Letters by a modern St. Ferdinand III about cults

The media and their political friends adore the gay gene theory. Gay ‘rights’ evoke paternalistic images of fairness, love, legality and Charter or Bill of Rights protection. But is this an accurate picture of a scientifically invalidated theory? Yet another study [yawn] states that genetics determines a person’s sexuality. In fact the study claims that 40-60% of a person’s sexuality is genetic –implying quite clearly that the rest is environmental and social. But don’t expect that detail to make the headlines. The media will just report that ‘genes cause sexual orientation’. Politicians appealing to human rights, love, respect and justice will propound that Homosexual marriage is a deeply moral issue. They are right. But those who support Gay Marriage and by extension the transfer of tax payer funds to homosexuals, [ie. money from non- gay supporting citizens], are on the wrong side in the debate.

There is nothing moral in using bad science to create worse policy.

Changing Society
All previous claims of a ‘gay gene[s]’ have of course been disproved. But the Gay Lobby [funded in Canada by tax payers], and the media persist. Genetic theories on forced sexuality lead inevitably to judicial activism, gay marriage, the annihilation of Church independence by the state, and more liberality in social mores in which Gay ‘Rights’ are just one more obsessive issue on the road to licensed prostitution, euthanasia and selling taxable marijuana in corner stores. For the media and politicians the Gay gene theory is a vital battle to be won in the liberal vision of a paternalistic and caring nanny state. Don’t expect them or ‘independent’ researcher to give up easily.

But is the gay gene theory valid ? The original study in 1993 by gay activist Dr. Hamer, cited a gay gene theory in male sexuality. The media loved it. But it was quickly rubbished by peer reviews and scientific investigations [see below]. But now the pro-Gay groups are back with another 2004-5 study that links groups of genes to human sexuality. The newer work is a warmed over version of Hamer’s discredited claim. It should be greeted with the same skepticism and subject to rational scientific peer review. But the media, as they did with Hamer’s study, breathlessly informs us that genetics causes sexual orientation. They were wrong about Hamer’s study and within 1 year, their new claims will be discredited as well when peer reviews, and scientific critiques have been conducted on this newer pro-Gay gene study.

What then is the big difference in the past 12 years ? Since Hamer’s failed original study there has been much improvement in mapping the human genome. Scanning of the entire human genome can supposedly allow scientists to search for possible genetic determinants of sexual orientation. Post 1993 investigations have not only looked at the genes located on the X chromosome [genes on this chromosome are only passed to a son from his mother], but have also scanned all chromosomes, including genes from the father. The newer studies purportedly show that there exist identical stretches of DNA on three chromosomes which are shared by about 60 percent of gay brothers versus the 50 percent normally expected by chance. However, as with Hamer’s study, there are lots of problems with these conclusions, which the media in their pro-Gay frenzy deign to cover.

Hamer’s 1993 Study:
A furore was caused by Gay activist Dean Hamer of the National Cancer Institute who examined the X chromosomes of 40 pairs of homosexual brothers. The study, which appeared in the March 1993 issue of the journal Science, found that 33 of the pairs of these brothers had genetic markers for male homosexuality. The Gay lobby was jubilant. Finally there was proof that Gays were forced into their life-style by the hand of God and by genetic composition. The media picked up these findings and together with left-liberal activists and politicians began a 10 year campaign to remodel society on flawed data. The ill effects of bad media reporting and invalid science are still today corrupting the political and social configuration of modern society.

Almost immediately, with little media coverage, Hamer’s study was damned. In the exact same journal that published Hamer’s flawed work, Science, a peer review concluded that Hamer had fabricated his work. This study was conducted by scientists from the Department of Clinical Neurological Sciences at the University of Western Ontario and the Department of Genetics at Stanford Medical School who concluded that, "data do not support the presence of a gene of large effect influencing sexual orientation." The Boston Globe reported the findings of another peer review by Dr. Richard Pillard, a professor of psychiatry at Boston University's School of Medicine, which showed "that sexuality is greatly influenced by environment, and that the role of genetics is, in the end, limited." Other peer reviews followed showing that Hamer’s data was wrong. Eventually even Hamer himself was forced to conclude that it is totally implausible that something as complex as human sexuality can be explained solely in terms of genetic inheritance. He admitted for instance that lesbianism is 'culturally transmitted, not inherited ... It's more environmental than genetic, more nurture than nature.’ Isn’t it rather strange that lesbianism is not genetic but male homosexuality is?

