and fetuses to eliminate those of the “wrong” sex. Do you think they won’t screen for the “wrong” sexual orientation, too?
Liberals are slow to see what’s coming. They’re still fighting the culture war. The Toronto Star, like other papers, finds a neuroscientist who thinks the new study “should erode the moral judgments often made against homosexual preferences and rebut any argument that it is a mere a lifestyle choice.” Well, yes. But then what? The reduction of homosexuality to neurobiology doesn’t mean your sexual orientation can’t be controlled. It just means the person controlling it won’t be you.
I doubt it will be just sexual orientation. Future Pundit has been discussing the implications of cognitive modifications for children for years. One’s personality and outlook are the outcome of a host of fixed parameters* (biology) modulated by environmental inputs (socialization, etc.); for generations parents have been obsessed with controlling and shaping the latter. With the rise of lobotomization you saw the demand for a change in the hardware, and the popularity of drugs such as Prozac has normalized lifestyle experimentation with brain chemistry.
Homosexuality is a hot-button issue that is in the public eye. But it isn’t the only personality & social trait which is strongly contingent upon the biological parameters, it’s just the boundary condition. The gay culture war seems to me to be fading into the past, but we’re going to open a far broader and significant engagement with nature in the near future. I think an irony in this is that traditionally cultural radicals have been the biggest proponents of encouraging individuals to deviate from their God-given inclinations, but the reality that a disproportionate number of such radicals are among the childless and cultural conservatives are among the childed suggests to me that we may see a blossoming of the “squares” in the future as deviations from the norm of the human tapestry get “evened” out.**
* Some of these parameters are obviously probabilistic, though the probability probably emerges out of our ignorance of other interacting parameters which also vary.
** I don’t think being a cultural conservative entails an aversion to biochemical modification as evidenced by the widespread acceptability of formerly exotic interventions such as in vitro fertilization.
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