The Evolutionary Roots and Meaning of Flannel

I was walking down the street yesterday afternoon, starting to compose a blog post in my head, when I realized that I often do that -- but when I sit down in front of the computer I draw a blank. I guess that's what you call Writer's Block, and the only remedy I can see is to sit down anyway with a topic in mind and a few links to hand, and dig in. John Kenneth Galbraith used to say that the results were pretty much the same whether he felt like writing or not, and my experience points to the same conclusion.

So: Argggghh. I checked out Robert M. Sapolsky's The Trouble with Testosterone: and Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (Scribner, 1997) from the library yesterday. Someone I was arguing with on Facebook claimed that testosterone made men more aggressive than women. (I thought it was the Y chromosome?) I knew that was at best oversimple, and having read Sapolsky's title essay standing up in a bookstore a couple of years ago, I thought it would be a handy reference. But instead of just rereading "The Trouble with Testosterone," I started at the beginning of the book, with the essay "How Big Is Yours?" (Thiiiiiss big!) Which quickly put me in a bad mood.

"How Big Is Yours?" begins with a meditation on "our" treatment of the mentally ill in former years, though Sapolsky admits that while we no longer persecute epileptics "for their presumed bewitchment," "the mentally ill give the rest of us the willies." While we can draw the line between a person and his or her disease in some realms, "in many other realms" we don't do such a good job.

Witness, for example, the Neanderthal bellowing in so many editorials about how John Hinckley was "getting away with it" when he was hospitalized as a schizophrenic rather than being jailed after shooting Reagan. Or contemplate the number of teachers and parents who are not very good at drawing the line between the essence of who a child is and the learning disabilities that impinge on that essence -- and who instead let words like "lazy" or "stupid" creep in.

If many of us are not very good at drawing that line now, that problem is going to get worse. Some astonishing new trends in neuropsychiatry and behavioral biology indicate that the line will shift in directions we never would have guessed. This shift affects much more than our understanding of the biological imperatives that drive a small group of us to monstrous behavior. It also affects how we view the quirks and idiosyncrasies that make each of us a healthy individual [23].

Parenthetically, I wonder how Sapolsky, or anyone else, knows what "the essence of who a child is" ... is. If those learning disabilities are innate, aren't they part of her essence? What is the essence of a person?

Sapolsky goes on to discuss the research on schizophrenia led by the psychiatrist Seymour Kety of Massachusetts General Hospital several decades ago. By examining adoption records "meticulously maintained in Denmark," Kety's team "showed that genetics does in fact increase the likelihood of the disorder" (23). The work entailed interviewing the relatives of schizophrenics in large numbers, and while they weren't schizophrenic themselves,

along the way someone noticed something: a lot of these folks were quirky ... just a bit socially detached and with a train of thought that was sometimes hard to follow when they spoke. ... They believed in strange things and were often overly concerned with magical or fantasy thinking. Nothing certifiably crazy -- belief in some New Age mumbo jumbo or astrology, or perhaps a very literal, fundamentalist belief in biblical miracles. None of these are illnesses. ... Is there a gene for believing in the Force and Obi-Wan Kenobi? Certainly not, but perhaps there's something closer to it than we ever would have imagined [24].

The reader will have perhaps noticed, as I did, something of the snake oil salesman in Sapolsky's style. A fondness for overheated language like "Astonishing." "Directions we never would have guessed." "Closer to it than we ever would have imagined." It's not uncommon in popular science writing.

Anyway, Sapolsky goes on to describe obsessive-compulsive disorder, brain-related disinhibition, such as Tourette's synrome and Huntington's disease, and

People with a type of temporal lobe epilepsy ... tend to be extraordinarily serious, humorless, and rigid in their ways. They tend to be phobic about doing new things, and instead perseverate on old behaviors and tastes, tending to walk to work the same way each day, usually wearing the same types of clothes, ordering the same meal in restaurants. ... Such people also tend to have an intense interest in religion or philosophy [26-7].

He reaches a climax with a report of Simon LeVay's research which found a difference in the size of a part of the hypothalamus between men and women, gays and straights. He admits the force of (some) criticisms of Levay's work, that "the scientific jury is still out" on it, but protests,

suppose his finding turns out to be accurate. And suppose a small interstitial nucleus in a male turns out to be more a cause than a consequence of homosexuality. What will happen when brain imaging techniques improve to the point, as they inevitably will, where we can measure the size of this brain structure in a person? Being gay is not a disease. ... Do we inform adolescents of their nucleus size when they have not yet become sexually active and haven't expressed a sexual preference? What do we do with an openly and happily gay or straight adult whose nucleus is the "wrong" kind? What will we make of nuclei of intermediate sizes? And will the Food and Drug administration move to squelch the predictable festering of quacks flogging their methods of changing nucleus sizes? [30-31]

It's mildly alarming when a scientist (Sapolsky's a Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford) is this dumb. Even if Levay's conclusions had been correct, and they have not been confirmed in attempts to replicate them, you wouldn't be able to tell whether a man is gay or straight simply by looking at his interstitial nucleus. Levay found a range of sizes in his samples within each group; the difference he found was average, not absolute. Remembering that he was working with brains from cadavers, and that there's no way to measure the sexual orientation/preference even of living individuals, some of the "heterosexual" men had smaller interstitial nuclei than some of the "homosexual" men, or even of the women. The fault lies not with Levay's lab work, but with his biological-determinist agenda and his mistaken belief that if homosexuality is proved to be innate, it will be proved to be a benign or even positive trait.

For that matter, there are problems with Kety's work with schizophrenics. Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin went over Kety's data (which he graciously and properly supplied them) in Not in Our Genes (Pantheon, 1984, 222ff). The problems are statistical, but so are Kety's conclusions; as a statistician, Lewontin is qualified to discuss them. In general, most touted claims of genetic causes -- for schizophrenia, alcoholism, homosexuality -- crumble when someone tries to replicate them, or even looks at them cross-eyed. But the refutations are less well remembered than the original claims, as Sapolsky's use of Kety and Levay shows.

