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The latest gay rights campaign in Italy is flawed, writes Jason Foster.
A
new campaign against heterosexism authorised by the Regional Government
of Tuscany is causing controversy in Italy. The campaign’s poster image
identifies a new-born baby as ‘homosexual’, and bears the slogan,
‘sexual orientation is not a choice’.
Conservative politicians
and the Vatican have criticised the use of a baby in such a campaign;
but the real problem is its message that homosexuality should be
tolerated because it can’t be changed.
In itself, the idea that sexual orientation is pre-given has strong credibility.
However,
by defending same-sex attraction in terms of its involuntary nature,
the campaign logically implies that if sexual orientation could be
chosen, then prejudice would be justified. It therefore suggests that
homosexuality is something people have to put up with, like a
disability or a disease that can’t be cured, rather than something good
and worthy of choice.
In this respect, compare homosexuality with
heterosexuality. Most people don’t accept heterosexuality because
sexual orientation isn’t chosen, but because they see heterosexuality
as good, as being the natural way in which human beings reproduce, and
hence the proper way to be.
From this perspective, viewing
homosexuality as involuntary places it in the same category as a
disability, because it prevents people from exercising their natural
capacity for reproductive sex, in the same way that deafness is a
disability that denies people the capacity to hear.
Yet this
ignores the negative side of heterosexuality, which involves biological
and psychological differences between male and female that too readily
give rise to unequal and oppressive relationships favouring men over
women – and some men over other men. For example, it’s no coincidence
that the greater proportion of violent and destructive acts are
performed by the more masculine of heterosexual males.
This
morally offensive and socially harmful dimension of heterosexuality
increases when distinctions between male and female become more extreme
– the most infamous case in recent times being the repression of
Afghani women under the Taliban. Nevertheless, you can’t have
masculinity without femininity, since they are opposites that define
each another. Hence the problem is one of heterosexuality, rather than
of masculinity alone.
If straight sexuality is so problematic,
then perhaps its natural opposite has something choice-worthy going for
it, because it offers the potential for relationships that are free
from the inequalities that heterosexuality can give rise to.
While
heterosexuality risks the differences between male and female becoming
sources of inequality and oppression, homosexuality should encourage
relationships based on equality and reciprocity, for which the shared
gender of partners is a starting-point. This is not to deny that some
same-sex relationships can be unequal or destructive, nor to suggest
that all straight relationships are mired in hierarchy and violence.
Rather, it’s to point out the positive potential in one as the
advantage that it has against the negative possibilities of the other.
Of
course, to realise such an ideal would still require that same-sex
attracted persons think about the moral quality and social effects of
their relationships. Unfortunately, it probably wouldn’t translate into
an effective billboard campaign. Convincing people that sexual
orientation should to be accepted because it isn’t voluntary is
probably all we can hope for right now. Yet in the long-term, this
won’t be enough if same-sex attraction is to secure genuine acceptance,
rather than just tolerance.
Maybe that will only come when it’s heterosexuals who also have to protest, ‘il nostro orientamento sessuale non e una scelta.’
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Opinion 
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