Panel Voices: Does finding a biological or genetic cause of being LGBT matter?

George Gramer and Cecil Bethea weigh in on this week’s question

George Gramer

To give proof to the disbelievers, I suppose so. Some haters think we just live our lives out of choice instead of genetic determination. We know it is the latter.
To be able to tell Mom and Dad that it truly is genetic and not “this guy who means the world to me,” of course it matters. Yet the likelihood of funding such a study is unlikely in this period of huge budget deficits and attempts to rein in spending.

Still, there seem to studies conducted all the time with government (not only in the USA) funding.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $1.5 million to study biological and social factors for why “three-quarters” of lesbians are obese and why gay males are not, calling it an issue of “high public-health significance.”

In the U.K., scans reveal homosexual men and heterosexual women have symmetrical brains, with the right and left hemispheres almost exactly the same size. Scientists at the prestigious Stockholm Brain Institute in Sweden also found certain brain circuits linked to emotional responses were the same in gay men and straight women.
Science is wonderful, and science can provide great insight. But with that insight comes a certain risk. Many employers require periodic blood or urine samples, thus we need to ensure that certain privacy rights are always maintained.

Iowa native George K. Gramer, Jr. is the president of the Colorado Log Cabin Republicans.

Cecil Bethea

Of course it matters a great deal! Before DNA became all the rage to explain all mysteries biological, we used to argue that our orientation was “natural” for us. Few believed us. For them it was a taste, like preferring cherry pie to blueberry. Had we wanted to change we could have switched to blueberry.

Back in those golden days, we were torn psychologically as we began to recognize the significance of our yearnings. Some of us had to suffer being driven from our family. Society declared us “persona non grata” and an open season upon us. We were beaten, robbed, and killed with the police being unconcerned. We had it easy compared to gays in Nazi Germany: There our brothers were sent to concentration camps. Even amongst the S.S. troops, on average one gay soldier was found every month. Considering what we had to survive, only the intellectually–bankrupt could argue that we just had aberrant tastes which we could easily change.

Scientists could offer us great support legally and perhaps psychologically were they to discover the DNA causing us to be gay. Such a discovery would have two edges: A woman could find out her child would be gay before and have an abortion. Sometimes an increase of knowledge brings blessings and problems in equal numbers.

Cecil Bethea was raised in the South before joining the Air Force, and now calls himself “a Westerner of Southern extraction.”