'Gays Made, Not Born' - On the Confused State of the Religious Mind

Call it an easy target, blame me for going after the intellectually weak, but what is it about the Catholic pre-occupation with other people's sex lives and identities. And why are they consistently so confused both about the meaning of facts when it comes to sexual orientation as well as about the normative issues?

Jamaican Catholic Deacon Peter Espeut is as good an example as any to show what I am concerned about. Jamaica being a militantly anti-gay country where anti-gay discrimination was recently even enshrined in the country's constitution, courtesy to a large extent of campaigners like Catholic-Deacon-sociologist-turned-sex-expert Peter Espeut. Espeut writes in today's edition of the Jamaica Gleaner that gays are made, and that we are not born that way. Do read his contribution to public debate on that island to make sense of what follows below.

He takes the current absence of conclusive evidence of a genetic causation of homosexuality as evidence of a non-genetic causation of homosexuality. To give you just one example to illustrate how absurd this view of the nature of scientific inquiry is: According to Espeut's logic, HIV could not have been the cause of AIDS when it hadn't been discovered. Now, I am not suggesting that there is a genetic cause of sexual orientation, but to claim, as Espeut does, that it cannot have one because there isn't conclusive evidence at a certain point in time (ie today), is remarkably stupid. Perhaps that level of critical thinking skills is what predestines one to become a columnist for one of Jamaica's daily papers. Let's just note that this view on the causation issue constitutes a basic logic error and move on.

He then makes another logic error, and compounds it with plenty of excited exclamation marks. The exclamation marks have to do with not-blameworthy human characteristics such as the colour of our skin. As Espeut notes, 'we are born that way.' Implied is that we didn't choose to be that way, and that we are what we are in an immutable sense. Well, the thing is, there's plenty of things we have not chosen, yet they are immutable. Think about our language. Did we consciously choose it? Can we consciously dump it? Not quite. So, immutability is quite unrelated to the 'born that way' proposition. I do apologise for not using exclamation marks here, but do feel free to add them for emphasis in your mind.

Not surprisingly, Espeut being a sociologist, he then moves on to the next mistake, namely seeing the cause of sexual orientation in some parental behaviour. After all, having unjustifiably excluded genetic factors (and presumably, even though he doesn't say it, any number of possible non-social environmental factors), Espeut moves right on to his favourite possible causes of sexual orientation. Being a good sociologist he offers a lot of possible - but entirely speculative! - stuff, just in case.

He writes, 'But what causes gender-conforming and gender-non-conforming behaviour? Hormone imbalances may be one explanation. Others suggest that domineering mothers and ineffectual fathers may interfere with socialisation; and still others suggest that homosexuality may be triggered by having sexual encounters with members of one's own sex at an early age that prove to be very satisfying.'

As I noted before, Catholic Church staff and lay people have a perverse fascination with other people's sex lives. For the fun of it, let me note that 'hormone imbalances' invariably would invariably have causative genetic components. But hey, sociologists... - It is also worth noting that the language that is deployed here isn't exactly descriptive sociology, rather it is Catholic theology dressed up in pseudo-academic language. 'Domineering mothers', 'ineffectual fathers', plus (we are in Jamaica after all, so this still flies in public discourse) the invariable bullshit about pedophile homosexual grooming. Who, among serious sociologists or psychologists suggests the latter? Nobody that I'm am aware of. What is remarkable about Espeut's pet causes of homosexuality is that there is no more evidence for any of them then there is for his much-hated genetic causes. But that's what he believes in, so with all the weight that a degree in sociology and deaconessing in the Catholic Church provides, much credence is given to these baseless claims about the causes of homosexuality.

Espeut concludes thus, 'Let us not fall into line with 'gay-rights' propaganda by speaking as if LGBT behaviour is normal and natural. Unless you want to say that improper socialisation and dysfunctionality are normal and acceptable.' I have alerted you already to the Deacon's favourite rhetorical tool of using pejorative language ('improper', 'dysfunctional' etc) where argument would be required. Let me address the issue of homosexuality being abnormal and unnatural issue by copying here content from a Hastings Center Report article I published back in 1997. It's still true and shows us how little progress has been made on this subject matter. The fundamentalist religious in the world will turn around and continue their little flat-earth tirades as if nothing had happened at all. And mass media still give them outlets to vent their rage instead of asking them to seek professional help.

