The real puzzle is homosexual orientation—why there should be men and women who consistently prefer homosexual mating opportunities to heterosexual ones, or who avoid mating with the opposite sex altogether. At least in men, homosexual orientation appears to be inborn. Gay men generally report that their homosexual attractions began as soon as they felt sexual stirrings shortly before adolescence. And homosexuality is more concordant in identical than in fraternal twins, suggesting that their shared genes play a role. Homosexuality, by the way, is one of the few examples of a nature-nurture debate in which the politically correct position is “nature.” If homosexuality is innate, according to the common understanding, then people don’t choose to be gay and hence can’t be criticized for their lifestyle; nor could they convert the children in their classrooms or Boy Scout troops if they wanted to.
The evolutionary mystery is how any genetic tendency to avoid heterosexual sex can remain in a population for long, since it would have consigned the person to few or no offspring. Perhaps “gay genes” have a compensating advantage, like enhancing fertility when they are carried by women, particularly if they are on the X chromosome, which women have in two copies—the advantage to women would need to be only a bit more than half the disadvantage to men for the gene to spread.223 Perhaps the putative gay genes lead to homosexuality only in certain environments, which didn’t exist while our genes were selected. One ethnographic survey found that in almost 60 percent of preliterate societies, homosexuality was unknown or extremely rare.224 Or perhaps the genes work indirectly, by making a fetus susceptible to fluctuations in hormones or antibodies which affect its developing brain.
Whatever the explanation, people with a homosexual orientation who grow up in a society that does not cultivate homosexual behavior may find themselves the target of a society-wide hostility. Among traditional societies that take note of homosexuality in their midst, more than twice as many disapprove of it as tolerate it.225 And in traditional and modern societies alike, the intolerance can erupt in violence. Bullies and toughs may see an easy mark on whom they can prove their machismo to an audience or to one another. And lawmakers may have moralistic convictions about homosexuality that they translate into commandments and statutes. These beliefs may be products of the cross-wiring between disgust and morality that leads people to confuse visceral revulsion with objective sinfulness.226 That short circuit may convert an impulse to avoid homosexual partners into an impulse to condemn homosexuality. At least since biblical times homophobic sentiments have been translated into laws that punish homosexuals with death or mutilation, especially in Christian and Muslim kingdoms and their former colonies.227 A chilling 20th-century example was the targeting of homosexuals for elimination during the Holocaust.
During the Enlightenment, the questioning of any moral precept that was based on visceral impulse or religious dogma led to a new look at homosexuality. 228 Montesquieu and Voltaire argued that homosexuality should be decriminalized, though they didn’t go so far as to say that it was morally acceptable. In 1785 Jeremy Bentham took the next step. Using utilitarian reasoning, which equates morality with whatever brings the greatest good to the greatest number, Bentham argued that there is nothing immoral about homosexual acts because they make no one worse off. Homosexuality was legalized in France after the Revolution, and in a smattering of other countries in the ensuing decades, as figure 7–23 shows. The movement picked up in the middle of the 20th century and blasted off in the 1970s and 1990s, as the gay rights movement was fueled by the ideal of human rights.
Today homosexuality has been legalized in almost 120 countries, though laws against it remain on the books of another 80, mostly in Africa, the Caribbean, Oceania, and the Islamic world.229 Worse, homosexuality is punishable by death in Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen, parts of Nigeria, parts of Somalia, and all of Iran (despite, according to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, not existing in that country). But the pressure is on. Every human rights organization considers the criminalization of homosexuality to be a human rights violation, and in 2008 in the UN General Assembly, 66 countries endorsed a declaration urging that all such laws be repealed. In a statement endorsing the declaration, Navanethem Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote, “The principle of universality admits no exception. Human rights truly are the birthright of all human beings.”230
FIGURE 7–23. Time line for the decriminalization of homosexuality, United States and world
Sources: Ottosson, 2006, 2009. Dates for an additional seven countries (Timor-Leste, Surinam, Chad, Belarus, Fiji, Nepal, and Nicaragua) were obtained from “LBGT Rights by Country or Territory,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights. Dates for an additional thirty-six countries that currently allow homosexuality are not listed in either source.
