The debate regarding homosexuality reminds me of a larger issue. What do we mean by normality, and do we want everyone to be normal?
For example, some forms of deafness are inherited, and some deaf parents do not want their children “cured”. I do not know how homosexual parents feel about this. (There are gay parents. Some adopt children, and some marry and have children by conventional means.)
Not everyone who deviates from majority traits considers their variation to be a handicap. I come from a family where left-handedness is common. It causes some problems, the most notable of which is with using scissors. I wonder if parents would go for some simple and inexpensive intervention that would guarantee right-handedness. I also have color-blindness in the family, including a nephew who is totally color-blind. There are some benefits to these traits.
I thought it would be fun to make a list of such differences and toss around opinions about whether they are actually detrimental and whether people would readily adopt medical technology that normalized children.
It’s obviously controversial, but I hope we can play nice.
Neil,
You’re not fooling anyone, except possibly yourself.
That’s good, because I was not trying to fool anyone.
Thank, Walto.
walto:
Yes. I suspect that the stories (including Dawkins’ version) ultimately trace back to this 1940 Time magazine article.
It’s easy to see how people could have misremembered that article or distorted it in the retelling, especially during the pre-Internet years. With Google at his fingertips, Neil should have done better.