'Why is there a dispute as to whether homosexuality is natural or normal? We suggest it is because many people seem to think that nature has a prescriptive normative force such that what is deemed natural or normal is necessarily good and therefore ought to be. Everything that falls outside these terms is constructed as unnatural and abnormal, and it has been argued that this constitutes sufficient reason to consider homosexuality worth avoiding.[16] Arguments that appeal to 'normality' to provide us with moral guidelines also risk committing the naturalistic fallacy. The naturalistic fallacy is committed when one mistakenly deduces from the way things are to the way they ought to be. For instance, Dean Hamer and colleagues commit this error in their Science article when they state that "it would be fundamentally unethical to use such information to try to assess or alter a person's current or future sexual orientation, either heterosexual or homosexual, or other normal attributes of human behavior."[17] Hamer and colleagues believe that there is a major genetic factor contributing to sexual orientation. From this they think it follows that homosexuality is normal, and thus worthy of preservation. Thus they believe that genetics can tell us what is normal, and that the content of what is normal tells us what ought to be. This is a typical example of a naturalistic fallacy. Normality can be defined in a number of ways, but none of them direct us in the making of moral judgments. First, normality can be reasonably defined in a descriptive sense as a statistical average. Appeals to what is usual, regular, and/or conforming to existing standards ultimately collapse into statistical statements. For an ethical evaluation of homosexuality, it is irrelevant whether homosexuality is normal or abnormal in this sense. All sorts of human traits and behaviors are abnormal in a statistical sense, but this is not a sufficient justification for a negative ethical judgment about them. Second, 'normality' might be defined in a functional sense, where what is normal is something that has served an adaptive function from an evolutionary perspective. This definition of normality can be found in sociobiology, which seeks biological explanations for social behavior. There are a number of serious problems with the sociobiological project.[18] For the purposes of this argument, however, suffice it to say that even if sociobiology could establish that certain behavioral traits were the direct result of biological evolution, no moral assessment of these traits would follow. To illustrate our point, suppose any trait that can be reasonably believed to have served an adaptive function at some evolutionary stage is normal. Some questions arise that exemplify the problems with deriving normative conclusions from descriptive science. Are traits that are perpetuated simply through linkage to selectively advantageous loci less 'normal' than those for which selection was direct? Given that social contexts now exert 'selective pressure' in a way that nature once did, how are we to decide which traits are to be intentionally fostered? Positions holding the view that homosexuality is unnatural, and therefore wrong also inevitably develop incoherencies. They often fail to explicate the basis upon which the line between natural and unnatural is drawn. More importantly, they fail to explain why we should consider all human-made or artificial things as immoral or wrong. These views are usually firmly based in a non-empirical, prescriptive interpretation of nature rather than a scientific descriptive approach. They define arbitrarily what is natural and have to import other normative assumptions and premises to build a basis for their conclusions. For instance, they often claim that an entity called "God" has declared homosexuality to be unnatural and sinful.[19] Unfortunately, these analyses have real-world consequences. In Singapore, unnatural acts are considered a criminal offence, and "natural intercourse" is arbitrarily defined as "the coitus of the male and female organs." A recent High Court decision there declared oral sex "unnatural," and therefore a criminal offence, unless it leads to subsequent reproductive intercourse.

In the United States, several scholars and lesbian and gay activists have argued that establishing a genetic basis for sexual orientation will help make the case for lesbian and gay rights. The idea is that scientific research will show that people do not choose their sexual orientations and therefore they should not be punished or discriminated against in virtue of them. This general argument is flawed in several ways.[23] First, we do not need to show that a trait is genetically determined to argue that it is not amenable to change at will. This is clearly shown by the failure rates of conversion therapies.[24] These failures establish that sexual orientation is resistant to change, but they do not say anything about its ontogeny or etiology. Sexual orientation can be unchangeable without being genetically determined. There is strong observational evidence to support the claim that sexual orientation is difficult to change, but this evidence is perfectly compatible with non-genetic accounts of the origins of sexual orientations. More importantly, we should not embrace arguments that seek to legitimate homosexuality by denying that there is any choice in sexual preference because the implicit premise of such arguments is that if there was a choice, then homosexuals would be blameworthy.