The same graph shows that the decriminalization of homosexuality began later in the United States. As late as 1969, homosexuality was illegal in every state but Illinois, and municipal police would often relieve their boredom on a slow night by raiding a gay hangout and dispersing or arresting the patrons, sometimes with the help of billy clubs. But in 1969 a raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay dance club in Greenwich Village, set off three days of rioting in protest and galvanized gay communities throughout the country to work to repeal laws that criminalized homosexuality or discriminated against homosexuals. Within a dozen years almost half of American states had decriminalized homosexuality. In 2003, following another burst of decriminalizations, the Supreme Court overturned an antisodomy statute in Texas and ruled that all such laws were unconstitutional. In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy invoked the principle of personal autonomy and the indefensibility of using government power to enforce religious belief and traditional customs:Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct.... It must be acknowledged, of course, that for centuries there have been powerful voices to condemn homosexual conduct as immoral. The condemnation has been shaped by religious beliefs, conceptions of right and acceptable behavior, and respect for the traditional family.... These considerations do not answer the question before us, however. The issue is whether the majority may use the power of the State to enforce these views on the whole society through operation of the criminal law.231
Between the first burst of legalization in the 1970s and the collapse of the remaining laws a decade and a half later, Americans’ attitudes toward homosexuality underwent a sea change. The rise of AIDS in the 1980s mobilized gay activist groups and led many celebrities to come out of the closet, while others were outed posthumously. They included the actors John Gielgud and Rock Hudson, the singers Elton John and George Michael, the fashion designers Perry Ellis, Roy Halston, and Yves Saint Laurent, the athletes Billie Jean King and Greg Louganis, and the comedians Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O’Donnell. Popular entertainers such as k.d. lang, Freddie Mercury, and Boy George flaunted gay personas, and playwrights such as Harvey Fierstein and Tony Kushner wrote about AIDS and other gay themes in popular plays and movies. Lovable gay characters began to appear in romantic comedies and in sitcoms such as Will and Grace and Ellen, and an acceptance of homosexuality among heterosexuals was increasingly depicted as the norm. As Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza insisted, “We’re not gay! . . . Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” As homosexuality was becoming destigmatized, domesticated, and even ennobled, fewer gay people felt the need to keep their sexual orientation hidden. In 1990 my graduate advisor, an eminent psycholinguist and social psychologist who was born in 1925, published an autobiographical essay that began, “When Roger Brown comes out of the closet, the time for courage is past.”232
Americans increasingly felt that gay people were a part of their real and virtual communities, and that made it harder to keep them outside their circle of sympathy. The changes can be seen in the attitudes they revealed to pollsters. Figure 7–24 shows Americans’ opinions on whether homosexuality is morally wrong (from two polling or
ganizations), whether it should be legal, and whether gay people should have equal job opportunities. I’ve plotted the “yeses” for the last two questions upside down, so that low values for all four questions represent the more tolerant response.
The most gay-friendly opinion, and the first to show a decline, was on equal opportunity. After the civil rights movement, a commitment to fairness had become common decency, and Americans were unwilling to accept discrimination against gay people even if they didn’t approve of their lifestyle. By the new millennium resistance to equal opportunity had fallen into the zone of crank opinion. Beginning in the late 1980s, the moral judgments began to catch up with the sense of fairness, and more and more Americans were willing to say, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” The headline of a 2008 press release from the Gallup Organization sums up the current national mood: “Americans Evenly Divided on Morality of Homosexuality: However, majority supports legality and acceptance of gay relations.”233
FIGURE 7–24. Intolerance of homosexuality in the United States, 1973–2010
Sources: Morally wrong (GSS): General Social Survey, http://www.norc.org/GSS+Website. All other questions: Gallup, 2001, 2008, 2010. All data represent “yes” responses; data for the “Equal opportunity” and “Legal” questions are subtracted from 100.
Liberals are more accepting of homosexuality than conservatives, whites more accepting than blacks, and the secular more tolerant than the religious. But in every sector the trend over time is toward tolerance. Personal familiarity matters: a 2009 Gallup poll showed that the six in ten Americans who have an openly gay friend, relative, or co-worker are more favorable to legalized homosexual relations and to gay marriage than the four in ten who don’t. But tolerance is now widespread: even among Americans who have never known a gay person, 62 percent say they would feel comfortable around one.234
And in the most significant sector of all, the change has been dramatic. Many people have informed me that younger Americans have become homophobic, based on the observation that they use “That’s so gay!” as a putdown. But the numbers say otherwise: the younger the respondents, the more accepting they are of homosexuality.235 Their acceptance, moreover, is morally deeper. Older tolerant respondents have increasingly come down on the “nature” side of the debate on the causes of homosexuality, and naturists are more tolerant than nurturists because they feel that a person cannot be condemned for a trait he never chose. But teens and twenty-somethings are more sympathetic to the nurture explanation and they are more tolerant of homosexuality. The combination suggests that they just find nothing wrong with homosexuality in the first place, so whether gay people can “help it” is beside the point. The attitude is: “Gay? Whatever, dude.” Young people, of course, tend to be more liberal than their elders, and it’s possible that as they creep up the demographic totem pole they will lose their acceptance of homosexuality. But I doubt it. The acceptance strikes me as a true generational difference, one that this cohort will take with them as they become geriatric. If so, the country will only get increasingly tolerant as their homophobic elders die off.
A populace that accepts homosexuality is likely not just to disempower the police and courts from using force against gay people but to empower them to prevent other citizens from using it. A majority of American states, and more than twenty countries, have hate-crime laws that increase the punishment for violence motivated by a person’s sexual orientation, race, religion, or gender. Since the 1990s the federal government has been joining them. The most recent escalation came from the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, named after a gay student in Wyoming who in 1998 was beaten, tortured, and tied to a fence overnight to die. (The law’s other namesake was the African American man who was murdered that year by being dragged behind a truck.)