Sapolsky admits the downside of such findings: "In every generation, there will be brownshirts whose biological ideal comes with an Aryan profile, and in every generation there will be some scientists and physicians who will be happy to march into hell with them" (31). This is just a tad Eurocentric, of course. There's no reason why people must idealize the "Aryan"; it could just as easily be Sun People versus Ice People, or noble Israelis versus insectlike Arabs; or the jade-white Han race with its ancient civilization over upstart big-nose redface gwailo. But, no doubt thanks to his neurochemistry, Sapolsky's an optimist: "this new knowledge will be rife with promise as well ... When science teaches us repeatedly that there but for the grace of God go I, when we learn to recognize kinship in neurochemistry, we will have to become compassionate and tolerant, whether looking at an illness, a quirk, or a mere difference" (ibid.). Will we "have to"? There's no reason to think so. There's evidence that scientists and doctors are actually less tolerant of difference than the general population. Maybe it's because the passion for order that draws many people to science goes along with a tendency to intolerance of messy difference.

Though Sapolsky doesn't have temporal lobe epilepsy, he recognizes himself in the syndromes he describes: "At times when I am overworked and anxious, I develop a facial tic and I count stairs as I climb them. I usually wear flannel shirts. In Chinese restaurants I always order broccoli with garlic sauce", and so on. "Yet is is reasonable to assume that there is some sort of continuum of underlying biology here ... Perhaps whatever neurochemical abnormality causes a schizophrenic to believe that voices are proclaiming her the empress of California is the same abnormality that, in a milder form, leads a schizotypal person to believe in mental telepathy" (28-29).

And there's the rub. As with men's interstitial nuclei, you can't tell by noting someone's personality quirks whether they have temporal lobe epilepsy or are just quirky. Labelling certain constellations of quirks as the result of neurochemical disturbance, though, will tend to stigmatize all of them, regardless of their cause. If male homosexuality were associated with smaller interstitial nuclei, genetic markers, or differences in hormonal level, it would become defined by it: anyone, regardless of actual sexual desires or behavior, who showed up on the assays would be diagnosed as homosexual -- which is not a good thing.

I say this, not because I object to studying the biological underlay of human behavior, but because I recognize that there is such an underlay -- it just doesn't explain much. If there turns out to be a neurochemical reason why I tend to eat the same thing in the restaurants I patronize, there will also be a neurochemical reason why other people tend to try everything on the menu, and go to a wide range of restaurants. People who change their outfits regularly and go shopping for new ones as often as possible will be as neurochemically influenced as someone who wears flannel every day; and so on. The "normal" is not the result of moral virtue but is merely the most common neurochemical configuration. Like invoking the supernatural, invoking biological causes for human behavior explains everything, and therefore it explains nothing.

Someone I know on Facebook posted a reference to the evolutionary roots of religion in his status. It occurred to me to ask if anyone is studying the evolutionary roots of science. No one could think of any; indeed the very question seemed to baffle them. But if everything human has evolutionary roots, then science must also. And given its great cultural significance, why is no one, apparently, studying its evolutionary origins and meaning?

Which reminds me of something else. A survey of elite scientists (cited in Julie Des Jardins' The Madame Curie Complex, 124) found them to be a bit socially detached, obsessively wrapped up in a world of their own; I immediately thought of them when I read Sapolsky's description of schizotypics. Could it be that not only believing in magic and fantasy, but being a world-class physicist is (gasp!) the result of neurochemistry?

In his Introduction Sapolsky says that one of the book's essays, "Primate Peekaboo," was written when, "to my embarrassment, I was devoting about ten hours a day to thinking about the O.J. [Simpson] trial," and so it "considers the intense voyeurism that is common to all of us primates" (14). How interesting. I paid hardly any attention to the Simpson case. Am I not a primate, then? One trouble with Sapolsky's type of pop science exposition is that it ignores individual differences and social factors: the corporate media's obsession with Simpson, for example, was based at least in part on his celebrity as a football star among jock-sniffing male reporters, whether or not they covered a sports beat. Does primate voyeurism extend to ten hours' cogitation per day, or was that a quirk of Sapolsky's neurochemistry? As I said, if everything is biology, then everything is biology.

The Evolutionary Roots and Meaning of Flannel

I was walking down the street yesterday afternoon, starting to compose a blog post in my head, when I realized that I often do that -- but when I sit down in front of the computer I draw a blank. I guess that's what you call Writer's Block, and the only remedy I can see is to sit down anyway with a topic in mind and a few links to hand, and dig in. John Kenneth Galbraith used to say that the results were pretty much the same whether he felt like writing or not, and my experience points to the same conclusion.

So: Argggghh. I checked out Robert M. Sapolsky's The Trouble with Testosterone: and Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (Scribner, 1997) from the library yesterday. Someone I was arguing with on Facebook claimed that testosterone made men more aggressive than women. (I thought it was the Y chromosome?) I knew that was at best oversimple, and having read Sapolsky's title essay standing up in a bookstore a couple of years ago, I thought it would be a handy reference. But instead of just rereading "The Trouble with Testosterone," I started at the beginning of the book, with the essay "How Big Is Yours?" (Thiiiiiss big!) Which quickly put me in a bad mood.

"How Big Is Yours?" begins with a meditation on "our" treatment of the mentally ill in former years, though Sapolsky admits that while we no longer persecute epileptics "for their presumed bewitchment," "the mentally ill give the rest of us the willies." While we can draw the line between a person and his or her disease in some realms, "in many other realms" we don't do such a good job.

Witness, for example, the Neanderthal bellowing in so many editorials about how John Hinckley was "getting away with it" when he was hospitalized as a schizophrenic rather than being jailed after shooting Reagan. Or contemplate the number of teachers and parents who are not very good at drawing the line between the essence of who a child is and the learning disabilities that impinge on that essence -- and who instead let words like "lazy" or "stupid" creep in.

If many of us are not very good at drawing that line now, that problem is going to get worse. Some astonishing new trends in neuropsychiatry and behavioral biology indicate that the line will shift in directions we never would have guessed. This shift affects much more than our understanding of the biological imperatives that drive a small group of us to monstrous behavior. It also affects how we view the quirks and idiosyncrasies that make each of us a healthy individual [23].

Parenthetically, I wonder how Sapolsky, or anyone else, knows what "the essence of who a child is" ... is. If those learning disabilities are innate, aren't they part of her essence? What is the essence of a person?