Catholic Church is at it again and Iran doesn't fail us either

There was an opportunity, and senior Catholic Church management grabbed it. As is routine in Catholic agitprop, disasters are being used to ruminate about God's punishment for human failings (aka 'sins'). Well, the Love Parade (a pretty pointless commercial music festival in Germany) recently translated into 21 deaths and hundreds of injured people. Official investigations are still ongoing as to who should be held responsible for these deaths and injuries.

Well, God man and Salzburg's archbishop Andreas Laun said in a commentary the following (the translation is mine and, as you know, I'm not a certified interpreter, so check for the original German language text here): 'The Love Parade and the participation in it, leaving aside its disgusting imagery, are objectively a kind of insurrections against the Creation and God's order. They are sin and invitation to sin.' As our God man knows, there has been public uproar in the past when his organization decided that this and this or she and he had been sinful or sinners and deserving of God's punishment. This time then he's a bit smarter and leaves open the question of whether the deaths are God's punishment for the young people's participation in the Love Parade (really nothing much other than an open air music festival). Instead Mr Laun goes on ruminating about why people reject the idea of a punishing God. He concludes eventually that there is a punishing God and that God punishes out of 'love'. We should not then reject the idea that what happened in Duisburg, including the 21 deaths and more than 500 serious injured Love Parade attendees, might be God's punishment. That is what true love, Christian style, might well require. Mr Laun can't understand why we can't see the world by his light...

Remains just one question: Why ain't God busy punishing his pedophile earthly representatives and those in the church hierarchy who cover(ed) their tracks? Why is God busy with young people going to a musical festival? Odd chap indeed. Strange, strange priorities.

Well, as to our all-time God favorite, the Islamic Republic of Iran (different God, you might note, same principle), is busy trying to hang an 18 year old kid, Ebrahim Hamidi, alleging - demonstrably falsely I might add - that he's engaged in same sex acts. Boggles the mind as ever. I can never decide whether North Korea or Iran are my all-time favorite caricatures of states (well, after that all-time winner, Vatican 'state').

The lesson to be learned from it all: Where there is a God there is cruelty. Try atheism for an ethical alternative.

The Week

It's difficult for me to pick my 'favourite' news item this week to blog about. Two stand out, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and the latest news from spokespeople of the cult of misery as my good friend Russell Blackford likes to call the Roman Catholic Church. The study in the NEJM was mistaken by large media organisations to further substantiate the claim that folks diagnosed to be in persistent vegetative state (PVS) or minimally conscious state (MCS) actually are not in such states, but rather that they're fully conscious persons trapped in a completely unresponsive body. Researchers in Belgium and France measured brain reactions in 54 such people in both countries and discovered to their surprise that some of them had the same brain regions light up that did light up in the healthy control group. This does indeed suggest that there's a possibility that in those folks a functional brain capable of understanding and responding to questions is kind of stuck in an unresponsive body. That is scientifically truly interesting and deserves further research. However, it's worth noting that despite the media hype (and hype by 'pro-life' activists) of the 54 PVS participants only a 5 responded in the manner I have just described, and 'in three of these patients, additional bedside testing revealed some sign of awareness, but in the other two patients, no voluntary behavior could be detected by means of clinical assessment.' The researchers sadly failed to ask how these 'responsive' people felt about being stuck in an unresponsive body, whether they wanted to continue living, questions that have been for a long time central in ethical and policy debates about the proper treatment of people in such states.

