Sexual orientation: etiology, control, irrelevance, morality

In the course of mocking an inane WorldNetDaily article, the folks at Feministe are having an interesting discussion about the importance of 'choice' in arguments about discrimination against those with disfavored sexual orientations.

As some of the commentators note, one problem with focusing on the fact that almost no one experiences their sexual orientation as chosen or could change it if they tried is that it misses much of what is wrong with homophobia and invidious discrimination more generally, viz., that it involves inflicting harm or denying opportunities to people for a bad reason. The fact that sexual orientation is generally outside of an individual's control makes doing this even worse, of course, because the people in question no longer have a way to avoid this unfair treatment, but focusing entirely on choice seems to obsess over the aggravating factor to the exclusion of the underlying wrong. Being short, for example, is hardly something over which people have any real control (putting aside issues of malnutrition, etc.), but we don't usually think the NBA morally at fault for discriminating against short people, because they have a good reason to do so and because this practice does not foreclose essential life-options for the vertically-challenged.

Firing an exemplary employee because one has discovered that she is a lesbian is morally wrong not because her lesbianism is unchosen but because it is irrelevant to her job performance. But even if this is conceded, the argument is not complete: if lesbianism itself were a sinful disposition, and the employee was not chaste, there would at least be a colorable claim that this makes censure of many forms, including firing, appropriate, just as it might be quite alright to fire someone who enjoyed torturing small animals in his free time. So it is therefore important to confront head-on the question of immorality and to insist that same-sex sexual activity is not immoral, or at the very least not the sort of immorality that would justify such censure (the latter may be the best we can do with regards to those wacky traditionalists who view almost all sexual activity as immoral).

'Choice' plays a complicated role here, because it typically figures into our views about the appropriate censure visited upon those who do bad things: there seems little point in censuring or punishing, as opposed to merely stopping, those who cannot control their actions or (crucially) whose example will not inspire others. But these niceties carry no weight with those who would, on grounds of morality, discriminate only against sexually active homosexuals, since they can point to the availability of chastity as justifying censure (though few, of course, are particularly consistent about enforcing this vis-a-vis sexually immoral heterosexuals). Ultimately, then, we still need to persuade at the level of morality. At the very least, we need to persuade that sexual 'deviance' isn't immoral enough to justify the level of 'collateral damage' its persecution entails.

Finally, it's worth noting that very little of importance trades on the etiology of sexual desire as opposed to its later mutability, irrelevance, or immorality. Of course, if it's irrelevant in most contexts and morally neutral, its mutability and etiology are matters of trivia. But even if it were relevant or immoral, so long as desire is largely immutable it doesn't much matter whether it originates from genes, childhood environment, or gayness-waves emanating from Tinky-Winky--at least in terms of the propriety of personal censure and discrimination (it might well have policy implications concerning Tinky-Winky).

[Disclaimer: none of this is particularly original, and much of it is via Les Green's work.]