Sapolsky goes on to discuss the research on schizophrenia led by the psychiatrist Seymour Kety of Massachusetts General Hospital several decades ago. By examining adoption records "meticulously maintained in Denmark," Kety's team "showed that genetics does in fact increase the likelihood of the disorder" (23). The work entailed interviewing the relatives of schizophrenics in large numbers, and while they weren't schizophrenic themselves,

along the way someone noticed something: a lot of these folks were quirky ... just a bit socially detached and with a train of thought that was sometimes hard to follow when they spoke. ... They believed in strange things and were often overly concerned with magical or fantasy thinking. Nothing certifiably crazy -- belief in some New Age mumbo jumbo or astrology, or perhaps a very literal, fundamentalist belief in biblical miracles. None of these are illnesses. ... Is there a gene for believing in the Force and Obi-Wan Kenobi? Certainly not, but perhaps there's something closer to it than we ever would have imagined [24].

The reader will have perhaps noticed, as I did, something of the snake oil salesman in Sapolsky's style. A fondness for overheated language like "Astonishing." "Directions we never would have guessed." "Closer to it than we ever would have imagined." It's not uncommon in popular science writing.

Anyway, Sapolsky goes on to describe obsessive-compulsive disorder, brain-related disinhibition, such as Tourette's synrome and Huntington's disease, and

People with a type of temporal lobe epilepsy ... tend to be extraordinarily serious, humorless, and rigid in their ways. They tend to be phobic about doing new things, and instead perseverate on old behaviors and tastes, tending to walk to work the same way each day, usually wearing the same types of clothes, ordering the same meal in restaurants. ... Such people also tend to have an intense interest in religion or philosophy [26-7].

He reaches a climax with a report of Simon LeVay's research which found a difference in the size of a part of the hypothalamus between men and women, gays and straights. He admits the force of (some) criticisms of Levay's work, that "the scientific jury is still out" on it, but protests,

suppose his finding turns out to be accurate. And suppose a small interstitial nucleus in a male turns out to be more a cause than a consequence of homosexuality. What will happen when brain imaging techniques improve to the point, as they inevitably will, where we can measure the size of this brain structure in a person? Being gay is not a disease. ... Do we inform adolescents of their nucleus size when they have not yet become sexually active and haven't expressed a sexual preference? What do we do with an openly and happily gay or straight adult whose nucleus is the "wrong" kind? What will we make of nuclei of intermediate sizes? And will the Food and Drug administration move to squelch the predictable festering of quacks flogging their methods of changing nucleus sizes? [30-31]

It's mildly alarming when a scientist (Sapolsky's a Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford) is this dumb. Even if Levay's conclusions had been correct, and they have not been confirmed in attempts to replicate them, you wouldn't be able to tell whether a man is gay or straight simply by looking at his interstitial nucleus. Levay found a range of sizes in his samples within each group; the difference he found was average, not absolute. Remembering that he was working with brains from cadavers, and that there's no way to measure the sexual orientation/preference even of living individuals, some of the "heterosexual" men had smaller interstitial nuclei than some of the "homosexual" men, or even of the women. The fault lies not with Levay's lab work, but with his biological-determinist agenda and his mistaken belief that if homosexuality is proved to be innate, it will be proved to be a benign or even positive trait.

For that matter, there are problems with Kety's work with schizophrenics. Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin went over Kety's data (which he graciously and properly supplied them) in Not in Our Genes (Pantheon, 1984, 222ff). The problems are statistical, but so are Kety's conclusions; as a statistician, Lewontin is qualified to discuss them. In general, most touted claims of genetic causes -- for schizophrenia, alcoholism, homosexuality -- crumble when someone tries to replicate them, or even looks at them cross-eyed. But the refutations are less well remembered than the original claims, as Sapolsky's use of Kety and Levay shows.

Sapolsky admits the downside of such findings: "In every generation, there will be brownshirts whose biological ideal comes with an Aryan profile, and in every generation there will be some scientists and physicians who will be happy to march into hell with them" (31). This is just a tad Eurocentric, of course. There's no reason why people must idealize the "Aryan"; it could just as easily be Sun People versus Ice People, or noble Israelis versus insectlike Arabs; or the jade-white Han race with its ancient civilization over upstart big-nose redface gwailo. But, no doubt thanks to his neurochemistry, Sapolsky's an optimist: "this new knowledge will be rife with promise as well ... When science teaches us repeatedly that there but for the grace of God go I, when we learn to recognize kinship in neurochemistry, we will have to become compassionate and tolerant, whether looking at an illness, a quirk, or a mere difference" (ibid.). Will we "have to"? There's no reason to think so. There's evidence that scientists and doctors are actually less tolerant of difference than the general population. Maybe it's because the passion for order that draws many people to science goes along with a tendency to intolerance of messy difference.

Though Sapolsky doesn't have temporal lobe epilepsy, he recognizes himself in the syndromes he describes: "At times when I am overworked and anxious, I develop a facial tic and I count stairs as I climb them. I usually wear flannel shirts. In Chinese restaurants I always order broccoli with garlic sauce", and so on. "Yet is is reasonable to assume that there is some sort of continuum of underlying biology here ... Perhaps whatever neurochemical abnormality causes a schizophrenic to believe that voices are proclaiming her the empress of California is the same abnormality that, in a milder form, leads a schizotypal person to believe in mental telepathy" (28-29).

And there's the rub. As with men's interstitial nuclei, you can't tell by noting someone's personality quirks whether they have temporal lobe epilepsy or are just quirky. Labelling certain constellations of quirks as the result of neurochemical disturbance, though, will tend to stigmatize all of them, regardless of their cause. If male homosexuality were associated with smaller interstitial nuclei, genetic markers, or differences in hormonal level, it would become defined by it: anyone, regardless of actual sexual desires or behavior, who showed up on the assays would be diagnosed as homosexual -- which is not a good thing.

I say this, not because I object to studying the biological underlay of human behavior, but because I recognize that there is such an underlay -- it just doesn't explain much. If there turns out to be a neurochemical reason why I tend to eat the same thing in the restaurants I patronize, there will also be a neurochemical reason why other people tend to try everything on the menu, and go to a wide range of restaurants. People who change their outfits regularly and go shopping for new ones as often as possible will be as neurochemically influenced as someone who wears flannel every day; and so on. The "normal" is not the result of moral virtue but is merely the most common neurochemical configuration. Like invoking the supernatural, invoking biological causes for human behavior explains everything, and therefore it explains nothing.

