How do you determine the naturalness of homosexuality?

“Homosexual carnal intercourse between two consenting adults” is legal in India now. It wasn’t for lack of reason or scientific data that the item of legislation that rendered sodomy illegal – Section 377 – had been retained for so long. Instead, it was more a question of whether sodomy offended public decency and morality. On September 6, the Supreme Court of India said no consensual sexual act between adults, whether of the same gender or otherwise, could be considered illegal or offensive to public decency or morality.

The US had this moment in 2003, but there, science did play a role. In the landmark case Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court of the US was able to rule that homosexuality was not a sin against nature on the back of a growing body of evidence that homosexuality exists in nature. More broadly, science helped determine the construction of sexuality in human and non-human species and rescued it from the chokehold of religious ideals and the stigma it carried. CJI Dipak Misra and Justice A.M. Khanwilkar may not have laboured through the scientific evidence in their own judgment but the veins of rationalism are evident in their syntax. Consider this excerpt (from the full; emphasis added):

What nature gives is natural.Thus, that part of the personality of a person has to be respected and not despised or looked down upon. The said inherent nature and the associated natural impulses in that regard are to be accepted.

From another part of the same judgment:

equally naturalneither a physical nor a mental illnessa trauma to the conception of expression of biological desire which revolves around the pattern of mosaic of true manifestation of identity‘order of nature’ is limited to the procreative concept that may have been conceived as natural by a systemic conservative approach and such limitations do not really take note of inborn traits or developed orientations or, for that matter, consensual acts which relate to responses to series of free exercise of assertions of one‘s bodily autonomysexual orientation is a natural condition and attraction towards the same sex or opposite sex are both naturally equal

Many of these arguments hinge on what it means to be natural. But what is nature, and what is naturalness*? The Wikipedia article on homosexual behaviour among animals carries an instructive line in this regard, and vis-a-vis the tenet of peccatum contra naturam (Latin for “sin against nature”): “The observation of homosexual behaviour in animals can be seen as both an argument for and against the acceptance of homosexuality in humans.” It’s ‘for’ because if animals do it, then it’s natural; it’s ‘against’ because humans are not meant to be like other animals. It’s a ridiculous position to be in. I find a quote originally about economics to be useful here:

… if background conditions determine, in a way which in principle falls outside a theory, what counts as the events over which the theory ranges, the theory is at the mercy of changes in these conditions which at any moment can undermine the predictive power of the theory.

The philosopher Richard Norman had intended to develop a theory that could predict how much, rather what kind of, resistance certain technologies would meet from certain cultures based on what traditions each technology appeared to offend. He succeeded in that he was able to explain why some cultures struggled, and continue to struggle, with the acceptability of technologies like vitro fertilisation and contraception, and what the latter might have in common with homosexuality. He pegged it on background conditions. Russell Blackford, a philosopher at the University of Newcastle, Australia, summarised Norman’s thesis thus in a 2006 review (emphasis added)

If there are recognised choices that include sexual acts with no possibility of pregnancy, then one of the background conditions has been lost.

Blackford writes in another part of the review (emphasis added):

nature is being equated with the background conditions recognised within the culture concerned

However, given that the Bharatiya Janata Party has refused to issue a statement on the historic SC verdict, signalling its moral ambiguity (at the very least) on the subject, it seems unlikely that the party’s members – i.e. the country’s ministers – will be open to making incremental changes in their worldview to accommodate the naturalisation of “unnatural” sexual acts, so to speak.

*Not to be confused with the naturalness of particle physics, or maybe it is.

The Wire
September 7, 2018

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