Maybe it's in the Genes

Sometime back in the 1980’s I had the misfortune to attend a meeting of the Christian Family Association in Palmerston North, New Zealand. The speaker was a right-wing, anti-Semitic activist from Australia, who harangued the audience about the decline of the community’s moral standards. She was particularly scathing about the HIV/AIDS virus, opining that God-rejecting evildoers, who had deliberately chosen to be gay, were malevolently passing the virus on to the straight community. And in the next breath she went on to say, ‘And in Queensland, mosquitoes are spreading this virus’. This prompted me to comment, probably a little too loudly, ‘how can you pick a gay mosquito?’ The audience reacted with laughter which completely nonplussed the speaker. But that’s another story . . .

It’s the gay fruit fly and not the mosquito I want to talk about. Way back in 1963 a man named Kulbir Gill discovered, very much to his surprise, genetically homosexual fruit flies. A mutated gene led affected male fruit flies to both initiate courtship with and welcome courtship from other males. Not a great deal seems to have been made about this discovery at the time, possibly because it ran counter to the commonly accepted wisdom that people become homosexual primarily through their environment and nurture rather than being homosexual by nature through their genetic constitution.

In the 1990’s Dr Dean Hamer who was researching Kaposi’s sarcoma, began also to focus on the possible role of genes in sexual orientation. His National Cancer Institute research team in the USA published the results of some of their research in Science in 1993. Their study of genetic markers appeared to indicate a predisposition towards homosexuality in a region known as Xq28 where homosexual brothers had different Xq28 markers from their heterosexual siblings. While Hamer and others thought they were well on the way to isolating the gay gene, attempts to replicate the finds by other scientists produced differing results, and the Hamer research became something of a nine-day wonder.

But other scientists continued to probe the wondrous nature of things. In 1999 biologist Bruce Bagemihl published Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity which established that there is enormous variety throughout the animal kingdom in non-reproductive or same gender sexuality. Bagemihl documents evidence of same-sex activity across such an extensive range of animals that it becomes virtually impossible to argue that the behaviour is not ‘natural’. President Mugabe of Zimbabwe famously declared that in his country not even pigs do it, while not to be outdone, Anglican Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria is on record as saying that homosexuality is an ‘aberration unknown even in animal relationships”. Both are woefully unobservant because even domesticated animals like pigs and dogs exhibit same-gender sexual relationships just as their fellow species in the wild. Bagemihl adopts an almost religious attitude to his work saying that it is ‘a meditation on the nature of life itself and a celebration of its paradoxes and pluralities’ and that it is ‘capable of inspiring our deepest feelings of wonder, and our most profound sense of awe’.

So what’s brought all this on, I hear you ask? Well, this week our friend the fruit fly is back in the news again. According to the press, biotechnologists at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and at Ohio University have discovered a single ‘switch gene’ which changes the sexual orientation of male and female fruit flies. One of the research scientists says, ‘We have shown that a single gene in the fruit fly is sufficient to determine all aspects of the flies’ sexual orientation and behaviour’. Another comments ‘Hopefully this will take the discussion about sexual preferences out of the realm of morality and put it in the realm of science’.

One can’t imagine the religious moralists giving up without a fight however. Many with biblical literalist and evangelical dispositions have long insisted contrary to the belief of many gay and lesbian people that they were born with their orientation, that it is nothing more than a learnt behaviour which can be ‘cured’ either with psychological ‘help’ or with rituals of Christian deliverance. I expect they will continue to maintain this view even in the face of increasing evidence to the contrary.

But if a consensus emerges amongst the scientific community about the existence of the so-called gay gene, there will be an impact upon our theology. If some of us are born gay or lesbian what does this tell us about our Creator? And if we are all made in his image as the Bible avers, what will we now have to say about his image? No doubt the fundamentalists will come up with their own irrational response, something along the lines of ‘God creates us all as heterosexual, but Satan, always up to his wily tricks, muscles in and begins messing about with our genes’. Others will probably continue to argue that any genetic predisposition towards homosexuality is one of the results of the Fall. Like the pain of childbirth for a woman, it is a punishment that God inflicts upon us for our disobedience.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that God intended us to be this way – a wonderfully diverse humanity endowed with difference, imagination and artistry which echoes and complements the diversity of creation as a whole. Bruce Bagemihl puts it this way:

“Biological exuberance is available, if it is nothing else – at our fingertips, everywhere we turn, in the fibers and textures that surround us, in the spices that fill our nostrils as we walk past the corner store, in the cloud formations above us and the dandelion seeds strewn by the wind about us, in the embrace of a friend and the kiss of a beloved – in all the colours and patterns that fill our lives. . . . . . It is about the unspeakable inexplicability of earth’s mysteries – which are as immediate as the next heartbeat.”