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This sensitive topic interests me as an accessible aspect of the wider question of nature versus nurture. There are two separate perspectives I wish to explore; in the following essay I will give a brief overview of the sociological case, and in its companion I will address the biological case.

As a general philosophical principle, I don't believe any behavioural aspect of any person's life is set in stone from birth. Although I can see a scientific rationale for granting the possibility that people are born with a propensity for a particular behaviour, predicated on the reasonable postulate that behaviour on the gross organic scale is influenced by the behaviour of brain cells and the provable fact that variations in certain genes can markedly modify such behaviours, I fail to find that equivalent to the assertion that someone was meant to express that behaviour - this seems to me an example of extrapolating the fixed present into the fluid future, and hence a conceptual error. Whether or not the Creator exists, and whether or not He has a plan for us all, we demonstrably can defy our genes and our experience and change horses midstream as it were. To argue that we are somehow not meant to do so when we can is to venture into iffy teleological waters. I shall look at that argument at some point, but for me here and now it appears to rest on the quintessentially pataphysical question of what we mean by 'meaning' and so there for the moment I'm letting that point rest.

If we can't settle how or why people turn out to be homosexual in their orientation, can we still settle the moral and ethical questions raised by their integration into society? I believe we can, because I believe the principles we should adopt for considering such questions do not concern themselves with the origin of behaviour but with the effects of behaviour. I believe this because it allows us to apply a set of principles universally to behaviours of all kinds, without getting bogged down in whether they were genetic or environmental, voluntary or involuntary, justified or unjustified; and further because I believe universal applicability is a necessary component of fairness, and above all any practical application of a moral principle should be a fair one.

(A relatively quick digression on fairness here. Fairness is a construct. Fairness is not a real thing like sunlight or marble. We create fairness in our heads by judging the real things about us against the ideal things we conceptualise.

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