WHAT DOES HE BELIEVE ARE THE IMPLICATIONS OF THIS?
IS HIS POSITION DEFENSIBLE?

Jud Evans has nine children. He is a mature philosophy student at the University of Central Lancashire.  He lives in the North West of England with his wife Susan-Clare and  his  three  youngest  children:  Cameron  10, Connor  8  and  Marius aged  6.

Echoing Auschwitz Doctor Mengele's allegations [1] that 'Jews are abnormal,' and reflecting the multiplicity of similar claims to be found on the internet contending that blacks, gays and Jews are 'unnatural' or 'abnormal,' philosopher Michael Levin in his article; 'Why Homosexuality is Abnormal.' [2] makes a chillingly similar claim.

     There is no doubt that the opinions and unsympathetic attitudes of Michael Levin regarding homosexuality are shared by many people. This paper seeks to evaluate these views and their entailments and consider whether they are defensibly viable by contrasting them with more sympathetic oppositional beliefs regarding the gay condition and lifestyle. My methodology will be to deal with each point in turn by way of extrapolation and comparison with the opinions of others, together with my own views on the matter. I will insert my own evaluative interpellations as the process unfolds. The conclusion will consist of a summing up and include an overall statement of my personal position.

I wonder does Levin's choice of the word 'abnormal,' which simply means 'not typical or usual or regular or conforming to a norm' in fact really means for him 'unnatural,' or 'not in accordance with or determined by nature?' Hitler saw Jews as unnatural [3] and the words seem to have been interchangable with the Nazis. My reading of Levin leads me to believe that this may also be the case for him that homosexuality is 'contrary to nature?'

     Well nature or God Himself seems to be unaware of either the opinions of the internet's hate-speechifiers, Hitler's, Mengele's or for that matter Levin's opinions upon this matter, as any modern geneticist or population statistician will now confirm. Mother nature or God continues to provide a constant replenishment of both female and male human beings of fine homosexual, black and Jewish stock, and humankind with these same-sex preferences continue to increase in number exponentially as our world population grows.

     On the basis of Levin's argument that homosexuality is abnormal, God or mother nature is making a tremendous amount of mistakes. Out of a world population of 6.5 billion, 975 million are homosexual - and 975 million mount up to a hell of a lot of mistakes in anybody's book - holy or secular. Is it just possible that it isn't God who is mistaken after all - but Levin himself?

     Dr. Kirk Cameron, a statistical scientist at The American Family Research Institute [4] provides the generally accepted rule of thumb homosexual make-up as a percentage of the US population as being 10% male and 5% female. There is no reason to question this percentage which is probably true of most countries in the world, though it is no doubt far higher if we take into consideration those gays who as a result of the sort of lack of sympathy demonstrated by commentators like Levin, still remain in the closet.

     Is Levin's position based upon abnormality defensible? I think not for reasons that I will develop in the next section. John Corvino points out in his 'Homosexuality and the Moral Relevance of Experience,'[5] that Levin's main argument is the fact that homosexuals use their sexual organ for purposes for which it was not intended. Whilst Corvino is much more in touch with the modern world than Levin, I do not agree with his characterisation of 'organ misuse' as Levin's main discriminatory device.

     For me the misuse of the bodily parts argument is facile and easily demolished, as I seek to do later. For me Levin's main engine of attack which acts as the main underpinning of his discrimination is his reliance upon a far more serious paradigm, his hypocritical explanation of an individual homosexual's unhappiness as being caused by the fact that they are homosexuals, and not as the result of some sections of society's contempt and abuse for them, a contempt which he himself intensifies with his vulgar arguments and anecdotal unreferenced rubrics.

     Can we blame the angst and unhappiness  of the Jews under Hitler's Third Reich as stemming from the fact that they were Jews, or was the cause of their unhappiness due to the dreadful manner in which Jews were treated by a large section of the German people? I deal with both of these putative arguments later in what follows, but first I will address his claim that homosexual anal and oral sex is a misuse of bodily parts.

