Queer notion.

DAILY, it seems, there are journalistic reports of bilogical breakthroughs that take us within striking distance of an understanding of the causes of homosexuality. These reports are often impressively accurate in their representation of the physiological mechanism involved, but less cogent in explaining the social consequences if some physiological causation were established.

This is not surprising. The reports tend to misconceive the meaninh of "biological" (as apposed to environmental) causation, and then to see a given causal explanation as answering all questions about volition, normality, and morality. All behavior is, of course, biological in the sense that some entity in the brain is affected; if some tells you to think of a pruple elephant and you do, the phyiology of your brain has been altered. However, "biological" in the context of homosexuality refers to a physiological factor that in some sense precedes the development of homosexuality and predisposes an individual to become a homosexual.

It seems most likely (though it has yet to be conclusively demonstrated) that homosexuality has a biological basis. However, it is even more likely (indeed it has been conclusively demonstrated) that most or all homosexuality requiresd an environmental, as well as the a biological, push. The fact that half of all the identical-twin brothers of homosexuals are heterosexual renders it exceedingly unlikely that much homosexuality is caused by biology alone.

Put another way: Bob lacks predisposing physiological factor for homosexuality and will not become homosexuality no matter what his environment. Bill possesses this predisposing factor, but we will become homesexual only if he encounters the appropriate environment. (What that environment is is a subject of constant argumeny among psychoanalysts, psychologists, and sociologists. But then what isn't?)

Now, for some reason, people seem to believe that the more biological the causation, the less volitional the behavior. They further believe that the degree of volition determines normal or abnormal status, and moral status. These beliefs are for the most part false.

Biological impulses often leave more room for volition than do environmentally caused impulses. For example, the effects of childhood brutalization can restrict one's freedom far more than does a physiological preference for sweets; and many purely biological impulses pale in strength before the smoker's need of a cigarette.

Neither cause nor degree of volition determines the psychological (as opposed to the statitical) normality or abnormality of behavior. Mongoloidism is clearly abnormal, but red hair is not. A desire to eat cocker spaniel is (in our society) a sign of phsychological abnormality that is probably environmentally caused, but a desire to eat steak is not abnormal. Child molestation is immoral even if, as some have suggested, biology plays a significant role in generating the impulse that derives it.

Any argument for social discouragement of homosexuality must be predicted on the view that it is harmful to society or to the homosexual himself. If the latter, harmful not merely in a tautological sense, but in the sense that the pathologies with which it is associated (suicide, depresssion, compulsive sexual need, and developmental stagnation at the adolescent level) inhere in the development of the homosexuality itself, and are not merely the result of social ostracism.

The current fashion, of course, dictates the acceptance of claims, that homosexuality is merely "an alternative lifesyle" that is harmful to neither society nor the individual. But none of all the thousands of societies known to have existed on earth has ever accepted an adult male's playing a passive homosexual role. And the vast majority of societies have comdemned homosexuality of any kind. It's possible that we know more than the Inuits and the Japanese and the Bambuti Pygmies and the Jivaro and the Elizabethan English and our own grandparents, but it is far from obvious that this is the case. And it is not a matter that wll be settled either way by the discovery of a wayward gene.