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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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This is the biggest reality. I remember that around the time of Obergefell, I was taking neuroscience classes and also sitting in on some queer theory classes. The former was relevant to my professional work/interests, and the latter was me just seeing this strange movement brewing and wanting to discover if there was any there there (spoiler: there wasn't really). In any event, my queer theory prof made a point of declaring agnosticism concerning whether sexual orientation was biologically determined (and one of our first readings was an article titled "What's wrong with be(com)ing queer?"). Around the same time, I was seeing in neuroscience some actual science on the topic of pair bonding/infidelity, what was there, what was really lacking, and just what sort of things were considered scientific evidence in the general area.

So, in that context, I'm sitting in a bar, having a drink with my friends. The topic comes up somewhat related to the whole homosexuality/gay marriage thing. I just ever so gently wonder if mayyyyyybe we don't have settled science telling us that sexual orientation is biologically determined, that mayyyyyybe we don't have some set of utterly conclusive scientific experiments demonstrating that people are "born that way" (of course, it could totally be true, but maybe it just hasn't been shown conclusively). Lemme tell ya, for people who are usually pretty rigorous about logical, scientific arguments, the looks on their faces were more, "How could someone even entertain the possibility," than, "Oh, well clearly you're just not aware of these three papers which conclusively show..." In one moment, one experience, I viscerally knew that they had not been reasoned into their position on homosexuality, like at all. It's hard to feel this in your bones without experiencing it, but when you do, you won't forget it. These positions are not being taken because of objective logic and reason. There are other forces at work.