Levin's moral remonstrances show clearly that he is obviously riled by nature's or God's obstinate production of viable human individuals who seem not to conform to his passé notions of penile purpose in relation to the reproductive role of the male member. For Levin a bodily organ is FOR some antecedally developed function, which he says explains its emergence through evolution. As an example of misuse he itemises other misapplied  bodily parts,  such as the teeth which he fantasizes a man might have extracted and to hang around his neck as a necklace to illustrate his point.

     Levin states on page 238 of 'Ethics in Practice' [6] that his argument permits 'gradations of abnormality.' In view of this, it would be interesting therefore to hear from Levin as to at what precise grade or percentage figure on the deontic-dial does the 'misuse-of-member' needle on his 'penile-misuse-meter' move from Levin's default set-position pointing at full-blown heterosexuality, before it gradually swings through the bi-sexuality zone and finally comes to a quivering rest on a segment of the dial which finally indicates full-blown Levinesque 'abnormality?'

     Statistically, that is if one goes by majorities, it is those people who actually use their sexual organ for Levin's ideal purpose that are in the minority. If we add together the estimated 15% of the world population who are gay to the 40% of men between the ages of 25 to 40 who admit to having anal intercourse with women we arrive at a figure of  55%. I would be interested to know why Levin considers the penetration of the female back-passage any different from a man's from the point of view of his 'misuse' criterion? Does he, we may wonder, consider 'non-use' a form of 'misuse' too? Is masturbation equally classed as 'misuse' in his view of sexuality? [7] (National Centre for Health Statistics. 2002.)

     And what about that other anthropometical agglomerator of well-rounded human well-being - the felicitic or hedonic calculus? Does the reportedly increasing amount of majority heterosexual indulgence in what Levin terms as 'the inappropriate use of the male member' ellicit cat-calls of cheerlessness, or hand-claps of happiness, from the straight participational or non-participational audience?

     So what, we are entitled to ask, is the difference between the misuse of certain bodily parts and the use of those parts purely for pleasure rather than for procreation? It seems that both homosexual, bi-sexual and heterosexual participants derive pleasure from such pasttimes - so why is one normal and the other abnormal, and furthermore what on earth has it got to do with us?

     There is also the question of persons who do not employ their sexual body parts at all. Although Levin protests that his position does not predict that celibate priests will be unhappy and Judeo-Christianity has deemed homosexuality a sin, arguably the most spectacular misuse or non-use of body parts of all, concerns the priests of various religions, who are demonstrably not being 'spiritually compensated' and though having sworn themselves to celibracy, present a worrying problem for the society and the church as the constantly reoccurring headlines of any newspaper will confirm?

    According to Vern Bullough [8] of the Free Inquiry Magazine, Volume 22, Number 3. a significant percentage of the Catholic clergy, are homophile, perhaps as high as 40 per cent. Does their higher calling, which Levin claims provides 'compensating satisfactions,' offset the unhappiness which Levin professes to deplore as an inevitable concomittant of the homosexual condition, and if so would this not suggest that if Levin is really concerned at their unhappiness he should encourage a mass entry of homosexuals into the clergy to take advantage of the immediate increase of happiness for them,  which the spiritually engendered 'compensatory satisfactions'  will engender?

     For Levin the pleasure that such people derive from such sexual activity is marred by his belief that unhappiness inevitably follows, because it leaves unfulfilled an innate and innately rewarding desire. He entrusts it to us to conjecture exactly what these 'unfullfilled desires' actually are. We can guess that he refers to the love and companionship of a partner of the opposite sex, with whom to build a home and have children and feel comfortable as a 'normal' rather than 'abnormal' member of their community?

   He seems not to have grasped that this idylic model of heterosexuality is not desired by the average homosexual at all, any more than it is desired by the increasing numbers of heterosexuals who prefer to live alone and presumably misuse their members sur leur propre, or if they do live with a partner, live with them under an agreement that children will not be a part of their ongoing relationship.

   Again, for me the putative 'implications' of Levin's argument are indefensible, but now I shall move from one rather unwholesome aspect of Levin's criticism, which for me is based on no more than hostile reaction, to one of unconscionable hypocrisy - his blaming of homosexuals for their own putative unhappiness.