Stan Terman, MD, PhD of Caring Advocates commented (sensibly): "The finding that while bedside behavioral testing detected NO awareness (the hallmark needed for the diagnosis of Permanent Vegetative State), a high tech scan (fMRI) allowed one patient (out of 23) [not 4] to answer five simple Yes-or-No questions such as, “Is your brother’s name Alex?” Sensational news reports claimed that technology allowed this patient “to communicate for the first time since [the accident].” This may be an overstatement in terms of what we mean by “communication.” While the authors intend to ask patients about pain in the future, they did not suggest posing the ultimate existential Yes-or-No question, “Do you want to live in this state?” Surveys indicate that most people answer “No,” but there are still some who may this limited finding as a reason to never give up hope. Family members of patients with severe disorders of consciousness, especially if they are people of faith may use this finding to bolster their argument to continue to provide aggressive medical care and tube feeding when physicians consider such medical treatment to be futile. In addition, powerful faith-based health organizations, that determine their institutions’ policies regarding refusal of medically administrated food and water, may cite this result from one patient to continue tube feeding, indefinitely. Yet there is something I do not hear: So far, no professional has proposed, based on the finding that fMRI could help NONE of the patients whose PVS resulted from loss of oxygen (as opposed to physical trauma), it is therefore now both morally and ethically correct to withdraw feeding tubes from those PVS patients. I suppose the news media would prefer to report findings as providing hope—that’s what people want to hear. Unfortunately, bolstering false hope could lead to an inappropriate allocation of scarce medical resources." Stay tuned for more to come on this issue. I suspect the debate is far from over!

Well, then there are my friends from the Roman Catholic Church. Reeling from - by now - substantial numbers of (sexual) abuse cases involving children in their care across the globe, the organisation is being hit with the same scandal in Germany, where the number of abuse cases has reached more than one hundred (and counting). Of course, this ain't really newsworthy, we're used by now to the fact that some of its celibate staff are anything but celibate, particularly so when kids are about. Since 1995 about 100 of them were investigated in the context of child abuse allegations in Germany alone. Quite a number! As usual senior management tried as long as possible to protect its staff from prosecution - while busy preaching to the rest of society what proper sex and morals are all about. It is this bit that annoys me ever more. I do not understand why anyone in this day and age would even bother listening to representatives of this organisation the moment they say 'ethics' or 'morality'. Routinely historical truth is being mutilated in the name of the ideological cause, when bishops declared at one point or other that the holocaust is abused as a propaganda instrument by Jewish people, and, of course, that abortion is akin to genocide (tell that to the folks who were slaughtered in Rwanda, for instance). Incidentally, Christians fanatics from a southern state of the USA have been on the road again, in good colonial style, to grab kids in third world countries. It looks like in Haiti a whole bunch of them will be prosecuted for kidnapping kids (whose parents and/or relatives are alive and kicking). The official version is that they planned to hand them over to adoptive parents in the USA. It goes without saying that it all was a misunderstanding now. I pray to the non-existing Gods that they will be sentenced and put in Haitian jails and won't be simply extradited to the USA. There got to be some justice in this world every now and then.

Human dignity and individual liberty

There is an argument going on among well-intentioned and more or less knowledgeable bioethicists about the question of whether there is much use in deploying the concept of 'human dignity' in resolving conflicts about normative questions in the field. Here is a good critical take on the issue.

Typically the issue of dignity is wheeled in by opposing sides when they don't like the stance held by the other side, and they have no good arguments left to defend their own take on the matter. Here's a few examples: voluntary euthanasia and physician assisted suicide. There's opponents of physician assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia who claim that such means to end a persons life are not dignified. Certainly the Roman Catholic Church thinks so. If you know anything at all about this debate, you will know that 'Death with Dignity' is also the battle-cry deployed by voluntary euthanasia groups. The same concept is used without blushing by groups for diametrically opposed means. That's odd indeed.

Up to this point I talked about the concept of dignity as if there was one. Of course, if neither the euthanasia folks nor the anti-euthanasia folks are able to demonstrate that the other side is wrong in their use of the concept of dignity, quite possibly there is something wrong with the concept, or, more to the point, quite possibly there's no concept.

Is voluntary euthanasia the exception pointing to a small problem with the idea of 'dignity', or is there actually more evidence that 'dignity' might just be a vacuous motherhood-and-apple pie thing suitable for and against anything and nothing. Well, in fact, there's plenty of other examples. IVF and artificial insemination (to go the the other end of our lives) are in the same boat as euthanasia. Christians routinely argue (well, claim) that our dignity is violated if we use such means of modern reproduction, allegedly because it's against our nature to do so. Of course, they don't mean a matter-of-fact type nature, they mean their normative understanding of what our nature should be like. It is well known that people who require access to such means of reproduction think their their dignity as rational agents is violated if the state or others prevents them from exercising such a choice (gays and lesbians come to mind, for instance). Both sides deploy the idea of 'dignity' to advance their diametrically opposing stances! Odd indeed.

