24 Jul 2008
It's not my fault
Just watched the first in the BBC series of people finding out how they are what they are. Apparently athlete Colin Jackson finds out how he is an athlete next week, but tonight John Barrowman scoured the world to meet scienticians who could tell him how he was gay.
All the media-friendly studies were trotted out - inheriting the pink X gene from mother, rather than the blue one; having older brothers; not producing enough foetal testosterone in the womb. The last one apparently explains the other study that found gays and straight women have the same sized brain, as do lesbians and straight men. And the one about ring fingers and index fingers.
Anyway, poor Barrowman didn't come up trumps on having the pink X gene, nor were his fingers the 'right' ratio. He was very disappointed that someone couldn't tell him they had objective evidence that he hadn't chosen his sexuality, until it turned out his mother had miscarried a boy before his older brother was born, so imagine his joy to find he was a real gay after all!
It was a fun show, particularly when Barrowman was surprised to discover that one of his researchers was kinda hot - he was more than ready to offer him his DNA. For research.
The argument goes that the bigots will have the wind taken out of their sails if it can be shown that sodomy is down to nature, but I don't think so. The racists shouting abuse at that African kid playing GAA in Carlow earlier this week don't think that way – obviously the black kid didn't choose to be black, no more than the vast majority of women choose to be women.
I assume that Radovan Karadzic and his gangs of murderers didn't believe the people they were killing, who looked like them and in many cases spoke the same language and came from the same towns, had chosen to be non-Serbian.
The bigots will hate you for being gay, having a gay lifestyle, doing gay acts – whatever way you want to spin it – regardless of what logic you place before them. Hate is irrational, by and large, and most of the gay-haters, like Iris Robinson, take their cues from stories told in a desert thousands of years ago, just the sort of people to distrust the outcome of scientific research.