In her brief for homosexual marriage, Gay Marriage: Waking the American Conscience, Silke Fauve characterizes those “who would deny gays their human rights” as being motivated by “fear, blind adherence to religious dogma, or a simple hatred of what they don’t understand...”

First, there is nothing wrong with being motivated by fear. Without the capacity to experience fear, humans would cease to exist. Fear enables us to avoid or flee from life-threatening situations. However, I think that it would be better to characterize the human response to homosexual behavior as ranging from distaste to revulsion, not as fear. And again, feelings of distaste and revulsion enable humans to avoid things that threaten their survival. Rotting meat gives off a revolting odor, and humans do not have to study nutrition to know that they must avoid eating such meat. The feeling of distaste that humans experience when they are confronted by homosexual conduct is the flip side of their desire for  heterosexual relations, which produce offspring and so ensure the survival of the human race.  

As for “religious dogma” being a reason to avoid homosexual contact, as David Sloan Wilson explains in his Darwin’s Cathedral: “Rationality [and here we may consider ‘rationality’ as belief in a putatively rational political ideology—eloi] is not the gold standard against which all other forms of thought are to be judged. Adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged.” Taking Calvinism as an example of a group evolutionary strategy, Wilson writes that its “seemingly irrational features...seem gratifyingly functional from an evolutionary perspective. For all its otherworldliness, Calvinism caused its community of believers to behave adaptively in the real world, which is all that evolution can be expected to accomplish.”

Religious beliefs often serve as reinforcements of adaptive behaviors. This is obvious in religious injunctions against homosexuality.

“Hatred,” like “fear,” is again a word that does not properly characterize the human response to homosexual behavior; “disapproval” would be more appropriate. Adaptive behavior normally occurs on the subconscious level, so any lack of understanding of the usefulness of an adaptive response is not an argument against the response. In any case, the explanation for the distaste humans feel towards homosexuality is rather simple: the behavior is non-adaptive inasmuch as it prevents humans from reproducing, and if such behavior were widespread it would threaten the existence of the human race.

Referring to homosexuals, Fauve writes that “it is immoral to dehumanize a group of innocent people in order to subject them to discriminatory, abusive laws.” Presumably, “discriminatory, abusive laws” refer to laws that recognize that marriage is appropriate only to a man and a woman. But marriage and families are evolutionary strategies that enable humans to survive and pass on their genes. These strategies make evolutionary sense only when marriage involves a man and a woman. One cannot change the laws of biology by passing a law or by making a judicial ruling. A confused idea of egalitarianism informs Fauve’s view. That homosexual marriage is not recognized by law is no more discriminatory or abusive than men’s not being given maternity leave in order to give birth.

Fauve writes: “The Christian God I was introduced to as a child was a powerful spirit of love...” But Christianity does not recognize homosexual love as licit. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is unequivocal on this matter: “Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.”

I doubt any of the Protestant denominations would take issue with the Catechism’s teaching. Of course, a homosexual may say that he is not a Christian, and that he doesn’t give a fig about Christian teaching. But he cannot say that Christianity has ever viewed homosexuality as anything other than a very grave sin.

Whether or not “America’s separation of church and state renders theological arguments irrelevant,” evolutionary arguments are not irrelevant. The human race, if it wants to remain in existence, must encourage adaptive behavior and discourage non-adaptive behavior. This will remain true even if the Church someday decides, in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, to approve homosexual acts.

Fauve appeals to Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in her attempt to circumvent the laws of biology, specifically to Paragraph 1 of Article 16: “Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.” Fauve refers to Paragraph 1 of Article 16 without actually citing it in her essay, doubtless to avoid the reader’s attention being drawn to the words “men and women” in the article. In the French version of the Declaration, the intent of the framers is even clearer: “A partir de l’âge nubile, l’homme e la femme...ont le droit de se marier e de fonder une famille.”(“When of marriageable age...man and woman have the right to marry each other and to found a family.”)

Fauve feels that homosexuals’ inability to marry makes them “subhuman...a defective class of human beings.” But they are no more subhuman than is a man subhuman because he cannot give birth; nor is a woman subhuman because she can. There is an evolutionary reason for which male and female exist and come together to procreate, as articulated by Matt Ridley in his The Red Queen: “Parasites provide exactly the incentive to change genes every generation that sex seems to demand. The success of the genes that defended you so well in the last generation may be the best of reasons to abandon these same gene combinations in the next. By the time the next generation comes around, the parasites will have surely evolved an answer to the defense that worked best in the last generation....Parasites invent new keys; hosts change the locks....So a parasite with the right key will quickly exterminate the asexual species but not the sexual one....[A]n individual, by having sex, can produce offspring more likely to survive than an individual that produces clones of itself.”

Like many transhumanists, Fauve lacks a grounding in evolutionary biology, the study of which quickly leads one to conclude: What Nature and Nature’s God have put asunder, let no man attempt to join.

Postscript: The virulent assault on adaptive behaviors has been going on for many decades in the West. Fauve’s use of terms such as “hatred, lies, dehumanize, discriminatory, abusive, self-righteous hate monger, devil’s domain” to characterize the feelings of those who question the wisdom of non-adaptive behaviors is typical of the virulence of the broad attack on stable evolutionary survival strategies. That non-adaptive behaviors are countenanced and even championed by those whose procreative interests are jeopardized by such behaviors is a puzzle that remains to be solved.

GayMarriage: Waking the American Conscience: