What if we are all wrong?

An interesting article in the New York Times today  discusses an article in this months Journal of Personality and Social Psychology about why some people may be such vehement homophobes.

Apparently a group of scientists have performed a study, and found scientific evidence that some homophobia is the result of repressed same-sex desire. They do go on to make a statement that not all homophobia is a result of these repressed desires, but, apparently about 20% of this unreasonable fear and hatred can be traced to a persons own internal conflict with same-sex attraction.

While this is all very interesting, and nothing particularly new for anyone who is actually a homosexual and had to deal with homophobes for their entire lives, it begs a bigger issue: if our culture weren’t so hung up on what people do in bed, we wouldn’t have people with these internal conflicts in the first place.

If we go back to the Kinsey report from 1948, even using somewhat primitive methods, Alfred Kinsey was able to conclude with some degree of certainty that most people were not exclusively homosexual or heterosexual.

Again, there are no absolutes here. And I think that the lesson we need to take from this is that left alone, human beings have a wide range of sexual behaviour, pretty much all of which is normal.

Sure, the church, in all of its various forms over the millenia has managed to skew our thinking on what is really normal. I think what is abnormal is to expect human beings to be completely monogamous over their entire lifetimes. I think that absent influence from religion, human sexuality in all of its glorious forms would be something that we rarely gave a second thought.

Many of the books I read as a young person were of the “science fiction” genre, and some of them presented a society where a “group marriage” might exist. Within this group, children would be born, cared for and loved, but no one necessarily knew which of the group might be the father, because it didn’t matter. On any given evening, who ended up in bed with whom was unimportant, and unremarkable.  All that mattered was that the group was happy, children were raised responsibly, and everyone cared for each other.

This utopian society cannot exist in the world we know today because either a government or an organized religion would be unable to leave such a group alone. Not being a psychologist, I fail to understand why it matters to anyone how any group of people choose to live their lives.

People in our western culture who are on the political and religious right claim that a proper family must consist of 1 Mommy, 1 Daddy and the children. Mommy and Daddy have to be completely monogamous to each other, and stay together until death do them part, otherwise the children are horribly damaged for life. I suspect quite a few people on the left and not so conservative subscribe to this same picture because it is the only reality we’ve been allowed to perceive as “normal” for as long as we can remember.

I call bullshit on the whole stinking mess. I think that during any persons lifetime they can be attracted to a number of people, of both sexes, and who they choose to mate with or take up housekeeping with at any given time is something that governments and religions should ignore. So what if a group of people want to get together and call themselves a family. So what if two guys decide to set up housekeeping, or two girls. Or three of one and two of another.

Back to the beginning, I think that the reason we have so many people, up to 20% of us it may seem, who are fighting these internal battles about who they might be attracted to is a shame – there is no natural reason for us to be ashamed of who we are attracted to at any given time. Any reason that we feel shame about who we love or who we are attracted to is one imposed on us by a religious belief or some government deciding it is wrong.

I think the more of us who live our lives without regard for what some old guy in a bad dress might think, the better. The more of us who set an example and love who we wish, right in front of the neighbors, the better. The better we know and accept ourselves, the less we will see of “crimes of passion” and broken hearts from petty jealousy.

Sex is as much a part of the human existence as breathing. It should be equally unremarkable.