Ah, I can just hear the disgusting advertising slogan. Homosexual no more! A scenario like this anticipated by an episode of ReGenesis, and a prettier one, anticipated by such writers as Samuel R. Delany in one of his last SF novels, Triton, is peeking over the horizon, as Tierneylab writes
To their surprise, neurobiologists have discovered that homosexuality can be turned on or off in fruit flies. They’d known that sexual orientation can be genetically programmed, but they didn’t realize it could also be altered by giving a drug that changes the way the flies’ sensory circuits react to pheromones.
For John Tierney, and not just for him, this raises pressing questions
Would some people, gay or straight, who weren’t having luck attracting one gender decide to switch to the other? Would some people casually switch back and forth?
Would some social conservatives [...], who normally object to biologists “playing god” and pharmacologists altering “human nature,” change their minds and urge the use of biotechnology to promote heterosexuality?
Hmmm. I wonder what is the most troubling aspect of this…maybe the aspect which is downplayed by Tierney by presenting it as one aspect of many, but whose importance he demonstrates nevertheless by starting his brief introductory passage with
I don’t think of homosexuality or heterosexuality as an “illness” to be “cured,” but
You know, for me this sounds awfully like the sentence that I’ve heard way too often: “I don’t have anything against foreigners, but…” Ok, to be fair, his ‘but’ has a different function. Still. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it.
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