Americans New McCarthyism
101
A basic principle of our social covenant is that w^e do not
discriminate against people on the basis of circumstances that
they cannot choose, like race, sex and disability. If sexual
orientation belongs on that list. . . then should we still prohibit
gay marriage . . . ?
In the article, Mr. Kristof surveyed the “the accumulating evidence”
that points to homosexuality as something one does not choose. One of the
scientific documents he cited was “Bom Gay? The Psychobiology of Human
Sexual Orientation,” a study authored by Doctors. Qazi Rahman and Glenn D.
Wilson of the Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, University of
London, and published in the highly respected peer-reviewed scientific journal
Personality and Individual Differences (34:8, June 2003, 1337-1382).^ In his
article, Mr. Kristof further quoted Dr. Rahman: “There is now very strong
evidence from almost two decades of ‘biobehavioral’ research that human
sexual orientation is predominantly biologically determined.”
In late January 2005, a University of Illinois at Chicago researcher
announced results of a study that examined the entire human genome for
possible genetic origins of sexual orientation. The study was conducted in
conjunction with the University of California at San Diego, Pennsylvania State
University, and the University of California at Los Angeles, funded in part by
the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Complete
results of the study were published under the title “A Genomewide Scan of Male
Sexual Orientation” in the March 2005 issue of the biomedical journal Human
Genetics,
Prior to the study’s publication, UIC researcher Brian Mustanski
confirmed they’d found stretches of DNA linked to sexual orientation on three
different chromosomes in the nucleus of cells of the human male. “There is no
one ‘gay’ gene,” said Mustanski, a psychologist in the UIC department of
psychiatry and lead author of the study. “Sexual orientation is a complex trait, so
it’s not surprising that we found several DNA regions involved in its
expression---- Our best guess is that multiple genes, potentially interacting with
environmental influences, explain differences in sexual orientation.” As Steph
Smith further explained in his January 28, 2005, report on the study:
The genomes of 456 men from 146 families with two or more
gay brothers were analyzed___
Identical stretches of DNA on three chromosomes—
chromosomes 7, 8 and 10—^were found to be shared in about
60 percent of the gay brothers in the study, compare