[Matts]

I am not even going to try to answer the question proposed in the initial post of this thread. Let me instead propose another question: what difference would it make, in terms of ethics, if homosexuality were a choice? Many people who are bisexual, while unable to choose either an exclusively heterosexual or an exclusively homosexual preference, have in practice gone from heterosexual relationships to homosexual relationships and sometimes back again, and some of them even from homosexual relationships to heterosexual relationships and sometimes back again. Does the fact that they, unlike exclusive homosexuals, are in a position to prefer heterosexual relationships over homosexual relationships (but choose not to) somehow make their homosexual relationships less ethically sound than those of exclusively homosexual people?

This inane debate about the Cause appears to be one of those manufactured issues people turn to when they want to make ethics seem more complex than it needs to be in order to cover up the fact that, when it comes to the crunch, they don't have a rationally acceptable argument (in this case against consensual homosexuality). It is my contention that we do not need a separate ethics for sexuality (a "sexual ethics," an ethics of sexuality apart from general ethics) but need to apply the same ethics to all social behaviour. The only rationally justifiable ethics is based on the principle of individual autonomy, the idea that a person should be in charge of their own destiny insofar as this does not infringe upon another individual's right to freedom and happiness.

Dumping spent nuclear fuel into the environment is a choice but it is not an immoral practice by virtue of being voluntary, it is immoral because it is reckless negligence of the well-being of the organic world (and of other humans). Homosexuality as such (internal level) is not a choice, even for bisexuals, but homosexuality as social practice (external level) is. The fact that a homosexual relationship, unlike homosexual desire, is a choice does not make it immoral; the only thing that would make it unethical is some objective harm to other people or the environment. "Infringement of our deepest values as Christian Americans" is not objective harm but a subjective and definitional issue (read: attitude problem).

In other words, we need to do away with the perennial nail-biting about the Cause as a pseudo-issue of "sexual ethics" and see what is really central to an ethical sexual life: the same as to any other area of social behaviour. The "choice vs. inborn trait" debate, in addition to oversimplifying the question, is a bluff, an attempt to turn our minds to a sphere of contention which is ethically irrelevant. This debate is being spinned eternally in order to cover up for the embarrassing truth that mutually consensual homosexuality is not an infringement of anyone's basic rights, or of anything else under the sun for that matter. Same-sex desire as such is not what conservatives like to refer to as a "lifestyle choice," but the only rational reaction to such a claim is not "it is not so" but rather "it is not so but so what if it were?"