If, as science is getting close to proving, that being gay is genetically encoded, that makes things rough for fundamentalist Christians.
As Harold Meyerson points out, it creates a conundrum: God creates gay people in the same way he creates straight people and being gay or straight is determined the moment the sperm enters the egg. But according to fundamentalist dogma, homosexuality itself is a sin — an imperfection — and therefore God has created a sinful, imperfect being. But God, being perfect and all-good, can’t do that. (But if God is all-powerful, he can do anything….) And this gay human being is therefore condemned to Hell for nothing that he did; he or she could live a good life, walking in the Light of God, yet doomed while the straight person who led the same life gets a free pass. As Meyerson says, “Indeed, it means that a gay person’s duty is to suppress his God-given instincts while a straight person’s duty is to fulfill his.”
It also brings up the question of what do fundamentalists do when they find out through in-utero testing that their child is gay? They don’t believe in abortion, so that’s out, and they don’t believe in genetic manipulation, so the fetus can’t be reprogrammed in the womb. They don’t believe in stem-cell research that could somehow lead to a “cure” for homosexuality. So they are bound by their faith and practice to bring a sinful child into the world. In their theology, are they damned for allowing this to happen?
This is what happens when reality and theology face off. As Galileo and many other scientists have found out, theology does not like it when science proves one of its superstitions to be false, and the theocrats do everything they can to destroy the bearer of such bad news — yet they are never capable of proving the science itself wrong. It also illustrates the folly in micromanaging theological interpretation down to the cellular level. All it does is create more paradoxes and conundrums, and for some, including a lot of Quakers, it gets in the way of a true spiritual journey. The devil, after all, is in the details.
The real problem for the fundies is that if science does find the genetic code for homosexuality, the professional gay-bashers like James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson will be relegated to the environs of the Flat Earth Society and they’ll have to find some other minority to ostracize.
Watch out, left-handers; you could be next.