Thursday, October 16, 2008

Gay Genes

I hope that title alone doesn't bring me hundreds of strangers from google searches, but here we go anyway.

There is no specific research data that I can mention to suggest that there is a GAY gene out there, but my personal observations lead me to believe that people are born gay. I do NOT believe that it is simply a lifestyle choice. I think some people are born with no attraction to the opposite sex, and no desire to reproduce. That's fine. That's who they are, and I hope these people live in a supportive environment that doesn't force them to try to change it. I don't believe they can change it.

For the sake of the discussion we find ourselves in I'm going to proceed as though we can all accept then that there is a piece of genetic code that dictates this in a person. If you have a problem with that, then stop reading now, because this will make less and less sense to you the more you read.

Operating under that theory I can tell you that not all genes manifest in the creature that inherits them. Color-blindness, for example. It runs in my family going back at least three generations that I know of. My grandfather could not distinguish red from green, and my father can't either. I don't have that problem, but I still carry the gene for it, and so does my brother. My children and nieces and nephews may very well end up with it. It all depends on the women we have children with, and what genes they bring to the reproductive table.

There are many hereditary diseases that pass down the same way. It may be a recessive gene for three generations, and then suddenly somebody is born with Tay-Sachs or Celiac or haemophilia.

Before anybody gets offended, I AM NOT SAYING HOMOSEXUALITY IS A DISEASE. Not even remotely. Like these diseases, the gene for blue eyes can also hide for generations and then manifest out of nowhere. There are also recessive genes about certain types of ear wax, and blood type, etc.

But what I am saying is if we accept that it is an in-born trait, then we accept that it operates under the same rules as any other genetic trait. That means not only that it can be recessive in certain people, but it has to be recessive in certain people. If it wasn't, it couldn't be passed down by heterosexual parents. That also means that the genetic potential to produce a homosexual comes from the gene pool of your parents. Within each of them, it's obviously a recessive gene but in their children that are born homosexual, it has become a gene that is manifest.

Think about how many families you know where one of two, or two of three, or three out of four kids are straight, and there was one homosexual. The parents are hetero, the siblings are hetero, but one child was born gay. The majority of human children are not born gay, and thusly we reproduce. If the vast majority of human children were born gay thousands of generations ago, we would never have made it here. There would be no more generations after that one, or at least very few. That unfeeling, unthinking grinding wheel of nature would have swallowed us a long time ago, not as punishment, but simply for not having the ability to perpetuate ourselves.

That potential for the same parents to produce some straight and some gay children, to me, demonstrates that homosexuality does not transcend the laws of biology, but follows them quite nicely. If it's a gene, it's a recessive one. Seems obvious to me.

Also, let's not dismiss the power of society to convince a gay person to repress who they are and reproduce anyway. Even if they didn't want to, how many millions of gay people over the course of the milennia of human history do you think reproduced anyway to avoid judgement, persecution, and in some time periods even death. Hell, how many people do you think are still living like that today because they live in ass-backwards, close-minded communities? Probably a larger number than we'd all like to know.

I only bring them up to point out that those people definitely passed down an active, manifest gay gene.

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