[Vision2020] Nature’s Case for Same-Sex Marriage

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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March 29, 2013
Nature’s Case for Same-Sex Marriage By DAVID GEORGE HASKELL

BIOLOGY has returned to the nation’s highest court. It’s not Darwin’s
theory of evolution on the docket this time, but the nature of sex.
Defenders of Proposition 8, California’s ban on gay marriage, base their
case on what they call the “objective biological fact” that procreation is
an exclusively heterosexual process. Citing the 18th-century English jurist
William Blackstone, they argue that marriage should be “founded in nature.”

This invocation of nature echoes other voices. Last December, before Pope
Benedict XVI resigned, he used his Christmas greetings to the Roman Curia
to deplore what he called a “new philosophy of sexuality” that manipulates
and denies nature. Roy S. Moore, re-elected last fall as the Chief Justice
of the Alabama Supreme Court, once let rip with less measured language,
exclaiming in a child-custody case that homosexuality was “a crime against
nature and a violation of the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”
Meanwhile, Tennessee legislators have repeatedly sought the prohibition of
any sexual education “inconsistent with natural human reproduction.” None
of this is, in fact, new: Oscar Wilde’s
trials<http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/wilde/Crimwilde.html>hinged
on the courts’ understanding of natural love and unnatural vice.

References to biology coat these arguments with a gloss of scientific
rigor. But before we write nature into law, let’s take a stroll outside the
Supreme Court’s chambers and check those biological facts. Descending the
steps of the court, we enter Washington’s planted landscape, a formal park
where nature stands alongside patriotic monuments and federal buildings.
There is no shortage of counsel about biology here.

The grandeur of the National Mall is rightly famous. Less well known are
the hermaphroditic sex lives of many of its inhabitants. Japanese cherry
trees break bud in explosions of pink; male and female coexist at the heart
of each flower. The American elms that frame the Mall’s lawns present a
more reserved countenance to the world. But their inconspicuous lime-green
flowers are biologically bisexual. Ginkgo, another tree common in
Washington, follows a Prop 8-approved sexual separation, growing as
discrete males and females. But even the ginkgo will sometimes surprise
horticulturalists with a stray flower of the other sex.

An inspection of the bark of these trees reveals garden snails grazing on
thin, vertical lawns of lichens, yeasts and algae. Like the trees, each
sexually mature snail makes both egg and sperm. Mating among these
gastropods is charged with romantic tension; two males and two females are
caught up in every embrace. Downstream from the Mall, at the outlet of the
Potomac, marine snails called slipper shells add yet another twist: they
begin life as males, before maturing into females.

The snails on the trees graze on fungi that further enrich the Mall’s
sexual diversity. Fungi don’t have “sexes,” as most humans understand the
term. Subtle chemical markers on each fungal cell divide the species into
“mating types.” In some species, dozens of such types occur. Some of these
fungal cells — like the slipper shells — can’t resist the itch to switch
types.

Looking up from the fungi, we see a bee with its head buried in a cherry
blossom’s mop of reproductive parts, supping on sweet nectar, and a
northern cardinal fusses in the foliage, seeking early-hatched
caterpillars. If these birds and bees were the first to teach us about sex,
we’ve forgotten part of the lesson. Just as some species that are mostly
hermaphroditic contain unisexual individuals, some insects and vertebrates
cannot be simply called male or female. Human biology joins in this
rejection <http://www.who.int/genomics/gender/en/index1.html> of binary
claims of male and female. There is controversy in the scientific
literature about how many people are intersex, but some estimates put the
figure at up to 2 percent.

Of course, sexuality is more than an arrangement of cells. Bonds form
between sexual partners that help define the social structure of each
species. What does nature on the Mall teach us about these relationships?
Look, for instance, at the mallards paddling in the nearby reflecting
pools. If they are like mallards elsewhere, then one in 10 of them engage
in homosexual sex.

Stepping from the northern border of the Mall into the Smithsonian’s
National Museum of Natural History, we come face-to-taxidermied-face with
our great ape relatives. Before these apes were sequestered in museum
cabinets, homosexual bonds were a natural part of their lives. This is
especially true for our closest living cousins, the bonobos and
chimpanzees.

The facts of biology plainly falsify the oft-repeated notion that
homosexuality is unnatural. Every species has evolved its own sexual
ecology, and so nature resists generalizations. Does humanity’s natural
inheritance include homosexual bonds and behaviors? Certainly. This
conclusion is reinforced by the growing evidence that our sexual
orientation is influenced by both our
genes<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7581447>and the environment
that we experience in
the womb <http://classes.biology.ucsd.edu/bisp194-1.FA09/Blanchard_2001.pdf>.


A wide, living rainbow arcs across the natural world. Diversity rules in
sexuality, just as it does in the rest of biology. This natural variety
does not provide ready-made moral guidance. But to claim that the only
natural forms of sex and pair bonding occur between unambiguous males and
females is to ignore the facts of human biology. Let those who wish for
marriage to be “founded in nature” take note: the view outside the Supreme
Court is full of life’s beautiful sexual variegation.

David George Haskell <http://theforestunseen.com/>, a professor of biology
at Sewanee: The University of the South, is the author of “The Forest
Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature.”


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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