Rush Limbaugh – Jan. 2003;
“Let’s say we discover the gene that says the kid’s gonna be gay. […] The gay community would do the fastest 180 and become pro-life faster than anybody you’ve ever seen.”
Peter Tatchell, gay rights campaigner – Dec. 2006;
“These experiments echo Nazi research in the early 1940s which aimed at eradicating homosexuality. They stink of eugenics”
Serial killer? Are you implying that being a serial killer is a simple choice?
I don’t know how simple it is, but it’s a choice.
And that being a serial killer is equivalent to being gay?
The only “equivalent” is they are both choices.
Although there are all those dead hemopholiacs.
It’s unlikely that these particular experiments would be of much applicability to humans. For starters, no moral or ethical researcher would countenance doing to human subjects what had to be done to these sheep to derive effective treatments (skull sectioning, brain surgery, etc), and human and sheep brains are different enough that simple extrapolation-by-analogy is not likely to yield practical help.
Secondly, even if a hormonal treatment designed to suppress or reverse a particular sexual-response pattern was successfully created, if one’s “natural” hormonal balance is a product of genetics and environment then such a treatment would most likely be temporary at best. It would also most likely be expensive (and probably beyond affording by quite a few people), require extensive personal tailoring (as nobody’s neurochemistry is exactly like anyone else’s), and be fairly easy to voluntarily discontinue whenever one wanted. That’s a long way off from eugenically eliminating a population subgroup.
What such a treatment as this would do is make the option available for people; those whose convictions are in conflict with their attractions would have an easier resolution available. The potential to chemically alter one’s own sexual responses in general has a host of potentially therapeutic uses, as well as a boatload of potentially catastrophic abuses. It is up to individual societies to pass the laws deciding what chance of abuse to risk in return for potential benefits — as with any new technology.
“I could make a prediction that in some 30 or 40 years from now a closet gay judge will order a hapless night club patron to submit to sodomy”
Yeah bollocks you could, but ask yourself, do I want to be evermore known as, the “Anal Rape Kresgan”