Someone I know on Facebook posted a reference to the evolutionary roots of religion in his status. It occurred to me to ask if anyone is studying the evolutionary roots of science. No one could think of any; indeed the very question seemed to baffle them. But if everything human has evolutionary roots, then science must also. And given its great cultural significance, why is no one, apparently, studying its evolutionary origins and meaning?

Which reminds me of something else. A survey of elite scientists (cited in Julie Des Jardins' The Madame Curie Complex, 124) found them to be a bit socially detached, obsessively wrapped up in a world of their own; I immediately thought of them when I read Sapolsky's description of schizotypics. Could it be that not only believing in magic and fantasy, but being a world-class physicist is (gasp!) the result of neurochemistry?

In his Introduction Sapolsky says that one of the book's essays, "Primate Peekaboo," was written when, "to my embarrassment, I was devoting about ten hours a day to thinking about the O.J. [Simpson] trial," and so it "considers the intense voyeurism that is common to all of us primates" (14). How interesting. I paid hardly any attention to the Simpson case. Am I not a primate, then? One trouble with Sapolsky's type of pop science exposition is that it ignores individual differences and social factors: the corporate media's obsession with Simpson, for example, was based at least in part on his celebrity as a football star among jock-sniffing male reporters, whether or not they covered a sports beat. Does primate voyeurism extend to ten hours' cogitation per day, or was that a quirk of Sapolsky's neurochemistry? As I said, if everything is biology, then everything is biology.

I Don't Know How You Were Inverted

But back to Thomas Serwatka's Queer Questions, Clear Answers, as I promised. I read it all the way through, though I admit to skimming at times. I had to keep reminding myself that although most of what Serwatka writes is familiar to me, it won't be familiar to some (most?) of his other readers, who may not have read a book on this subject before. But that makes Serwatka's errors and misrepresentations all the more harmful.

As you'd expect in a book like this, Serwatka devotes quite a bit of space to the question of cause: why are some people drawn erotically to persons of their own sex, and others not? It's a very popular question among both straights and gays nowadays, and it might be worth mentioning that it wasn't always. During the 1970s, in the circles I moved in, it wasn't on our radar. The dominant theory at the time was the psychiatric absent-father / dominant mother theory of the neo-Freudians, and I already knew that it was largely discredited even before the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was not (no longer?) a disorder. (They didn't address the question of cause, however.) Alfred Kinsey was the scientific figure who loomed large for us then, and he hadn't concerned himself with causes.

Still, we weren't the only homosexuals in the world, and what didn't matter to us mattered to others. It must have been during my first year at IU, working in a branch university library, that I found a clipping that quoted a gay or pro-gay minister to the effect that homosexuals are born homosexual. That startled me, because I knew about the 19th century third-sex theories about the (male) homosexual as the soul of a woman in the body of a man, but I thought that those theories had also been discredited. The clipping was brief and didn't point to any support for the claim. Still, that was the last I heard of the "born-this-way" theory for several years. It made its big comeback in the 1990s, with the work of Simon LeVay, Dean Hamer, and Michael Bailey and Richard Pillard. I associate it with the Gay Rights Movement (as opposed to Gay Liberation) and the gay churches, where it's a pillar of their position, though there are plenty of apolitical and non-religious gays who agree with it. As Serwatka's exposition shows, it's also associated with the professional / therapeutic wing of gay male life.

Serwatka sums up the controversy as follows, in terms of a "summer flick":

There is a band of nomadic queer theorists ("you can't oppress me through your manmade heterosexist labels") shooting flaming arrows at the Brotherhood of Gay Essentialist [sic] (the "it's biology" group), while a clan of lesbian deconstructionists ("I will not be confined by society's expectations; I am free to create new categories") are hurling spears everywhere, tragically and unintentionally wounding a butch dyke ("I am what I am"). To make the battle even more chaotic, we add in bands of marauding conservative Jews, Christians, and Muslims ("It's a sin against Yahweh or the Trinity or Allah") railing against each other and everyone else on the field, including the moderately religious who are praying for peace and consensus as well as everyone's soul [34].

I've already mentioned Serwatka's "hearty, preacher's chalk-talk style," and I bet you can guess which group represents Serwatka in this scenario!* Not to belabor an already overdone caricature, the queer theorists I'm aware of are not "nomadic" but well-ensconced in the Master's House (Queer Theory arose in the academy); the Brotherhood of Gay Essentialists works in university counseling departments as well as freelancing as therapists, and plays in the Radical Faerie movement (a reminder that Essentialists can be assimilationist and anti-assimilationist). The same is true of lesbians: surely some "butch dykes" are also deconstructionists. And of course no conservative Jew would ever pronounce the name of Yahweh, and I've never heard any Christian call homosexuality a sin against the Trinity. Someone got a little carried away with his rhetoric here, and things never get much better.

Instead of traveling the earth looking for pages from an ancient text, our scientists are studying ancient and contemporary civilizations, using technologies to decipher parts of the human genome, and employing a host of research models to discover the secrets of our origins written into the earth's past and into our cells. And their hard work is yielding results, albeit still preliminary results. And all of this is going on while we are subjected to a cacophony of differing voices, each vying to win the public relations war over how sexual orientation should be viewed and "handled" in the culture [34-5].

That's right, those results are "preliminary," but they are publicized as if they were final, and many gay people point to them as though they had settled the question for once and all, and only irrational anti-scientific Christians could reject them. (It seems to me that a prudent gay movement wouldn't want to hitch its wagon to merely "preliminary" results that might be demolished later -- and, in fact, have been.) As I pointed at the end of my previous post on this book, the gay and lesbian scientists who have criticized the born-gay research are absent from Serwatka's tale. They do so, not because they are nomadic queer theorists, but because they are scientists criticizing other scientists' flawed work. But acknowledging that would complicate the simple good guys / bad guys story Serwatka wants to tell.

It's easier for Serwatka to focus on another group:

In the 1990s, queer theorists told us that there were no homosexuals; at least there were none until we labeled them as such in the 1890s. Strongly influenced by philosopher Michel Foucault, lesbian feminism, and the social constructionist movement, queer theory proposed that before we created the label there were no homosexuals; all we had were people who engaged in different forms of same-sex behaviors. In some societies these behaviors were condemned and punished; in some societies these behaviors were accepted and even honored. But in both sets of socities, the actions didn't define the person. People weren't divided into homosexuals and heterosexuals or into homosexuals, bisexuals, and heterosexuals. They were just people who did or did not engage in specific behaviors [49-50].

