In 2016, same-sex marriage has been legalized in the United States of America. Barrack Obama claims this ruling as “the victory for the America” (BBC News). The cheers had been spread across the sea of rainbow flags in the nation. Not only in the United States, several countries such as France and Brazil support the ruling of gay marriage by shining rainbow color spotlight on their signature buildings and monuments. After the ruling, the population of openly homosexual is growing in the States. Back in the 1900s, people constantly avoid this sensitive topic, they even treated this term as taboo. Furthermore, homosexuals would be punished or murdered if they were found out to be homosexual. In the present, homosexuality has become one of the most openly debatable topics. With more and more scientific studies and social experiments are conducted to investigate what causes homosexuality and how would it affect the today’s society, numerous of traditional beliefs are slowly being proved to be misconceptions of homosexuality.
Ignorance of people will generate fear among themselves, and it will eventually result hatred towards the “abnormality”. “Misunderstanding arising from ignorance breeds fear, and fear remains the greatest enemy of peace.” (Pearson). One must first understand what define a homosexual people before judging them unfairly. The simplest definition about homosexual people is that they only are only sexually attracted to people of one’ own sex. Dr. Herek from University of California explained the definition of homosexual briefly:
Homosexuality is usually understood as the counterpart to heterosexuality, with bisexuality applied to individuals who manifest both heterosexual and homosexual behavior or attraction. Such labels, however, represent an oversimplification. Not all people display consistency among their sexual feelings, behaviors, and identity; some experience considerable fluidity in their sexuality throughout their lives. Nevertheless, most adults in the United States report that they never made a conscious choice about their sexual orientation and that they have always felt the same type of sexual attractions and desires…. Some research data suggest that this pattern is more common among men, with women somewhat more likely to perceive their sexuality as fluid and involving some degree of choice. (1)
Homosexual people are categorized to be abnormal or odd in our society. From the beginning of mankind, the sexual orientation of majority is heterosexuality. Therefore, people conclude that because heterosexual is natural, so it ought to be the right sexual orientation of people and people should further pursuit “the right way”. Homosexuality is considered to be morally wrong because people ought to reproduce. George Moore introduced a new term called “naturalistic fallacy” to describe this falsely ethical thinking. He described that we should not infer of an “ought” from an “is”. For instance, women are born to be reproductive, it does not mean that they ought to reproduce. Another example of naturalistic fallacy is that falling sick is natural, so it is debated that people should not against the nature and prolong their life by using medical interventions. Before his death, Albert Einstein refused surgery with this statement, “It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share; it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.” Therefore, the question to be debated is not whether being homosexual is right or wrong; the real question is: “Who’s to decide what is right, and what is wrong?”
Like other kind of prejudice such as racism and sexism, ignorance will eventually generated hatred and fear toward the people that are different from one. Irrational discrimination against homosexuals or homosexuality is called homophobia. People with homophobia often think that homosexual people actually have a choice of their sexual orientation. They think their “choice” of sexual orientation will be spread among the world and inherited by the next generation. They fear that mankind will be doomed by the increasing amount of homosexuals due to the reducing of human reproduction. Unlike other phobias, homophobia is actually caused by the environment of one is living in, rather than inherent by some traumatic events. Hence, it is not considering as a disease that can cure of. There is not any necessity of having psychology therapy for those people with homophobia because it just simply not an actual phobia. Fear and hatred among people will eventually cause blood to bleed. Thousands and thousands of homosexuals have been murdered during the during the Inquisition and in Nazi Germany. We have evolved from apes, and yet, the thought of some people are still living in the stone age. We as the highly intelligent homo sapiens need to continuously learn and evolve from the history of mankind, or else history will be repeated by itself all over again, and our evolution will be forever stopped.
One of the common myths about homosexual is whether it is genetic. For this question, I have a very directed answer to it with my personal experience. I have two younger sisters, and they are identical twins. One of whom are heterosexual, the other is homosexual, and my parent blamed themselves for it. It is undoubtedly that they shared the exact same genetic blueprint, and they both grow up in a similar environment. However, my youngest sister is only attracted to female who is a lesbian too. Another evidence shows that homosexuals are actually occurring in the wild animal too. Several species such as giraffe, penguin, flamingo, dolphin, killer whales and billion types of bug are widely observed with same sex behavior among themselves. With more and more openly gay and lesbian people willing to join research program, researcher suggested that homosexuality might not due to the visible chromosomes that characterize who we are. There are numerous research and social experiment has been carried out over the past few decades, but we have yet determine an ultimate causes behind the homosexuality of human being. A research is currently conducted by Dr Tuck Ngum in University of California, its main goal is to investigate whether there are any relationships between being homosexual and their genes. Thirty-seven sets of identical twins were randomly selected to be studied about which genes are correlated with homosexuality. At least one of them is homosexual, and ten pairs in which are both homosexual. Only about more than a quarter of them are both gay, this further proved that it is not inherited from their parents. Besides, the blood of the homosexual twins was taken for DNA testing. However, only hypothesis is made for this research at the end, there were enough data to make conclusion whether homosexual is linked to chromosome. One thing we could confirm is that homosexual is undoubtedly natural. The challenging part of this research is that only a limited amount of subjects was involved in this research, and few similar third party experiments to support this result of this research. Hence, the future work for this research would be further genetic testing on a bigger population of test subjects. “Sexual attraction is such a fundamental part of life, but it ‘s not something we know a lot about at the genetic and molecular level.” (Dr Ngun).
History events such as the Inquisition and Nazi have showed us the consequences of wars that created to eliminated people with different demographic. Countless of mass murdering of homosexuals has showed us how hatred and fear would lead people to wars. By default, human is born to be empathic, we often stand in their shoes after observing their scenario. However, we would slowly forget how important it is to be empathy. We should all be empathic and accept who they are to our society. Ma Rainey, Mother of the Blues; Alan Turing, father of modern computer science; John Burnside, inventor of the Teleidoscope; Hull House, creator of first continuous education programs and Nobel Prize Winner; David Bowie and Mark Bolan, creator of Glam Rock and Leonardo Da Vinci, the famous artist, inventor and scientist, all of them have one in common, that are all of them are homosexual. We do not have the right to overlook how much they had contributed to our society. Now imagine how they have to hide and suppress their sexual orientation in the past when homosexuality is not accepted while contribute wonderful thing to the world.
All in all, people has spent too much time to hurt each other. Because of religions, some people suffer prejudice by other religion. Because of different races, some people suffer from discrimination for so long. Because of their nation, some people are finding refuge outside of their nation to survive. Because of having different sexual orientations, some people are prohibited to be together and start a family with their beloved. The terms of religions, races, nationality and sexual orientations are originally invented to be used to understand the world we living in. Ironically, it then becomes the excuses for human violence. Human are blinded by their own classification that they created. We have to embrace the alterity, not to eliminating it by one’s own standard. We need to create a world without war but peace for the next generation by teaching them how to love and show empathy to others. They did not chose to be homosexual in the first place, they just happened to be homosexual by default.
