Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Fruit Flies in the Castro
The boffins at University of Illinois at Chicago have figured out how to make fruit-flies gay, and how to turn them back again. It's very interesting to me because the human gay population for years argued that being gay wasn't genetic, because they didn't want to suffer Mengele-esque attempts to be cured. I always thought this was an unfortunate policy, since the argument "hey, this's how we are, and that's just the way it is" is a much better argument for acceptance vis-a-vis natural rights, &c. than "hey, it's a valid lifestyle choice" (since anything that's a choice is subject to slippery-slope arguments such as whether polygamy/polyandry, consensual teacher-student relationships, &c. should also be allowed). Ammunition for the "that's nature, get over it" crowd has just come through with variably, tunably gay fruit-flies -- if the mechanisms that determine sexual orientation become sufficiently widely understood, then those who feel that things should be otherwise can take it up with their creator, whereas the rest of us can move on and start making the appropriate societal decisions.
5 comments:
I always thought that the Sodom and Gomorrah (sp) stories were about gang-rape and people so obscene that they would violate hospitality...
Oh. Oh, my.
No, this is going to come out for other reasons: if the folks in the Castro can point to sexual behavior as genetic, then they WILL, not may, win the argument that they have the right to marry, etcetera, under the Equal Protection clause to the Constitution.
Cue D.C. catfight in five, four...
Not yet. The biologists are the first to point out the vast difference in complexity between us and the fruit fly.
This is good, because otherwise insect parthenogenesis would be considered sufficient proof of the virgin-birth of JC....
But it leans much more heavily in that direction. Honestly, though, anyone without an agenda must find Henry Rollin's argument convincing anyway.
that being...
It's on his spoken-word album Think Tank: in a nutshell, any straight person who thinks homosexuality is a choice should simply consider what it would take to make him or her choose the other option.
I think most of us would rather be force-fed liver & onions every hour on the hour for five years while having to listen to Barry Manilowe albums at 90 decibels.
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