Pornography is another, and my last example. There is no consensus at all about the question of whether someone violates his her or dignity (and that of others) by watching or participating in the production of pornographic material.

The German enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant initially understood respect for someone's dignity really as respect for a rational, autonomous agent. In that sense, dignity is kind of a short for respect for autonomous persons. That probably is a sensible thing. All other things being equal, we should be respectful of at least the self-regarding actions autonomous beings wish to undertake. May be that is what we should be saying, however. Of course, since then religious folks and invariably the UN have stepped in with a deluge of dignity here and dignity there declarations and statements that resulted into dignity being reduced to a campaign tool for everything and nothing at all. Christianity, for instance, quickly removed the Kantian criteria of reason and rationality and agitated for embryos' dignity, and human rights related claims derived from those. In case of doubt the supposedly necessary respect for these embryos' alleged dignity was used to override women's interest in controlling what's happening with their bodies. The UN has declared, for no good ethical reason at all, that reproductive human cloning is dignity violating. This emperor certainly is naked! Human dignity, warm and fuzzy as it may sound, is a useless tool for advancing arguments on any of the relevant fronts in bioethics. This insight is true regardless of the substantive stance that you'd take on any of these controversial issues, by the way. Dignity really is just a rhetorical tool as opposed to a serious conceptual means to advance discussions on these issues.

Today we are probably well advised, should we face the need to make a snap-decision, to reject dignity related claims unless these claims have another rationale attached to them that is based on some other framework. If anything, you'd probably right if you assumed that more often than not human dignity is deployed as a means of preventing people from making self-regarding choices.

OMG it's Easter again

... and there's no end in terms of speeches by Catholic Church senior management folks that would fairly qualify as evil propaganda. Augsburg's Bishop Dr Walter Mixa (he's the bloke wearing the colourful dress in the picture) declared that without God there's no end to what people would likely do to each other. He used in his Easter 'sermon' (in his particular case hate speech given on Church property to Church members) the examples of atheist nationalsocialism and atheist communism and the murders these regimes committed against millions of humans as examples of what happens when God's law isn't obeyed.

Well, fair enough, the good German bishop is paid to run propaganda campaigns against non-believers [in Germant only about 22% of the population believe unequivocally that God exists, while 23% do not (the rest is sitting on the philosophical fence)], but still. He chose to ignore that it wasn't atheism that motivated the Nazis or the Soviet style communists but Nazi ideology and Soviet style communist ideology. So, both with respect to the Nazi crimes and to the Soviety style communist crimes atheism did not trigger the horrendous crimes committed.

The same, of course, cannot be said for the crimes Christians and Muslims committed in the name of their respective Gods. The Christian crusades and the massmurders they resulted into were motivated entirely by religious belief. Similar stories can be told with regard to most monotheistic religious ideologies. Will any German authority go after the good bishop and charge him for hate speech related crimes? Of course not! Once you're a dress wearing middle-aged to very-aged man who represents an organisation that routinely is embroiled in child sex abuse cases, it seems you can say whatever you like.

Talking about double-standards! Indeed, I wonder whether my truthful description of the bishop (as dress-wearing etc) above would qualify by UN standards as a human rights violation, given that it could be read as mocking the representative of a major religion. According to the UN Human Rights Council that qualifies squarely as a human rights violation... -

In fairness to the Catholic Church, however, it tries to make up on the odd occasion for its all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good God's failings! The Vatican sent this Easter 500 Easter eggs to the victims of the earthquake in Italy. Neat gesture by one of the richest organisations on earth!

Irish Catholic Church in fight for donations

Funny story on the BBC news website (thanks Darragh - again). A Catholic priest in Ireland urges his followers not to donate to beggars standing outside the church doors, and asks instead that they give their money to him. The argument, it seems, is that the beggars might use the money on themselves (unlike his organisation with sends quite a bit of what it collects on to its Politbuero in Rome). Worse, as he explains, these beggars might be remote controlled by evil third parties - very much unlike his organisation.

