You can purchase an autographed copy of Anything But Straight by sending a $35 check or money order to:
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Wayne Besen
PO Box 25491
Brooklyn, NY 11202
Results casting doubt on the reality of bisexuality reported are probably incorrect. In the 300 or more known vertebrate species with natural homosexuality, all combine heterosexual with homosexual relations.
Humans are not likely to differ from other species in this regard,i ncluding our closest nonhuman relative, the bonobo. Indeed, in all human cultures homosexual expression has been, and is, combined with heterosexual expression.
The data in the article show that 20 percent of the pool having same-sex relations do identify as bisexual.These people surely aren't all lying. Instead, psychologists should add a fourth possibility to their list: namely, that they are wrong.
Dr. Joan Roughgarden San Francisco The writer is a professor of biology at Stanford.
Some gay and bisexual advocates are condemning "Straight, Gay or Lying?" regarding a study suggesting that bisexuality may not exist among human males - something those of us familiar with the scientific literature have known since, basically, forever.
Compare this hysterical - and anti-science - reaction to the conservative Christians' anti-science reaction to studies showing that homosexuality is an inborn orientation like left-handedness. They're identical.
The right hates science because the data contradict (in the case of homosexuality) Leviticus; the left because the data contradict the liberal lie that we're environment-created, not hard-wired in any way.
These particular scientific facts are making these advocates scream like members of the extreme right, though it's they who always tells the right to let go of concepts that are contradicted by science.
Chandler Burr New York The writer is the author of "A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation."
6 Comments:
Not all of us 'liberals' think that everything is "environment-created" as Mr. Burr contends. I for one believe that a very large portion of 'what we are' is hard-wired at birth, including of course, sexual orientation(s).
posted by Anonymous, at
7/12/2005 3:59 PM
WAYNE BESEN IS STUPID. Oh sorry, that was my Letter to the Editor.
posted by Anonymous, at
7/13/2005 7:59 AM
Interesting selective editing on Mr. Besen's part here. The selection of letters to the NYT that I saw showed 6 or 7 uniquely reasoned letters against the research and only Mr. Burr's in favour. That appears to have been stripped down here as if to suggest that support for the study was split 50/50.
posted by Anonymous, at
7/13/2005 3:36 PM
Hmm. I wonder what being hardwired vs environment has to do with whether there are "real" bisexuals or not? Why would there be hardwired vegans and carnivores but not omnivores? In the 60's were there "nigger lovers" and "same-race people" and none who just fell in love with who they fell in love with, without racial prejudice? As for the either/or: perhaps a suggestion would be to read Stephen Pinker's "how the mind works" which shows that indeed we are "hardwired" ie by the genes to do some things. But if the environment goes one way or another has a great deal to do with whether the blueprint gets built properly or not. There is no such thing as "hardwired" to have complicated results... everything from our taste or distaste of foods to our acquisition of language are both hardwired AND created as we develop as fetuses, children and adults. Anyways, I myself am not a man, but I am a real bisexual, and I really do not understand this insistence on either/or. Whether hardwired/environment, liberal/nonliberal, gay/straight. Open your eyes to the continuum of diversity in nature. cheers.
posted by Anonymous, at
7/17/2005 9:35 PM
