Reason has an imposter. Its name is rationalisation.

Very often, when people holding different convictions want to come to grips with an issue, whether at a micro level as between a parent and child or at the macro level as in a societal debate, reason is the platform for engagement. However, often too, people think they are bringing reason to the table when in fact they offer no more than rationalisation. In such cases, no meaningful engagement is possible.

Rationalisation slips in easily because in an important way, it mimics reason -- in its deployment of logic. But rationalisation has certain distinguishing features arising from a motivation to defend an a priori position come what may:

• It is not an open-ended enquiry, in the sense that it does not allow for evidence to lead to the conclusions;
    
• Instead, the desired conclusion leads to selectivity in the evidence presented;
    
• Most critically, assumptions and the historical context for what evidence it cites are rarely ever interrogated

On the first point -- not allowing an open-ended enquiry -- I think we need to admit that the Church has not had a brilliant record. 

Take for example, what happened to Jesuit Father John McNeill. He published a scholarly book The Church and the Homosexual in 1975, basically calling on the Church to rethink its position on homosexuality. For his effort, he was ordered to stop public ministry towards gay and lesbian persons in 1985, and when he refused, he was dismissed from the Society of Jesus in 1987.

Let me now come to selective citation of evidence. One of the easiest ways to spot this is to apply a test of consistency.

For example, last year, we heard a Nominated Member of Parliament declare that since homosexual orientation is not a fixed trait, it does not deserve legal protection.

Not only does this ignore just about all empirical findings of the last 30 years pointing to how sexual orientation is a significant component of personhood and one that is not chosen, with many studies also suggesting a biological basis for it -- in other words, a fixed trait -- it fails the simplest of consistency tests.

Consider religious identity. Religion is something that people choose and unchoose all the time, yet the state accords this freedom respect and protection. In Singapore, we even have a law that makes it a crime to deliberately offend someone on account of his religion. So clearly, being fixed is not a necessary condition for a trait to enjoy legal protection, yet my opponents would use that argument to tell you why it should be fair game to discriminate against gay people.

Another example of selective reference to evidence and glaring inconsistency would be the way the following equation is made, and usually very slickly, so that you have no time to query how each part connects to the next: Homosexual equals anal sex equals Aids equals health threat equals ban. Yet, it takes only a moment's reflection to see that the parts don't fit very well. Homosexual people are not the only ones engaging in anal sex; many heterosexual people do too. Furthermore, at least half of homosexual people never engage in anal sex. They're unable to. They're lesbians.

In any case, globally, anal sex is not even the primary mode of transmission of HIV; penile-vaginal sex is. The vast majority -- like 80, 90 percent -- of Aids cases in Africa and India, the two most affected regions, are due to heterosexual transmission, with the balance quite often due to injecting drug use. Why is the role of heterosexual sex ignored in the problematising of homosexuality via Aids? Consistency would demand that we make much louder objections to heterosexuality.

Finally, even if Aids is a health threat, are bans and punitive measures the right ways to deal with it?

Yet, despite the shockingly poor interconnectivity of its components, this equation from homosexuality to ban is often employed to little demurral. The aforementioned member of parliament used it herself and there are people who think she made a great speech.

Here is where I need to make the first of 3 sidetracks. It begins with a reminder not to selectively misuse disease for moral campaigns. We fail to remember that no disease strikes all people uniformly.

Nasopharyngeal cancer is a disease of people of southern Chinese ancestry -- that's most of you and me. It is a very rare cancer in other populations. Would we think it fair for people to read into this some moral defect of southern Chinese? Bird flu first struck the Vietnamese. Today, it is more endemic in Indonesia than anywhere else. Are we to read into this some moral defect of Vietnamese and Indonesians? Diabetes is more common in Arabs and Indians, probably due to a genetic predisposition. Should we criminalise them? And then ovarian cancer tends to strike women who have never borne a child. Is this disease God's retribution for not obeying his commandment to be "fruitful and multiply"?