Now, I have my own disagreements with queer theorists and social constructionists (is "movement" the right word for them, though?) and many of them get things as wrong as Serwatka does: in general, their tendency to treat Foucault's writings as a kind of scripture, to be harvested for prooftexts rather than as a goad to further thought of their own; their confusion of terminology with the reality to which it refers; their misuse of the social constructionist model to draw invidious distinctions between the present and the past, or between "The West" and other cultures; or confusing social construction with cultural determinism, the belief that human beings are blank slates on which their culture writes. In particular, I should point out that social constructionism has nothing to say about the cause question. No one, as far as I know, doubts that the anatomical signs of "race" (skin color, eye color, hair texture, etc.) have biological roots, but there is a large literature on the social construction of race. In the US, for example, a white woman can give birth to a black child, but a black woman can't give birth to a white one; but in other countries it can be the other way around. So even if it were proven -- and it hasn't been -- that homosexuality is genetically determined, that would not prove that it isn't socially constructed.

What bothered me first about Serwatka's discussion is that he kept using the term "sexual orientation" as if he knew what a sexual orientation is, and especially as if he knew that it is some kind of biological mechanism in our body that directs us to male or female erotic partners. This is just what no one knows. "Orientation" doesn't necessarily imply an inherent, unchangeable state; the compass-point orientation of a building, though it can be difficult to change after it is completed, is a choice, decided by its planners. The orientation of a parked car can be changed much more easily, as can my own spatial orientation as I write this. I wasn't born facing north, but even if I was, that doesn't doom me to face north forever, and I have faced in many different directions during my lifetime. It's true, when people speak of "sexual orientation" they're not thinking of such examples, but they're usually assuming what they need to prove: that "sexual orientation" is inborn and unchangeable. I've encountered numerous people who argue the point in circles: it's an orientation because it's inborn, and we know it's inborn because it's an orientation, and orientations are inborn ... I think that's what Thomas Serwatka is doing, though he may not be aware of it.

Still, Serwatka knows he needs some evidence, so he points to the past two decades' worth of research on the origin of sexual orientation. Numerous scientists and other critics, some of them gay or lesbian, have pointed to the flaws in this research, which has led to severe qualification of the born-gay advocates' claims, though they usually revert to certainty as soon as the critics have left the room. From triumphant cries of "We now know we're born gay!" they had to retreat to, "Well, at least we know there's a genetic predisposition to be gay," and Serwatka's own grudging "Is lifelong homosexuality biological? Yes, at least in part. How much of the biology is genetics and how much is hormonal is still to be determined, but there is definitely a genetic component, and most likely, both play a role" (65).

(Those interested in the question should look at Anne Fausto-Sterling's Myths of Gender [Harper, 1992]; Edward Stein's The Mismeasure of Desire [Oxford, 1999]; Roger Lancaster's The Trouble with Nature [California, 2003]; and now Rebecca M. Jordan-Young's Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Difference [Harvard, 2010]. Evelyn Fox Keller's The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture [Duke, 2010] does a good job of showing what is wrong with the whole nature vs. nurture debate; it's a short book though admittedly fairly technical. But if I could get through all these, surely my readers can!)

But even Serwatka's even-handed conclusion is wrong. The fact that he declines to consider scientific (as opposed to queer-theoretical) objections to the research he describes doesn't help. He likes the research on "finger-length ratio" so much, for example, that he gives it a text box of its own:

One of the physical traits that has been linked to difference in sexual orientation among women is finger-length ratio for the index (D2) and ring (D4) fingers. When D2 and D4 are similar in length, it is more likely that a woman will be heterosexual, whereas homosexual women's index fingers tend to be shorter than their ring fingers, as are men's. Studying this phenomenon, Lynn Hall and Craig Love ... found that when monozygotic twins were discordant for sexual orientation, the heterosexual and the homosexual twin would have different finger-length ratios, with the heterosexual sister having little to no difference in the length of the two fingers, their finger-length ratios were also concordant [60].

Serwatka couldn't have read Rebecca M. Jordan-Young's new book Brain Storm, which has just been published, but she surveys research that he could have examined:

There have been seven studies comparing 2D:4D in gay and straight men, and the findings are all over the map. Three studies find higher (feminized) ratios in gay men ..., but two other studies found gay men to have lower (hypermasculinized) ratios ... and two found no difference in digit ratios between gay and straight men. ... Among women, two studies have found lesbians to have "masculinized" digit ratios ... , but one small study ... and the two largest studies ... found no difference compared with heterosexual women. Only one study has reported a link between 2D:4D and gender identity, and this found a "feminized" pattern in male-to-female transsexuals, but no difference between female-to-male transsexuals and other genetic females. ... In sum, if there is any link between digit ratio and sexual orientation or gender identity, it appears to be very small, and to be limited to (genetic) men. The evidence is similarly mixed for other indicators [101; italics in original].

To be fair, Jordan-Young doesn't discuss Hall and Love's study (though she cites a 2000 paper by Hall elsewhere), but judging by the rest of the research, it probably doesn't matter because the link between sexual orientation and finger length is so tenuous. Serwatka also declares that Simon LeVay's claims about homosexuality and the brain have been supported by "Animal studies comparing rams who displayed same-sex and opposite-sex attraction [!] found similar patterns in hypothalamic development in heterosexual and homosexual rams" (61). That's intriguing, but it's a big jump from rams to human beings. (What is a "homosexual ram," anyway? Does he adore Lady Gaga?)

But all of this really misses the point. As I've pointed out before, the contemporary research on the origins of sexual orientation is not about sexual orientation (or even sexual behavior) at all, but about gendered behavior and roles. It is based on the assumption that there is really only one "sexual orientation," namely heterosexuality. What seems to be a homosexual man is really a man with a little woman hidden in his brain, who is attracted to people with little men hidden in their brains. This is shown by the way these researchers jump to the conclusion, without any evidence, that "feminization" of males, either through brain fibers or hormones, equals male homosexuality; but they don't even ask who is having sex with those feminized males.