So tolerance of homosexuality has gone up, and tolerance of antigay violence has gone down. But have the new attitudes and laws caused a downturn in homophobic violence? The mere fact that gay people have become so much more visible, at least in urban, coastal, and university communities, suggests they feel less menaced by an implicit threat of violence. But it’s not easy to show that rates of actual violence have changed. Statistics are available only for the years since 1996, when the FBI started to publish data on hate crimes broken down by the motive, the victim, and the nature of the crime.236 Even these numbers are iffy, because they depend on the willingness of the victims to report a crime and on the local police to categorize it as a hate crime and report it to the FBI.237 That isn’t as much of a problem with homicides, but unfortunately for social scientists (and fortunately for humanity) not that many people are killed because they are gay. Since 1996 the FBI has recorded fewer than 3 antigay homicides a year from among the 17,000 or so that are committed for every other reason. And as best as we can tell, other antigay hate crimes are uncommon as well. In 2008 the chance that a person would be a victim of aggravated assault because of sexual orientation was 3 per 100,000 gay people, whereas the chance that he would be a victim because he was a human being was more than a hundred times higher.238
We don’t know whether these odds have gotten smaller over time. Since 1996 there has been no significant change in the incidence of three of the four major kinds of hate crimes against gay people: aggravated assault, simple assault, or homicide (though the homicides are so rare that trends would be meaningless anyway).239 In figure 7–25 I’ve plotted the incidence of the remaining category, which has declined, namely intimidation (in which a person is made to feel in danger for his or her personal safety), together with the rate ofof aggravated assault for comparison.
FIGURE 7–25. Antigay hate crimes in the United States, 1996–2008
Source: Data from the annual FBI reports of Hate Crime Statistics (http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/civilrights/hate.htm). The number of incidents is divided by the population covered by the agencies reporting the statistics multiplied by 0.03, a common estimate of the incidence of homosexuality in the adult population.
So while we can’t say for sure that gay Americans have become safer from assault, we do know they are safer from intimidation, safer from discrimination and moral condemnation, and perhaps most importantly, completely safe from violence from their own government. For the first time in millennia, the citizens of more than half the countries of the world can enjoy that safety—not enough of them, but a measure of progress from a time in which not even helping to save one’s country from defeat in war was enough to keep the government goons away.
ANIMAL RIGHTS AND THE DECLINE OF CRUELTY TO ANIMALS
Let me tell you about the worst thing I have ever done. In 1975, as a twenty-year-old sophomore, I got a summer job as a research assistant in an animal behavior lab. One evening the professor gave me an assignment. Among the rats in the lab was a runt that could not participate in the ongoing studies, so he wanted to use it to try out a new experiment. The first step was to train the rat in what was called a temporal avoidance conditioning procedure. The floor of a Skinner box was hooked up to a shock generator, and a timer that would shock the animal every six seconds unless it pressed a lever, which would give it a ten-second reprieve. Rats catch on quickly and press the lever every eight or nine seconds, postponing the shock indefinitely. All I had to do was throw the rat in the box, start the timers, and go home for the night. When I arrived back at the lab early the next morning, I would find a fully conditioned rat.
But that was not what looked back at me when I opened the box in the morning. The rat had a grotesque crook in its spine and was shivering uncontrollably. Within a few seconds, it jumped with a start. It was nowhere near the lever. I realized that the rat had not learned to press the lever and had spent the night being shocked every six seconds. When I reached in to rescue it, I found it cold to the touch. I rushed it to the veterinarian two floors down, but it was too late, and the rat died an hour later. I had tortured an animal to death.
As the experiment was being
explained to me, I had already sensed it was wrong. Even if the procedure had gone perfectly, the rat would have spent twelve hours in constant anxiety, and I had enough experience to know that laboratory procedures don’t always go perfectly. My professor was a radical behaviorist, for whom the question “What is it like to be a rat?” was simply incoherent. But I was not, and there was no doubt in my mind that a rat could feel pain. The professor wanted me in his lab; I knew that if I refused, nothing bad would happen. But I carried out the procedure anyway, reassured by the ethically spurious but psychologically reassuring principle that it was standard practice.
The resonance with certain episodes of 20th-century history is too close for comfort, and in the next chapter I will expand on the psychological lesson I learned that day. The reason I bring up this blot on my conscience is to show what was standard practice in the treatment of animals at the time. To motivate the animals to work for food, we starved them to 80 percent of their freefeeding weight, which in a small animal means a state of gnawing hunger. In the lab next door, pigeons were shocked through beaded keychains that were fastened around the base of their wings; I saw that the chains had worn right through their skin, exposing the muscle below. In another lab, rats were shocked through safety pins that pierced the skin of their chests. In one experiment on endorphins, animals were given unavoidable shocks described in the paper as “extremely intense, just subtetanizing”—that is, just short of the point where the animal’s muscles would seize up in a state of tetanus. The callousness extended outside the testing chambers. One researcher was known to show his anger by picking up the nearest unused rat and throwing it against a wall. Another shared a cold joke with me: a photograph, printed in a scientific journal, of a rat that had learned to avoid shocks by lying on its furry back while pressing the food lever with its forepaw. The caption: “Breakfast in bed.”
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 67