Obvioulsy Hamer’s Gay activism impacted his ‘research’. Yet the media has never recanted on their support for the Gay gene theory. Such mis-reporting has prompted politicians to promote everything from Gay marriage to hate crimes and anti-free speech legislation, in which even Biblical passages are deemed hate speech if the supposed denigration of homosexuals occurs.

The 2004-5 Study:
Now the University of Chicago has published another non-peered reviewed investigation into gay genetics. In this study, researchers analyzed the genetic makeup of 456 men from 146 families with two or more gay brothers. According to the researchers the genetic scans showed a clustering of the same genetic pattern among the gay men on three chromosomes -- chromosomes 7, 8, and 10. These common genetic patterns were shared by 60 percent of the gay men in the study. This is slightly more than the 50 percent expected by chance alone.

According to media reports the geneticists claim that the regions on chromosome 7 and 8 are associated with male sexual orientation regardless of whether the man got them from his mother or father. The regions on chromosome 10 were only associated with male sexual orientation if they were inherited from the mother. Instead of only looking for ‘areas’ that can cause human sexuality, the U. of Chicago researchers scanned all areas of the genome looking for clusters of genes that might be similar across many homosexual men. This approach apparently has revealed that there exist certain clusters that could affect a person’s sexuality.

To their credit the U. of Chicago team states that further research is needed and that genetics might only account for 40-60 % of a person’s sexual orientation. Researchers say the next step is to verify these results in a different group of men to see if the same genetic regions are associated with sexual orientation. If the findings hold up, the U of Chicago team says they could start to look for the individual genes within these regions linked to sexual orientation. Yet much peer reviewed analysis needs to be done to confirm the methodology and results of their preliminary findings. Such caveats are absent from media reports.

Problems with the Gay Gene Concept: The U of Chicago study and our media makes it all seem so reasonable – you are born with certain traits that determine your orientation – hair, eye color, height, width, skills, aptitudes and innate desires. But there are some severe problems with stating that all of a person’s orientation comes down to genetics. The implications for society are huge, and this is why the one-sided media defense of the gay-gene theory is so annoying. Genetics is the casus belli of social reductionism – ‘nothing I do matters because I cannot control it.’ Yet there are many factors that are not even considered in the gay gene debate.

Genetics and logic
According to gay gene theory, genetic factors are largely, maybe even solely responsible for sexual orientation, with our genetic inheritance programming us to desire one sex rather than the other. There is, however, one obvious problem with this idea. If heterosexuality and homosexuality are, indeed, genetically predetermined (and therefore mutually exclusive and unchangeable), how do we explain bisexuality or people who, suddenly in mid-life, switch from heterosexuality to homosexuality (or vice versa)? I have yet to see any theories account for this exceptions. Examples of sexual flexibility are at odds with genetic theories of rigid sexual predestination. What about a woman or man, who enjoys sex with both men and women ? Is there now a gene for bi-sexuality or is the homosexual relationship genetic and the heterosexual one environmental ?

Most studies indicate that genetic factors, while not unimportant, are of secondary significance compared to social influences, such as the relationship between a child and its parents, formative childhood experiences, cultural mores and peer pressure. By about the age of five or six, these social influences lay the basis of an individual's sexual orientation. Because sexuality is fixed at such an early age, many lesbians and gay men feel they have been homosexual all their lives and therefore mistakenly conclude they must have been born queer. Social factors in homosexual development are routinely dismissed by politicians and the media as ‘racist bigotry’ and uncaring and frame public policy on the need to allow for example, gay adoption.

The media should be interviewing both sides of this debate but they don’t. For example Professor McLaren who has been working in reproductive and developmental biology --always on mammals -- for almost 50 years, [the last five or so at Cambridge before that she was Director of the Medical Research Council Mammalian Development Unit at University College, London], is adamant that genetics has little impact on sexuality. She gives an example. "Some people believe that there is a gene for height, but that does not explain why over three generations people in Japan have become taller. Genes do have a big influence on height," she says, "but so do better food and better nurturing." The same can be stated for sexual orientation. Social mores and environmental factors are the dominant determinants of sexual orientation. In this regard Professor McLaren and many others warn that some of the misconceptions about the role of genes are very dangerous. According to McLaren the genetic influence can be small or large, but it cannot be considered on its own. The pre and post birth influences must be also be taken into account. If that is true, then why the rush to the political reconstruction of family, church, and taxation, in which the basic units of society are being redefined ?