The general rule is that the world is neither homogenous nor symmetrical. Processes lead from one thing to another and patterns result. 

Yet, people tend to assume that the world is, or should be, homogenous and symmetrical; they use this as a starting assumption and on that basis, read moral significance into epidemiology. Doing so is to completely miscomprehend the nature of the world.

Another major feature of rationalisation is a failure to interrogate assumptions; in fact, quite often, you see intention to use false assumptions as the springboard for an argument. In this regard, there's a whole cluster of arguments that I'm sure everyone here has come across before, and which share the theme of unnaturalness.

Variant no. 1

The first variant arises from a laziness with word meanings. There's a conflation of "common" with "normal" with "natural".

Since homosexuality is uncommon, so the belief goes, it can't be normal. Since it is abnormal, it must be unnatural.

This kind of slip-sliding happens when people fail to stop and think. The truth is, there are real differences among these three concepts. "Common" is a mere statistical matter, but "normal" has a functional element. When it comes to physical or psychological attributes, something is normal when it is no impediment to good health, that's why we usually speak in terms of a range of normalcy. "Natural" should simply mean that which is found in nature -- a descriptive term -- but as I will discuss below, is often warped to something prescriptive, to mean that which is acceptable.

Take some examples:

People with blond hair are rare. The trait is essentially found only in a minority of people of European descent, who are a minority of all humans, Would we say that since blonds are uncommon, so they are abnormal, and by the same token, they are unnatural?

Take left handedness: Although it is less common than right handedness, today we consider it as just another variant of normal. We realise that being left-handed is no impediment to healthy functionality. (This wasn't always the case though. In some cultures historically, people saw left-handedness as a mark of ill character. Thus we have the word "sinister" with all its unkind connotations.) Moreover, today, even though left handedness is statistically uncommon, we do not make the illogical progression to naming it as unnatural.

Nor do we call the musical talent, rare though that may be, an unnatural predisposition.

The rejoinder may be that whereas being blond or left handed or musically gifted is uncommon, no demonstrable harm results from these traits. In the case of homosexuality, a long list of harm would be laid out, starting with Aids, unhappiness and depression, and a bad influence on children.

The fallacy of the Aids indictment I have dealt with. As for unhappiness and depression, there is once again a failure to interrogate assumptions. Even if it is true that gay people have higher rates of such conditions, is it due to their sexual orientation per se, or due to the isolation and prejudice they encounter every day of their lives? Is it their doing or the work of others?

As for the "bad influence on children" thing, I'm sure you can see how this is closely related to the association between gay men and paedophilia. Not only are the many, many cases of heterosexual men guilty of paedophilia ignored, so are all the lesbians! The partiality of this accusation is blindingly obvious, yet it is deployed again and again.

The bottom line is: Scholarly and considered opinion finds no harm in homosexual orientation per se. It is indeed within the range of normalcy just like blond hair, left handedness or musical talent.

Variant no. 2

An even more common way by which the designation of "unnatural" is applied to homosexuality is through the excessively-valorised anatomical fit between the penis and vagina. Consequently, so the argument goes, using the organs in any other way must be "unnatural" or "not intended by nature".

First of all, this already fails the consistency test in that putting the penis into a woman's oral orifice (i.e. the mouth) seems to be regarded as perfectly ordinary, if the hue and cry over the conviction of Anis Abdullah in late 2003 is anything to go by. Yet we would criminalise the insertion of a penis into a man's oral orifice.

Surely I don't have to point out that almost all those who demanded the retention of 377A were silent over the repeal of Section 377, which made it legal to insert a penis into a woman's anal orifice.

But people don't seem to interrogate how meaningful it is to rely on this easy plug-and-socket analogy, for if there is any distinctive feature about the human species, it is our inventiveness. We make use of things to do new things. It is totally natural for us to use objects, including parts of our bodies, in novel ways, such as doing cartwheels with our hands, using umbilical cord blood for stem cell research, using our skulls to score a header in football, or using fingers to play the church organ (with feet scurrying furiously over the pedals). 

