In his response of 18 August, 2010 Joe Carter, web editor of First Things, a leading American conservative Catholic publication, attempted to forge a rapproachment between gay activists and conservative Christians, suggesting that if gay activists could agree that homosexual behaviour requires free choice then conservative Christians might even join with them in protesting against eugenic therapies aimed at changing someone's future behaviour while still in the womb. The problem with Carter's request is that gay people have never denied that their sexual behaviour, like all of their behaviour, is the result of free choice.  The claim that gay activists deny their free will is a straw man.  Rather, they disagree with the Catholic claim that the behaviour in question (consenting homosexual behaviour between adults) is morally unacceptable.

Carter says gay activists could be "harming their cause even more if they continue to argue that homosexual behaviour is normal and acceptable simply because it has a basis in our biological nature."  First, if homosexuality does have a basis in some people's biological nature, this tells us only that homosexuality is a natural variant of human sexuality.  It does not make all homosexual behaviour "acceptable" since that would be a moral question that has to do with the voluntary ways in which agents choose to express their predispositions.  The situation is exactly the same for the heterosexual.

Second, liberals and gay activists completely agree with Carter when he says that the kind of biological reductionism that treats human behaviour as explainable by chemical and physical laws "undermines both moral autonomy and the dignity of the individual".  The problem with such reductionism is that it re-describes behaviors as properties or objects within the individual's brain or gene. Many reject this deterministic model because they see human action as directed by free will.  We may have all kinds of dispositions, but we nevertheless decide how and when to express them.  

Carter's readers need to be clear that he is protesting against a Christian argument, not the gay activists' one, when he refers to the notion that a sexual "orientation is normal and acceptable simply because it has a basis in our biological nature."  

First, this conflates "normal" and "acceptable", treating them as though they were the same thing. "Normal" is a descriptive term about what constitutes average behaviour.  Homosexuals could reasonably argue that homosexuality is "normal" for those who possess a biological predisposition for homosexuality. This would not be to make any value judgement about the various ways in which homosexual individuals then express their same-sex attraction. It would merely be to say that homosexuality is a natural, though less common, variant of human sexuality. "Acceptable" is an evaluative term and it contains the implication that something ought to be accepted because it is morally permissible or at least not harmful.  Homosexuals can, and should, argue that homosexual orientation per se is both normal and acceptable prior to any evaluation of particular homosexual acts.  

Christians, not gay activists, have been attempting to wed the mere biological fact of procreative `complementarity' or the presumed `naturalness' of heterosexuality to some kind of judgment about its superior moral status - despite the fact that a heterosexual orientation can express itself in many morally bad ways (rape, pedophilia, infidelity, etc). None of these behaviours are made more acceptable because of their underlying heterosexuality. Heterosexual attraction, because it is involuntary, is irrelevant to a moral assessment of the behaviours to which it leads. What matter to an ethical assessment of any sexual behaviour are the voluntary aspects of those behaviours - i.e. whether they are consenting and whether they are injurious to others. Whether or not a sexual action is "acceptable" or "desirable" has everything to do with these considerations and nothing to do with the sex or sexual orientation of the agents involved. The voluntary aspects of behaviour are what matter to the moral assessment of all human action, whether sexual or not.

Homosexuality per se could not be a predisposition to immoral behaviour unless it could be shown that something about one's sexual orientation causes one to harm, injure or coerce non-consenting sex.  There is no evidence to show that this is the case. The mere attraction  one feels for the opposite or the same sex does not override free will and so cannot be an excuse for bad (immoral) behaviour.  Heterosexuals, more than homosexuals, have attempted to use their sexual orientation to excuse all kinds of bad choices - rape and infidelity being key examples.  But this doesn't cut any ice among those of us who reject the reductionism of biological determinism.  Thankfully, both liberals and Catholics can agree on that much.  

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Terri Murray is an academic theologian and bioethicist.  She holds a Masters Degree  in Christian Ethics from Heythrop College, Univerisity of London and is currently pursuing a research PhD in Social and Contextual Theology at Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford Brookes University.

An American ex-patriot, she teaches philosophy at Hampstead College of Fine Arts & Humanities in London, UK.  Her articles have been published in Free Inquiry Magazine, Journal of Social Philosophy, Existential Analysis, Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism and Philosophy Now Magazine.