      For me the most curious and hypocritical of Levin's arguments is his claim that rather than homosexuals being unhappy as the result of society's contempt and abuse for them, a disdain which he himself intensifies with his vulgar arguments and anectdotal references, their unhappiness is caused by the fact that they are homosexuals, and are thus abused and held in contempt by society. We may liken this extraordinary paradigm to African slaves, who until the north took up arms against the Southern Confederacy, was kidnapped and forcibly shipped to America to labour in the cotton fields.

     Surely, for Levin and those like him the unhappiness of the African slaves was caused not by the fact that these captives were legally recognised as such and beaten and abused by their white  slavemasters, but because they were black African slaves who had made the cardinal error of being born black, meaning that they were congenitivally inferior, uneducated brutes who were stupid enough to have been caught and transported to a far land, which meant that they could be paradigmatically beaten and whipped in accordance with the crazy logic which made it permissable and led to their unhappiness.

     The implication therefore is that if due to genetical happenstance or God's will you are born homosexual, or if you were a black African and imprudent enough to be caught by the slavetraders, or a German citizen whose religion happened to be Jewish, it is your fault if you are mistreated by society, because of the determinate circumstances of your birth, which cast you into the world as a genetical fall-guy, pre-programmed and ready-primed for abuse and hate-speech.

Michael Levin wrote 'Why Homosexuality is Abnormal,' in 1984, which to a great extent explains its curious datedness, but In a postscript added in 1993 Levin is at great pains to point out that in spite of the fact that he now accepts the scientific explanation of the genetical origin of homosexuality, he continues to view homosexuality as something that one does; a chosen lifestyle rather than as something that one is; the outcome of an unsolicited and unchosen orientation.

     The thought that mature homosexuals of both sexes are increasingly entering into long term partnerships, which have in many cases been recognised by law, seems to have passed him by. He states in his postscript that as up to now society has deemed homosexuality so harmful that restricting it outweighs putative homosexual rights, if society reverses itself it will in effect be deciding that homosexuality is not as bad as it once was thought.

    Thus it appears that Levin is less concerned with the rights of homosexuals to associate together, to co-habit in long term loving relationships and even to adopt children, and is more concerned with protecting the embarrassment and rights of those desiring not to associate with homosexuals.

     It is quite obvious from the foregoing that I find all of Levin's arguments unconvincing, and the implications hypocritical and indefencible. I consider his position not to be a cogent, sensible or even commonsense approach, but merely a thinly disguised ill-researched emotional tirade written in pseudo-philosophical jargon.


     Considered from a utilitarian point of view it should never have been allowed to have been published, for the amount of unhappiness that his words must have wrought, the increase to society's general unhappiness, not only to homosexuals, but to the families and friends of gay people, to the students subjected to studying these sentiments, and to people holding liberal, emphatic views on such themes must be immense.

     Levin rants against the call for civil rights for homosexuals, based upon the idea that it is wrong to discriminate on the basis of immutable transmitted traits, and homosexuality is involuntary and immutable if genetic.

Levin counters with a curious association with sport, and notes that we discriminate every day on the basis of immutable traits.

     He then appeals to the authority of Kant's categorical imperative as the ultimate moderator of reason, from which he infers it is our duty and obligation to oppose civil rights and freedom of association for homosexuals thus making them even more unhappy.

What Kant actually said was:

     Levin's follows his strictures against homonsexuals, by pronouncing that civil rights for blacks and women are also illicit as a violation of freedom of association. By a 'violation of freedom of association' he of course means the freedom of those who discriminate against gays not to associate with them. He deflects his rejection of civil rights for blacks and women by claiming that others [presumably straight men and non-blacks] will find it a reduction to the absurd, as there is nothing abnormal about being a black or a woman, and no one is made as profoundly uncomfortable by members of the opposite sex or other races as many people are made by homosexuals. I think that for many people,  Levin's company would make them feel far more uncomfortable

   I end by asking a pertinent question. Is a paper such as Levin's the the sort of hate-speech we want our young students to be exposed to in our establishments of higher learning?   Were not the lessons of the treatment of 'abnormal' minorities in Hitler's Third Reich enough?