Kiyo Watanabe plays "Prelude and Fugue in A Minor" by Johann Sebastian Bach on 79-rank Garland Pipe Organ at First United Methodist Church, Wichita Falls, Texas, January 13, 2006.

Kiyo Watanabe performs "Air for the G String" by Johann Sebastian Bach on 79-rank Garland Pipe Organ (2003) at First United Methodist Church, Wichita Falls, Texas, January 13, 2006.

 
Giving ourselves pleasure by using our fingers to masturbate, giving mutual pleasure by poking our penises here and there, is nowhere near to being the most unexpected outcomes of our natural curiosity and intelligence.

Variant no. 3

Since I am speaking at a Catholic event, I should also address the question of "natural law". Coming from the first few centuries of the Church, this concept came from a desire to grasp the Will of God by observing his work – the natural world. With respect to sex, it was noticed, without too much difficulty, I'm sure, that nine months following coitus, a baby sometimes results, and from this observation, it was inferred that God intended the purpose of sex to be reproduction. Thus, any other application of sex would violate God's Will, since it would be contrary to "natural law".

The thing to note is how a huge number of assumptions went into this, among which would be:

• that God had a Will and everything has a purpose, 
    
• that observing nature provides a reliable window to that, 
    
• that sex has but one purpose, and once that has been discerned, all other possibilities must be discarded and 
    
• pleasure, which is a lot more immediate and has a 100% correlation with sex -- whereas babies has a much lower correlation – cannot possibly be the purpose or God's Will.

Don't you see here a crying need to interrogate assumptions?

The last is particularly curious. Why was pleasure dismissed as a purpose of sex? We actually know the answer. This whole business of natural law coincided with another prevailing idea in the early Church: Stoicism. This idea, to put it very simply, held that human emotions and passions detracted from piety. Being devoted to God required a high degree of asceticism and renunciation. Pleasure is a huge distraction and cannot possibly be God's intended purpose for us.

And so this bias has come down to us, even as very few among us today know how it came about. In fact, we don't even realise the bias underlying our current ideas. We still see procreation as something "intended by nature", and we still feel very guilty about the pleasures of sex. We treat this view as axiomatic, when it is an artefact of history, and only Western history, for that matter.

See what I mean by failing to interrogate the historical context?

The Catholic Church has evolved somewhat with time. Today, the official line is that sexual relations within opposite-sex marriage have a dual purpose – procreation and the deepening of a communion between husband and wife. The latter is a grudging concession to the obvious pleasurability of the erotic, but even so, the guidance from the Vatican is that all sex – and it should only be within marriage – must remain "open to conception". By this rule, homosexual sex cannot be acceptable.

This runs straight bang into another consistency problem: Obviously infertile opposite-sex couples having sex do not seem to present any difficulty to Church views. The Church doesn't fret about a husband having sex with a post-menopausal wife. The Church happily solemnises a marriage between a man with medically diagnosed infertile testes and a woman, despite knowing full well that the sex they are going to have is not open to conception. Frankly, the selectivity in application of so-called divinely-inspired laws is quite unbecoming.

Failure to interrogate includes the failure to see the subjective for what it is. We don't reflect upon and question the stereotypes we hold in our minds. We project our emotive responses onto others, and when we imagine that others must feel the same way as we do, then hey, there must be some universal truth to it all.

A few simple observations about how other people may react emotively to things that don't particularly disturb us should suffice to alert us to the possibility of similar failings on our part. Just as their feelings, however deep-rooted they may seem to them, are not shared by us and therefore cannot be universal, how can we assume that our feelings are shared by others?