There is a great deal of folklore among gay men and lesbians which makes the same assumption: many gay men around the world are repulsed by the idea of having sex with other gay men, and liken the very idea to "lesbianism" or even "cannibalism." And who knows? They might be right. The point is that if they are right, then the educated and supposedly science-informed discourse about sexual orientation is wrong. Sexual orientation is not, as the American Psychological Association defines it,

... an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual, or affectional attraction toward others. It is easily distinguished from other components of sexuality including biological sex, gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female), and the social gender role (adherence to cultural norms for feminine and masculine behavior).

Nope; sexual orientation is really the desire some men have to stick their rear ends in the faces of other men, in hopes of being mounted by them; or the desire some women have to mount other women. Far from being "easily distinguished from other components of sexuality", in reality it is inseparable from them. In which case the whole public-relations project of the mainstream gay movement to distance us from "stereotypical" (that is, gender-nonconformist) queers who present themselves as the opposite sex is radically misconceived: we should rather embrace our inner drag queens/kings. At the very least, the mainstream gay movement will have to grapple with this problem a lot better than it has up till now.

The question of the cause of sexual orientation is a red herring, though, that has distracted gay people and our movement for too long now. Especially since, given the current state of the research, we cannot honestly claim that we were born gay. In the first place, it is false that there's an opposition between "biology" and "choice." As I've pointed out before, contemporary science and much philosophy take the position that there is no such thing as choice in human beings, but this leads to hopeless contradictions. Leaning on biological determinism not only deprives gay people of our choices, but our opponents as well: they are hostile to us, not because they are wicked, but because it's in their nature. And that leaves us nowhere.

Even if there were much better evidence that homosexuality was caused by our genes, it wouldn't settle the dispute we're engaged in. Inborn conditions aren't necessarily good: we don't think that people born with genetic conditions like sickle-cell anemia should be left to suffer because Mother Nature made them that way and She doesn't make trash. Genetic determinism has been used (and still is) to deny the humanity and limit the options of people with differing skin color, or differing reproductive organs. The Civil Rights movement didn't argue that it was wrong to discriminate against the Negro because Negritude was in his genes; nor did the women's movement take such a line. Nor did the US Supreme Court overturn state laws against "interracial" marriage in 1967 because Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving suffered from (or boasted) a genetic condition that forced them to marry someone of a different race -- it affirmed that people have the right to choose their partners.

We need to start challenging our opponents about it: If being gay is a choice, so what? But many gay people don't want to, because they believe they can only defend their sexual orientation if it's something they are stuck with, despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I once asked another speaker on a GLB panel what he would do if it were proven, scientifically and unquestionably, that he had chosen to be gay. He thought for a moment, then said that in that case, some psychiatrist would make a lot of money helping him undo that choice. I was stunned, not least because earlier he had been talking about how he'd helped younger gay kids come out and feel good about being gay; yet he himself clearly felt quite bad about it. He was also wrong in assuming that all choices can be reversed. This doesn't mean he is a bad person; it does show how deeply miserable and wrong many of us have been made to feel about ourselves, our desires, and our loves. "Would someone choose a 'lifestyle' that causes them to be hated, persecuted, and called a sinner?" -- it's amazing how many of us and our allies think that rhetorical question constitutes a defense. It's not. It's almost an altar call, the kind of cry one makes just before throwing one's sinful self into the arms of the Lord. And I'd be the last person to tell such gay people that they're wrong to hate themselves and to despise and dishonor their loves, but their attitude is not a great foundation on which to build a movement.

I haven't worked out myself how best to realize a position of proud choice for the gay movement. It would need to be done gradually, in response to the way our enemies try to exploit it. But it would start with the declaration that if homosexuality is a choice, so is heterosexuality, so is Christianity (whether pro- or antigay), and a fortiori being antigay is a choice. And go from there.

More on Queer Questions, Clear Answers later.

*You peeked. Serwatka is presumably one of "the moderately religious who are praying for peace and consensus as well as everyone's soul." Evidently those "moderately religious" are working through the state universities to further their theological agenda.

I Don't Know How You Were Inverted

But back to Thomas Serwatka's Queer Questions, Clear Answers, as I promised. I read it all the way through, though I admit to skimming at times. I had to keep reminding myself that although most of what Serwatka writes is familiar to me, it won't be familiar to some (most?) of his other readers, who may not have read a book on this subject before. But that makes Serwatka's errors and misrepresentations all the more harmful.

As you'd expect in a book like this, Serwatka devotes quite a bit of space to the question of cause: why are some people drawn erotically to persons of their own sex, and others not? It's a very popular question among both straights and gays nowadays, and it might be worth mentioning that it wasn't always. During the 1970s, in the circles I moved in, it wasn't on our radar. The dominant theory at the time was the psychiatric absent-father / dominant mother theory of the neo-Freudians, and I already knew that it was largely discredited even before the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was not (no longer?) a disorder. (They didn't address the question of cause, however.) Alfred Kinsey was the scientific figure who loomed large for us then, and he hadn't concerned himself with causes.

Still, we weren't the only homosexuals in the world, and what didn't matter to us mattered to others. It must have been during my first year at IU, working in a branch university library, that I found a clipping that quoted a gay or pro-gay minister to the effect that homosexuals are born homosexual. That startled me, because I knew about the 19th century third-sex theories about the (male) homosexual as the soul of a woman in the body of a man, but I thought that those theories had also been discredited. The clipping was brief and didn't point to any support for the claim. Still, that was the last I heard of the "born-this-way" theory for several years. It made its big comeback in the 1990s, with the work of Simon LeVay, Dean Hamer, and Michael Bailey and Richard Pillard. I associate it with the Gay Rights Movement (as opposed to Gay Liberation) and the gay churches, where it's a pillar of their position, though there are plenty of apolitical and non-religious gays who agree with it. As Serwatka's exposition shows, it's also associated with the professional / therapeutic wing of gay male life.

Serwatka sums up the controversy as follows, in terms of a "summer flick":

There is a band of nomadic queer theorists ("you can't oppress me through your manmade heterosexist labels") shooting flaming arrows at the Brotherhood of Gay Essentialist [sic] (the "it's biology" group), while a clan of lesbian deconstructionists ("I will not be confined by society's expectations; I am free to create new categories") are hurling spears everywhere, tragically and unintentionally wounding a butch dyke ("I am what I am"). To make the battle even more chaotic, we add in bands of marauding conservative Jews, Christians, and Muslims ("It's a sin against Yahweh or the Trinity or Allah") railing against each other and everyone else on the field, including the moderately religious who are praying for peace and consensus as well as everyone's soul [34].

