A Fly in the Ointment

According to a recent New York Times article, if you meddle properly with the fruit fly’s genetic structure, you can change its sexual orientation--in the case of this particular experiment, from straight to gay. This is good news and bad news, both for fruit flies and for people.

For the fruit fly, it means just one more incident of human invasion on its privacy. It’s bad enough we kill them regularly, or worse, experiment with them in ways that no one at Abu Ghraib even thought of. Now we’re changing their sexual orientation without even asking permission.

After all, what if the female in question--the one who is now, thanks to a meddling scientist, a lesbian fly--was looking forward to being a mother? Well, forget it, fly girl. You’re so not going there.

The experiment also has human consequences, although admittedly not quite as immediate as for the fly. (And by the way, is she now going to be the fly on the wall at a gay bar? Do other gay flies even go to bars?) How long will it be before the likes of Tom Delay and Rush Limbaugh demand science immediately tackle the issue by meddling in the genetic structure of all babies in order to remove their gay gene?

On the other hand, it does weaken the argument that people choose their sexuality, which is a ridiculous argument at best. Would anyone who’s aware of society’s outrageous prejudice society against gays and lesbians, chose to be gay and invite constant derision and contempt? Doesn't this add to the mounting evidence, including pheromones and hyperthallimi, that no one chooses to be gay? That the potential for being gay is hardwired into us at birth?

Or are the right-wingers still going to claim it’s all about choice--after all, didn’t the she-fly choose to seek out a female partner? She could have rejected science--as the entire rightwing does--and flown right into the waiting wings of a male suitor.

If you’re waiting for the rightwing to embrace the modern discipline of genetics, fuggedaboudit. They still haven’t embraced evolution, and that’s been around for a couple of centuries now. They haven't really embraced any science, for that matter, because science is something achieved by human intellect and human labor, and these days the rightwing doesn’t seem to trust anything that isn’t specifically mentioned in the Bible, unless it happens to bring about power or money. (I still can’t get over the book, God Wants You to be Rich, which was a huge bestseller in the Christian community.)

No matter what science proves concerning homosexuality, no matter what breakthroughs occur, the right isn't going to change its mind. It's not about science. It's not about facts. It's about some raw emotion that defies logic. In fact, there’s even some new scientific evidence to suggest that prejudice itself is hardwired in the brain, that just as people are born liable to become gay or straight, liable to become depressed or happy, they’re also born predisposed to hate.

This is, however, just another mark of science at which the right wing will undoubtedly scoff. At an upcoming rightwing conference, one of the topics will be how to deal with modern science as it pertains to, and weakens, the rightwing agenda--and how to discredit it. How would you like to be a fly (gay or not) on the wall of that discussion?