How many of you here are aware of how strongly people from deeply conservative Muslim societies feel about skimpy clothing on women? Their reaction can be quite visceral. But we ourselves are so used to the sight of spaghetti straps and bikinis, we find it hard to imagine that people can feel differently. And when these deeply conservative folks universalise their feelings into a dress code for their womenfolk, and castigate the West for its sexual mores, as represented by its "loose women", we think such a response ill-founded.

What makes you think that you yourselves do not, in other areas, likewise universalise your own reactions?

Another example: Some people, particularly from the West, find it disgusting that certain cultures eat dog. At once, you realise that it's a matter of acculturation, yet it's not easy for us to imagine that the disgust we feel (over other things) is likewise acculturated too. Feelings of disgust are rarely universal.

Thirdly, here's one I heard quite recently, from someone I thought quite highly educated. He ridiculed Indian religious tradition by pointing out that Hindu priests were bare-torsoed and some ascetic sadhus went about naked. What an absurd culture it was, he said, that the more pious one believed one was, the less one wore.

Kumbh Mela, 2001

 
But hold on, do you see the value assumption behind his comment? He had internalised a cultural idea that covering up meant dignity and exposure was risible. But this is a learnt idea, not any fundamental rule of our species.

Moreover, did he not see the parallel between the renunciation of comfort and material attachment that Hindus valorise and the Stoicistic idea that pleasure was antithetical to piety?

Frankly, such unreflexive mocking reveals far more about the person making it than about the subject referred to.

These examples should caution us against a tendency to universalise our feelings, assuming that others must surely share them and then think that since it's so common, there must be some fundamental truth to the disgust we feel.

In particular, we should be alert to how some people who feel disgust at the thought of homosexuality construct universal significance from their subjective reaction. "Homosex or the sight of gender transgression is disgusting to me," they seem to say, "therefore it must be in violation of some universal rule."

In this connection, I will now make the second sidetrack.

In 1996, Henry Adams from the University of Georgia led a study of homophobia. For test subjects, he recruited 64 men who said they were heterosexual. In the first phase of the study, he had them answer a questionnaire about their attitudes towards homosexuality, and based on the answers obtained, he marked each man as either homophobic or non-homophobic.

In the second part of the experiment, he asked each man to watch a series of videos privately, with measurement devices attached to their penises.

One video given to them involved lesbian pornography, and all the men responded physically to it. Response to lesbian porn is used in research as a marker of heterosexuality in males, because homosexual men never react to it. This first step enabled Adams to know for sure that he was dealing with non-homosexual men.

When he gave them heterosexual porn to watch, they responded to it too.

However, when he showed male-male porn, reactions differed considerably. Look at these pie charts:

Isn't it interesting that those with homophobic attitudes responded more strongly to the eroticism of male-male porn than those without? Are these guys who adopt homophobic attitudes overcompensating, perhaps subconsciously, for their own insecurities?

In short, what I'd like to warn against is that when we unversalise the subjective, we in effect use ourselves as a yardstick by which to measure others. I think you can see that that would be a rather self-centred way of engaging with people, and not anything one should be proud of.

Some might say, it's not a very Christian thing to do.

Now, let me discuss the chief rhetorical devices that we see again and again whenever people speak about homosexuality. They are a parody of reasoning, but few are alert to them. I shall discuss four commonly used devices:

• Slippery slope arguments;
• Sophistry;
• Prejudicial association; and
• Equating speculation with empirical knowledge.

Slippery slope arguments exploit the fear of the unknown and the unfamiliar. This will lead to that and then to that and that, it goes, along the way, riding on common, scary stereotypes. They conjure a threat to one's own group as the end result of a cascade of outcomes.

Slippery slope arguments are basically emotive in nature.

Here's the most common kind: If we decriminalise, more people will experiment with homosex, then more will turn gay – but why one should lead to the other is never explained. Next thing you know, there will be kissing on trains and sex on the streets. The "homosexual lobby" will demand non-discrimination laws next – as if that is such a shocking thing. They'll demand the right to marriage and will be raising children too.