I've already mentioned Serwatka's "hearty, preacher's chalk-talk style," and I bet you can guess which group represents Serwatka in this scenario!* Not to belabor an already overdone caricature, the queer theorists I'm aware of are not "nomadic" but well-ensconced in the Master's House (Queer Theory arose in the academy); the Brotherhood of Gay Essentialists works in university counseling departments as well as freelancing as therapists, and plays in the Radical Faerie movement (a reminder that Essentialists can be assimilationist and anti-assimilationist). The same is true of lesbians: surely some "butch dykes" are also deconstructionists. And of course no conservative Jew would ever pronounce the name of Yahweh, and I've never heard any Christian call homosexuality a sin against the Trinity. Someone got a little carried away with his rhetoric here, and things never get much better.

Instead of traveling the earth looking for pages from an ancient text, our scientists are studying ancient and contemporary civilizations, using technologies to decipher parts of the human genome, and employing a host of research models to discover the secrets of our origins written into the earth's past and into our cells. And their hard work is yielding results, albeit still preliminary results. And all of this is going on while we are subjected to a cacophony of differing voices, each vying to win the public relations war over how sexual orientation should be viewed and "handled" in the culture [34-5].

That's right, those results are "preliminary," but they are publicized as if they were final, and many gay people point to them as though they had settled the question for once and all, and only irrational anti-scientific Christians could reject them. (It seems to me that a prudent gay movement wouldn't want to hitch its wagon to merely "preliminary" results that might be demolished later -- and, in fact, have been.) As I pointed at the end of my previous post on this book, the gay and lesbian scientists who have criticized the born-gay research are absent from Serwatka's tale. They do so, not because they are nomadic queer theorists, but because they are scientists criticizing other scientists' flawed work. But acknowledging that would complicate the simple good guys / bad guys story Serwatka wants to tell.

It's easier for Serwatka to focus on another group:

In the 1990s, queer theorists told us that there were no homosexuals; at least there were none until we labeled them as such in the 1890s. Strongly influenced by philosopher Michel Foucault, lesbian feminism, and the social constructionist movement, queer theory proposed that before we created the label there were no homosexuals; all we had were people who engaged in different forms of same-sex behaviors. In some societies these behaviors were condemned and punished; in some societies these behaviors were accepted and even honored. But in both sets of socities, the actions didn't define the person. People weren't divided into homosexuals and heterosexuals or into homosexuals, bisexuals, and heterosexuals. They were just people who did or did not engage in specific behaviors [49-50].

Now, I have my own disagreements with queer theorists and social constructionists (is "movement" the right word for them, though?) and many of them get things as wrong as Serwatka does: in general, their tendency to treat Foucault's writings as a kind of scripture, to be harvested for prooftexts rather than as a goad to further thought of their own; their confusion of terminology with the reality to which it refers; their misuse of the social constructionist model to draw invidious distinctions between the present and the past, or between "The West" and other cultures; or confusing social construction with cultural determinism, the belief that human beings are blank slates on which their culture writes. In particular, I should point out that social constructionism has nothing to say about the cause question. No one, as far as I know, doubts that the anatomical signs of "race" (skin color, eye color, hair texture, etc.) have biological roots, but there is a large literature on the social construction of race. In the US, for example, a white woman can give birth to a black child, but a black woman can't give birth to a white one; but in other countries it can be the other way around. So even if it were proven -- and it hasn't been -- that homosexuality is genetically determined, that would not prove that it isn't socially constructed.

What bothered me first about Serwatka's discussion is that he kept using the term "sexual orientation" as if he knew what a sexual orientation is, and especially as if he knew that it is some kind of biological mechanism in our body that directs us to male or female erotic partners. This is just what no one knows. "Orientation" doesn't necessarily imply an inherent, unchangeable state; the compass-point orientation of a building, though it can be difficult to change after it is completed, is a choice, decided by its planners. The orientation of a parked car can be changed much more easily, as can my own spatial orientation as I write this. I wasn't born facing north, but even if I was, that doesn't doom me to face north forever, and I have faced in many different directions during my lifetime. It's true, when people speak of "sexual orientation" they're not thinking of such examples, but they're usually assuming what they need to prove: that "sexual orientation" is inborn and unchangeable. I've encountered numerous people who argue the point in circles: it's an orientation because it's inborn, and we know it's inborn because it's an orientation, and orientations are inborn ... I think that's what Thomas Serwatka is doing, though he may not be aware of it.

Still, Serwatka knows he needs some evidence, so he points to the past two decades' worth of research on the origin of sexual orientation. Numerous scientists and other critics, some of them gay or lesbian, have pointed to the flaws in this research, which has led to severe qualification of the born-gay advocates' claims, though they usually revert to certainty as soon as the critics have left the room. From triumphant cries of "We now know we're born gay!" they had to retreat to, "Well, at least we know there's a genetic predisposition to be gay," and Serwatka's own grudging "Is lifelong homosexuality biological? Yes, at least in part. How much of the biology is genetics and how much is hormonal is still to be determined, but there is definitely a genetic component, and most likely, both play a role" (65).

(Those interested in the question should look at Anne Fausto-Sterling's Myths of Gender [Harper, 1992]; Edward Stein's The Mismeasure of Desire [Oxford, 1999]; Roger Lancaster's The Trouble with Nature [California, 2003]; and now Rebecca M. Jordan-Young's Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Difference [Harvard, 2010]. Evelyn Fox Keller's The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture [Duke, 2010] does a good job of showing what is wrong with the whole nature vs. nurture debate; it's a short book though admittedly fairly technical. But if I could get through all these, surely my readers can!)

But even Serwatka's even-handed conclusion is wrong. The fact that he declines to consider scientific (as opposed to queer-theoretical) objections to the research he describes doesn't help. He likes the research on "finger-length ratio" so much, for example, that he gives it a text box of its own:

One of the physical traits that has been linked to difference in sexual orientation among women is finger-length ratio for the index (D2) and ring (D4) fingers. When D2 and D4 are similar in length, it is more likely that a woman will be heterosexual, whereas homosexual women's index fingers tend to be shorter than their ring fingers, as are men's. Studying this phenomenon, Lynn Hall and Craig Love ... found that when monozygotic twins were discordant for sexual orientation, the heterosexual and the homosexual twin would have different finger-length ratios, with the heterosexual sister having little to no difference in the length of the two fingers, their finger-length ratios were also concordant [60].