History and Queerness
If gayness was primarily explainable in genetic terms, I would expect it to appear in the same manner and in similar forms, in all cultures within all historical epochs. History however informs us differently. It is clear that historically homosexuality has been almost entirely a social-environmental phenomenon. As the anthropologists Clellan Ford and Frank Beach demonstrated in Patterns Of Sexual Behaviour (1965), far from being cross-culturally stable, both the incidence and expressions of same-sex desire vary vastly between different societies. They found, for example, that young men in some tribes (the Aranda of Australia, Siwan of Egypt, Batak of Sumatra, Anga of Melanesia and others) had relationships with boys or older male warriors, usually lasting several years. Eventually ceasing homosexual contact, they subsequently assumed sexual desires for women.

Likewise, a glance at history reveals huge disparities between configurations of homosexuality in different eras down the ages. Same-sex behavior in Ancient Greece was very different, in both its prevalence and particular manifestations, from homosexuality in Confucian China, Renaissance Italy, Meiji Japan, Tudor England and late twentieth century USA. This mutability in sexual practice militates against the one gene or gene cluster ‘fits all’ theory.

In Ancient Greece homosexual behavior was rampant in Thebes and Sparta but less prevalent elsewhere. Are we to believe that the Thebans had a genetic predisposition and makeup that differentiated them from other Hellenes living a mere 40 miles away ? More likely a warrior society, constantly engaged in war, in which women were deemed ‘evil’ and domesticated, and where men in shock troop formations and phalanxes, needed to depend upon their colleagues in battle, bred a system where younger men exchanged sexual favors with older men, who taught them the tenets of war, civil duty and social responsibility. The result was a compact and commitment not to flee from battle and a durability of relationships that transcended human fear and helped to keep order and formation in brutal, bloody, hand to hand fighting. Such homosexual contracts are entirely different than the gay sexuality expressed in modern times for instance. Moral values, social ideologies and cultural expectations - together with family patterns and parent-child interaction - seem the only credible explanation for these massive historical divergences.

Evolution?
Then there is the problem with evolution. Evolution in a common-sensical analysis, informs against accepting the gay gene hypothesis. Any genetic trait that reduces a person's chance of procreating will be treated as an evolutionary weakness. Traits that would impair procreation carry ‘evolutionary costs’ that cause the trait to essentially disappear within 100 generations. A 1981 study in San Francisco showed that gays and lesbians have only 20% of the number of children as do heterosexuals; i.e. the evolutionary cost factor among that sample of homosexuals is 80%. This is far higher than the usual rate in which a gene will disappear over 100 generations [typically a 1 % cost factor]. It is hard to suppose that somehow evolutionary laws bypassed homosexuality and that evolutionary science can be ignored when analyzing genetic patterns.

Social Reductionism – Responsibility is passé
Despite some very obvious theoretical and empirical weaknesses, the claims that certain genes cause homosexuality have been seized upon and vigorously promoted by many in the gay movement. It is social reductionist logic at its worst. Basically the refrain in our left-liberal, heavy handed government society is ‘Don’t blame me for anything – it is all genetic’. The political extension of this mantra is ever more redistribution, anti-free speech legislation and courses on sensitivity, as well as the attendant costs of judicial activism and political expediency – costs in the moral and economic sense. The victim complex is alive and well in modern times.

The Gay gene theory should be dispensed with. Gay activism and its social costs, funded by tax payers invites informed debate. Changing society based on silly science is unacceptable. Why not open up this debate in a referendum, and ask the people to listen to both sides and include all social, economic and familial issues in this debate ? Are the media and politicians and their gay allies that terrified of open discourse ? If they are so righteous and logical then let’s test their theories in open forums. My bet is that they would lose not only in the court of public opinion but also in the court of common sense.

In the meantime how about we stop funding pro-gay lobby groups with tax payer monies, and tell the courts to get lost with their meddling in non state institutions such as marriage. As well politicians can stop buying gay votes by redistributing monies based on shockingly illogical and non peer reviewed ‘science’.


Sources if you want to read about the Pro-Gay Gene theory: Mustanski, B. Human Genetics, March 2005 online first edition. Brian Mustanski, PhD, department of psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago. Elliot S. Gershon, MD, professor of psychiatry and human genetics, University of Chicago. News release, University of Illinois at Chicago. Council for Responsible Genetics.

Objective Gay perspective: Peter Tatchell activist in the London Gay Liberation Front in the early 1970s, and is currently a member of the queer rights group OutRage!. He is a contributor to Anti-Gay (Freedom Editions), and the author of Safer Sexy - The Guide To Gay Sex Safely (Freedom Editions) and We Don't Want To March Straight - Masculinity, Queers & The Military (Cassell).