Once again, it's full of uninterrogated assumptions and lazy stereotypes, but alas, the cascade set is often accepted whole without question.

Perhaps it's easier to see how grotesque the preceding slippery slope is if I recalled the arguments made just 150 years ago.

If we ended slavery, they used to say, the plantation economy would collapse. "Negroes" might one day demand to join "our" clubs. We may have to legalise inter-racial marriage and then our country would end up as a nation of half-breeds.

Or this one, from about 100 years ago:

If we give women the right to vote, we will cause domestic friction in our homes. Women may form their own opinions and no longer obey their husbands. A centuries-old tradition of male heads of households will be at risk. Once they have the vote, women may demand the right to stand for election too, and one day a woman may even rule over men, as prime minister.

I'm sure it is evident by now that these cascades of events have indeed largely come to pass but instead of the world being in great distress, we've just come to see the error of those arguments. What makes you think the slippery slope arguments with respect to the "threat" of homosexuality are any better?

Let's move on to other common rhetorical devices...

Sophistry is when one tries to make a distinction between practice or behaviour, and being, when practice/behaviour is an integral expression of gay people's personhood and identity.

You see this in nothing less than the Church's catechism:

They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.

Homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered ... Homosexual persons are called to chastity.

How is this inherently absurd? Let me give you some analogous examples:

We must be accepting the Chinese people. We must be sensitive to them and not discriminate against them. But Chinese should not act Chinese. They must eschew Chinese food, never speak the language or celebrate their customs.

Or,

It's fine if you are Christian, but it should be criminal to build churches, worship together or possess Christian literature. These acts are wrong, but we do not discriminate against you just because you are Christian.

Need I say more?

The next rhetorical device commonly employed is the prejudicial association of gay people with crime and disease, mental and physical. Some of you would already have noticed this in some of the examples I have cited so far.

There's the association made, either explicitly or implicitly, with paedophilia and molest in the case of gay males, and with enticing wives away from their "rightful" husbands, in the case of gay females.

There is a tireless attempt to classify homosexual orientation as a psychological ailment with all manner of so-called evidence purporting to show how gay people do not "fit in" with society.

In connection with the above, one of the most dishonourable things we see people doing is when they offer up speculation about the "causes" of homosexuality and either equate it in credibility with scientifically accepted facts or use it to dismiss known facts. This kind of rhetoric has no place on the platform of reason; it borders on dishonesty.

The most common speculation is that of the dominant mother, absent father "explanation" for gay males, and vice versa for gay females.

Let me say this categorically: In a hundred years of research, no evidence has been found to support this so-called explanation. Instead, hundreds of studies, peer-reviewed and published in reputable scientific journals, have indicated other possible developmental pathways to sexual orientation -- I stress, sexual orientation, not homosexuality alone -- none of which bears any relation to this aforementioned speculation.

To continue speaking of this discredited idea is akin to insisting that the world is flat after we have circumnavigated the globe.

The issue is not homosexuality, but homophobia. It is homophobia that distorts the reasoning process, that gives rise to the impulse to rationalisation, rather than open enquiry and genuine understanding. It is homophobia that stands in the way of bridging the divide.

If in a country where one race, say, the Chinese, is in a minority and another race the majority, and difficulties persist in race relations, do we say that it is a problem of Chineseness? Or do we say – do we know from experience – that the problem is really that of racism?

If women are not treated equally, do we point to them and say that they are the problem? Or is it sexism that is the problem?

Likewise, homosexual orientation and gay people are not the problem. Homophobia is. The point is: if one values moral integrity, then one must be very careful where one locates the burden of proof. It is not for the gay person to prove his dignity and worth, for these must subsist with him automatically, integral to his personhood. It is for those who would strip him of his dignity and worth to prove their case.

Homophobia shares another characteristic with racism and sexism: Just as racism and sexism is ameliorated through interaction between races and sexes respectively, so homophobic attitudes are reduced when people come to know gay people as family members or close friends. The change does not occur in the gay person, just as it does not occur in the racial minority. It occurs in the minds of the majority.