Serwatka couldn't have read Rebecca M. Jordan-Young's new book Brain Storm, which has just been published, but she surveys research that he could have examined:

There have been seven studies comparing 2D:4D in gay and straight men, and the findings are all over the map. Three studies find higher (feminized) ratios in gay men ..., but two other studies found gay men to have lower (hypermasculinized) ratios ... and two found no difference in digit ratios between gay and straight men. ... Among women, two studies have found lesbians to have "masculinized" digit ratios ... , but one small study ... and the two largest studies ... found no difference compared with heterosexual women. Only one study has reported a link between 2D:4D and gender identity, and this found a "feminized" pattern in male-to-female transsexuals, but no difference between female-to-male transsexuals and other genetic females. ... In sum, if there is any link between digit ratio and sexual orientation or gender identity, it appears to be very small, and to be limited to (genetic) men. The evidence is similarly mixed for other indicators [101; italics in original].

To be fair, Jordan-Young doesn't discuss Hall and Love's study (though she cites a 2000 paper by Hall elsewhere), but judging by the rest of the research, it probably doesn't matter because the link between sexual orientation and finger length is so tenuous. Serwatka also declares that Simon LeVay's claims about homosexuality and the brain have been supported by "Animal studies comparing rams who displayed same-sex and opposite-sex attraction [!] found similar patterns in hypothalamic development in heterosexual and homosexual rams" (61). That's intriguing, but it's a big jump from rams to human beings. (What is a "homosexual ram," anyway? Does he adore Lady Gaga?)

But all of this really misses the point. As I've pointed out before, the contemporary research on the origins of sexual orientation is not about sexual orientation (or even sexual behavior) at all, but about gendered behavior and roles. It is based on the assumption that there is really only one "sexual orientation," namely heterosexuality. What seems to be a homosexual man is really a man with a little woman hidden in his brain, who is attracted to people with little men hidden in their brains. This is shown by the way these researchers jump to the conclusion, without any evidence, that "feminization" of males, either through brain fibers or hormones, equals male homosexuality; but they don't even ask who is having sex with those feminized males.

There is a great deal of folklore among gay men and lesbians which makes the same assumption: many gay men around the world are repulsed by the idea of having sex with other gay men, and liken the very idea to "lesbianism" or even "cannibalism." And who knows? They might be right. The point is that if they are right, then the educated and supposedly science-informed discourse about sexual orientation is wrong. Sexual orientation is not, as the American Psychological Association defines it,

... an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual, or affectional attraction toward others. It is easily distinguished from other components of sexuality including biological sex, gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female), and the social gender role (adherence to cultural norms for feminine and masculine behavior).

Nope; sexual orientation is really the desire some men have to stick their rear ends in the faces of other men, in hopes of being mounted by them; or the desire some women have to mount other women. Far from being "easily distinguished from other components of sexuality", in reality it is inseparable from them. In which case the whole public-relations project of the mainstream gay movement to distance us from "stereotypical" (that is, gender-nonconformist) queers who present themselves as the opposite sex is radically misconceived: we should rather embrace our inner drag queens/kings. At the very least, the mainstream gay movement will have to grapple with this problem a lot better than it has up till now.

The question of the cause of sexual orientation is a red herring, though, that has distracted gay people and our movement for too long now. Especially since, given the current state of the research, we cannot honestly claim that we were born gay. In the first place, it is false that there's an opposition between "biology" and "choice." As I've pointed out before, contemporary science and much philosophy take the position that there is no such thing as choice in human beings, but this leads to hopeless contradictions. Leaning on biological determinism not only deprives gay people of our choices, but our opponents as well: they are hostile to us, not because they are wicked, but because it's in their nature. And that leaves us nowhere.

Even if there were much better evidence that homosexuality was caused by our genes, it wouldn't settle the dispute we're engaged in. Inborn conditions aren't necessarily good: we don't think that people born with genetic conditions like sickle-cell anemia should be left to suffer because Mother Nature made them that way and She doesn't make trash. Genetic determinism has been used (and still is) to deny the humanity and limit the options of people with differing skin color, or differing reproductive organs. The Civil Rights movement didn't argue that it was wrong to discriminate against the Negro because Negritude was in his genes; nor did the women's movement take such a line. Nor did the US Supreme Court overturn state laws against "interracial" marriage in 1967 because Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving suffered from (or boasted) a genetic condition that forced them to marry someone of a different race -- it affirmed that people have the right to choose their partners.

We need to start challenging our opponents about it: If being gay is a choice, so what? But many gay people don't want to, because they believe they can only defend their sexual orientation if it's something they are stuck with, despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I once asked another speaker on a GLB panel what he would do if it were proven, scientifically and unquestionably, that he had chosen to be gay. He thought for a moment, then said that in that case, some psychiatrist would make a lot of money helping him undo that choice. I was stunned, not least because earlier he had been talking about how he'd helped younger gay kids come out and feel good about being gay; yet he himself clearly felt quite bad about it. He was also wrong in assuming that all choices can be reversed. This doesn't mean he is a bad person; it does show how deeply miserable and wrong many of us have been made to feel about ourselves, our desires, and our loves. "Would someone choose a 'lifestyle' that causes them to be hated, persecuted, and called a sinner?" -- it's amazing how many of us and our allies think that rhetorical question constitutes a defense. It's not. It's almost an altar call, the kind of cry one makes just before throwing one's sinful self into the arms of the Lord. And I'd be the last person to tell such gay people that they're wrong to hate themselves and to despise and dishonor their loves, but their attitude is not a great foundation on which to build a movement.

I haven't worked out myself how best to realize a position of proud choice for the gay movement. It would need to be done gradually, in response to the way our enemies try to exploit it. But it would start with the declaration that if homosexuality is a choice, so is heterosexuality, so is Christianity (whether pro- or antigay), and a fortiori being antigay is a choice. And go from there.

More on Queer Questions, Clear Answers later.

*You peeked. Serwatka is presumably one of "the moderately religious who are praying for peace and consensus as well as everyone's soul." Evidently those "moderately religious" are working through the state universities to further their theological agenda.