Just so that his followers get the message, he explains that not giving to beggars when one could also hand cash over to the church doesn't violate bible tenets. There you go :-). Of course, as we all know, the church has not only problems with church staffers going after young boys, nope, there's also ... well... interest in other people's money.

UK Embryo Research: Civilisation = 0 Catholic Church = 1

It seems in ongoing battles over crucial biomedical research involving human embryos as well as access to reproductive health services the UK government under Gordon Brown caved in to the Catholic Church's lobbying and threats. So, here's the deal, the Catholic crowd in government (several government ministers, including Opus Dei operative Ruth Kelly) threatened to defeat the 'Labour' government's new embryology bill. According to a BBC news report the Catholic Church's representatives on 'Labour's government benches are permitted to vote against these three partts of the bill in order to follow their conscience:

# Preventing fertility clinics from refusing treatment to single women and lesbians - under current legislation clinics must take account of the welfare of the unborn child including "the need for a father". This will be replaced by the "need for supportive parenting".
# Creating a child with the correct tissue match to save a sick brother or sister.
# Creating so-called hybrid animal/human embryos to aid stem cell research.

Good on them, at long last it will be possible again to make no bones of the Churches homophobic agenda when it comes to reproductive health services. No access to fertility clinics for lesbians in the UK. And, seriously, creating a child with the correct tissue match to save a sick brother or sister. How sickening a reason for creating a child! Now the Church succeeds in getting rid of the sick kid, and preventing the new child from coming into existence. I wonder whether such children, if given the chance to have a say, would mind coming into existence, helping their sibling to survive, and live happily ever after... - My hunch is, that they just might not mind!

The Church also demonstrated that it is dealing with the overpopulation issue inits very own way. Creating animal/human embryos for research purposes (we're looking a few days after 'conception', if you wish to use Catholic terminology), how truly Frankensteinian. The thought of having a cell mass of a few hundred cells of such hybrids makes me shiver. Soo they'd be taking over the world, no doubt! What's the big deal about seeing millions die of all sorts of degenerative diseases. Good on the Church. It seems its ongoing support of any pro-death and pro-disease agenda is cause for true celebration.

I have no doubt 'Labour' party voters will be delighted to find out that they actually voted the Vatican into office in the UK. Little did they probably know.

Catholic Priest convicted torturer

It has been known for some time that the Roman Catholic Church has been a haven for pedophile priests in many countries. Well, it turns out that 'Gods' dress wearing representatives on our lil planet also enjoy other kinds of kicks. Christian Frederico von Wernich, a police chaplain no less, couldn't resist laying hands on allegedly left-wing guerillas during the years in which Argentina suffered under a fascist military dictatorship. Von Wernich was convicted of having undertaken multiple acts of torture of prisoners and was sentenced this week by an Argentinian court to lifelong imprisonment.

The Church hierarchy initially denounced the prosecution as an attack on Catholicism itself. The trouble for our dress wearing 'God' rep began when eye witnesses confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that von Wernich participated actively in the kidnapping, torture and murder of left-wing opponents of the dictatorship. Von Wernich, in the past, busily defended torture as a legitimate means to protect the fascist regime against its critics. Naturally the Church hierarchy didn't see it necessary to reign in his activities when it should have.

The one question that remains, given the criminal history of the Roman Catholic Church, is why anyone would still want to give credence to any Church pronouncement on matters ethics. What's kinda puzzling is also why their good, all powerful, and all knowing 'God' didn't think it might be a good idea to put a stop at least to his rep behaving like ... well, a torturer... but that really brings us full circle to the question of why folks continue to believe that there is such a being to begin with.

More on 'Faith' Schools

While the debate is raging in Canada about Mr Tory, the Conservative Party's aptly named leader's idea to pour more tax monies into faith schools, here's an interesting news item about these sorts of outfits in the UK. The Catholic Church, a known progressive force in international human rights circles, has issued a directive to 'its' schools in Northern Ireland to disband amnesty international support groups due to the human rights organisations support for abortion rights. So, if you ever had any doubt that these schools were truly about education first and not about ideology transfer.... think again.