Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

I almost can't believe that I'm writing this, but....I'm going to defend Bill Richardson on the whole "is being gay a choice" thing.

Sort of. And with deep ambivalence.

For those of you who might have missed the brouhaha, here's the deal: during a round table discussion with the Democratic candidates about LGBT issues, Bill Richardson was asked if he thought that being gay was a choice. He said yes.

You could have heard a pin drop.

He was asked the question again. He said yes. It got very uncomfortable in the room. And he's getting a lot of flak for it.

Perhaps rightly so, but I think that the Left (even the soi-disant "left" of the Democratic party) needs to think through more fully the reason why this position is so upsetting to them.

The logic goes something like this: "if it's a choice, then it can be condemned. If it's inborn, then it is morally neutral."

But this logic cedes the parameters and the terms of the argument to the anti-gay bigots. It lets the homophobes frame the discussion. The Left does this frequently, and the Right is terrific at exploiting it: look at the way the Left's rhetoric of equality gets used by the Right to justify ending affirmative action and to support neo-segregation.

With the is-it-a-choice-or-is-it-biological argument what the Left has ceded is this: the implicit presumption that if it's a choice, then it must be a moral choice and choosing to be gay is the wrong moral choice. The very terms of the debate presume that homosexuality is something that needs to be explained away or apologized for. It is essentially a demand that gays defend or explain why they're "like that."


Now, I don't thing that sexuality is a choice. But I do think that this debate profoundly misses the point.

Because what's really at the heart of the matter is bigotry. There is no one who is condemning homosexuality whose position will change if they can be convinced that it's biological. Then they will simply argue that that gays are organistically defective. As a friend of mine once said: "If they think it's biological, then they'll identify it as a disease." The real problem is pathologizing homosexuality, whether as a genetic or a psychiatric or moral disorder. The real problem is about rights, not about etiology. The fact that biological etiology is the last word exposes the fragility of straight liberals' advocacy for gay rights. It's a cheap way for the Clintons and Edwardses to soften their refusal to stand up for gay rights.

The other thing that should alert good leftists about the fucked-upness of the inborn vs. choice debate is how simplistic it is and how it runs counter to what has been at the center of intellectual leftism for the past forty years. For the past several decades, it has been a hallmark of leftist theories that "nature" itself is just an expression of culture. Gender and race have been aggressively (and rightly) denaturalized, exposing these seemingly indisputably natural categories as social constructions and exposing the ideological work that these categories perform. The left has fought against biodeterministic explanations of everything from femininity to criminality. But we are capitulating on this one, letting people who are hostile to homosexuality paint us into an intellectual corner and ignoring the fact that by ceding the terms of the debate, we have already lost.

Who we are at any level isn't as simple as choice vs. biology. Identity isn't a matter of just biochemistry or decision making. And rather than silencing one another for deviating from orthodoxy, we should focus on fighting bigotry and discrimination. And nothing was ever solved by imposing intellectual orthodoxies. Should we talk about genetics and brain chemistry? Of course. Should that end the discussion? Of course not.

Not that I think Richardson was likely thinking of the social construction of reality or Foucauldian epistemes or scholarly debates about enculturation or whatever when he made his blunder, but I think the reaction does highlight how by allowing the Right to (once again) set the terms, the Left has once again lost its moral authority. Of course, I think the fact that of the candidates only Kucinich supports gay marriage may say something about where moral authority on this issues lies.

For a better analysis than my hasty Saturday morning post can provide, here's what the fantastically smart Stanley Fish has to say. Even though I don't agree with him about Paradise Lost.


Hmmmm....Edited to Add: I cross-posted this entry over at Daily Kos, which I do occasionally when I am attacking the Democrats (just to be contrarian). I was surprised by some of the reaction. I certainly was not trying to say that being gay is a choice or to deny anyone's experience of their own sexuality. Not at all. And I wasn't trying to say that Richardson isn't a total doofus on this issue. But I will say that I am more concerned about his use of maricon than I am about the choice matter. And I am more concerned about watching the so-called liberals haggling over whose "domestic partnership" plan is stronger or weaker because they are afraid or unwilling to fully support gay rights.

And I am deeply concerned that defending homosexuality with biodeterministic arguments has two bad effects. 1) Defending it makes it seems as though it needs a defense. 2) I don't want clinicians deciding what, for me, is an ethical issue about civil rights, acceptance, and human dignity. What other moral decisions will we leave up to the biologists? Biology simply cannot account for the complexity of human identity and behavior. I once heard the much-missed Stephen Jay Gould give a lecture in which he said something like: "Whatever there is to be proud of in humanity, it isn't biology." And if we make biology the basis of our claim to human rights, we are left vulnerable to each scientific finding that advances, revises, or contradicts the last.

Morality and civility are very often based in ignoring or suppressing or rechanneling biological realities. If I am out to dinner and am still hungry, I can't simply take food off my dining companion's plate. Even if I have some biological imperative to try their pasta. Especially if it doesn't have too much sauce. Men are typically stronger than women--that doesn't legitimize men carrying out their biological impulses on women against their will. Animals shun members for procreating without permission, they eat their young, they engage in all kinds of behavior that is perfectly natural without being something that we wish to emulate as a human society. Nature makes a very poor basis for human society. Affirming the rights and dignity of people makes a really great basis.

Too much is unknown about identity and sexuality from a biological standpoint to make biology the only guarantor of rights.

Nothing against biologists. Some of my best friends are biologists.

Really.

And most biologists I know don't see humanity as a sum of biological imperatives, either.

My mother, who is not terribly political, always manages to see through the bullshit of politics (mine as well as everyone else's). She was telling me about a coworker whose daughter can't get insurance through the coworker's partner's health plan (my mom's workplace doesn't offer insurance). "If they could get married," my mom said, "that little girl would have health insurance. How is it 'family values' to let kids go uninsured?"

Edited AGAIN to add: the biology issue seems especially problematic for protecting the rights of transpeople. Going back to the point that being inborn or genetic is just going to make the bigots say that non-normative sexualities and gender identities are a kind of congenital illness: look at the research that tries to prove that psychopathy and sociopathy are inborn. This biological argument is used as an excuse to lock up teenagers for life. But what's even more disturbing is the way in which some of this "inborn sociopathy" stuff gets linked to non-binary chromosomal gendering. The XYY hysteria of a few years ago carried with it a very strong whiff of homo- and trans-phobia and a phobia that adapted itself quite easily to accord with the idea that sexual/gender identity is inborn.