The well-known Pew Research Center polled 2,007 people in the US in December 2006 for their attitudes towards gay people and homosexuality. There were a number of different questions, but here I will just mention one to show a typical pattern.

When asked whether they supported gay marriage, Pew found a huge difference between those respondents who knew someone gay from among their family members or close friends, and those who did not. In the first group, 55% supported gay marriage. In the second group, only 25% did.

Reason requires: 

• Sincerity in seeking out empirical facts; 
• A habit of interrogating prior assumptions; 
• Sifting out the subjective; and 
• Locating correctly the burden of proof.

In some ways, these were the errors the Church made in one of its most celebrated cases in history where the doctrinal was defended against the empirical. I am referring to the inquisition of Galileo Galilei.

Galilei was a scientist who through observation of the planets concluded that the Earth orbited the sun, and not the other way around. The Church insisted that Holy Scripture and any number of commonsensical observations said otherwise. Galileo was eventually summoned to attend an inquisition in 1633 where he was asked to prove the empirical against the doctrinal. Of course he couldn't because the doctrinal was by definition not susceptible to the empirical. So he was ordered to recant, his books banned and he himself imprisoned.

It took 200 years before the Church quietly lifted the injunction against Galileo's writings, by which time, nobody gave the Church any credence anymore for scientific literacy. The Church had made itself irrelevant on the question.

It took a further 150 years till 1992 before a pope would comment on the matter.

That year, commemorating the 350th anniversary of Galileo's death, Pope John Paul II in a speech titled "Faith can never contradict reason" spoke about the errors made the lessons learnt. I will quote 5 significant passages:

The geocentric representation of the world was commonly admitted in the culture of the time as fully agreeing with the teaching of the Bible... The problem posed by theologians of that age was, therefore, that of the compatibility between heliocentrism and Scripture.

[snip]

Paradoxically, Galileo, a sincere believer, showed himself to be more perceptive in this regard than the theologians who opposed him. "If Scripture cannot err," he wrote... "certain of its interpreters and commentators can and do so in many ways"

[snip]

A problem of great importance and great relevance today: the problem of ... complexity... [as opposed to] a univocal model of order...

Complexity indicates precisely that, in order to account for the rich variety of reality, we must have recourse to a number of different models.

[snip]

Pope John Paul II

The underlying problems of this case concern both the nature of science and the message of faith. It is therefore not to be excluded that one day we shall find ourselves in a similar situation, one which will require both sides to have an informed awareness of the field and of the limits of their own competencies.

[snip]

What is important in a scientific or philosophic theory is above all that it should be true or, at least, seriously and solidly grounded.

 
I believe that Pope John Paul was cautioning us not to let preconceived ideas trump the empirical, and not to pretend to be scientific or reason-based without solid foundation and methodology. As you might have noticed, he also cautioned us not to be simplistic and expect a "univocal model". Reality can be complex, heterogenous and diverse, and we must not dismiss such a possibility.

Too many people, in my opinion, are making the same mistake again, trying to insist on a doctrinal position that homosexuality is wrong when empirical findings and reason strongly indicate otherwise.

Where are the facts, some of you might ask? Indeed, I have not provided much in my talk, but I don't feel I need to, for there's plenty out there just a few mouseclicks away. If you seriously want the empirical facts, you will set about looking for it. And you will find them. As for those who say science has no answers, I think the saying goes: "There are none so blind as those who would not see."

My greater concern is that you will be misled by an elaborate confection of rationalisation and pseudo-facts -- the imposters of reason -- which is why I devoted this talk to this very topic. If you're going to venture forth into the universe of information out there, please be alert to the tricks. Please do so only with your eyes open, your mind supple and your heart sincere, for the problem as I see it, is not a lack of information, but a resistance to reflection.

© Yawning Bread