IGF CultureWatch

While gay-rights groups have not yet announced their opposition to the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, that declaration is only a formality. They will politely wait until the Senate has conducted hearings and then come out swinging against him. Whether or not they are right to oppose him, one basis for their likely opposition should be dispelled. Abortion rights are not gay rights. And when it comes to constitutional law, Lawrence is not Roe.

Typical of gay activists' reaction to the Roberts nomination was that of Joe Solmonese, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign. Writing for the online edition of the Advocate, Solmonese warned that Roberts "has an extremely disturbing record in opposition to Roe v. Wade," the historic 1973 Supreme Court decision announcing a constitutional right to abortion. Indeed, abortion has become the litmus test for gay groups in deciding whether to oppose him.

Yet abortion is not a gay issue in practice or in principle. In practice, gay couples are the least likely in the land to produce unwanted pregnancies. Procreation for gay couples typically involves months of planning and thousands of dollars in investment, requiring the use of sophisticated reproductive technology or the cooperation of a surrogate parent. "Oops babies" are simply not a phenomenon common to gay life. Gays thus have less practical need for the option of abortion than do heterosexuals.

Yes, a gay woman could become pregnant through rape or consensual heterosexual sex. She might then want an abortion. But this no more makes abortion a "gay" issue than the fact that gay people die in plane crashes makes aviation-safety regulation a gay issue. Not everything that could conceivably happen to a gay person is thereby a gay issue.

Why then do gay groups make abortion a test of a politician's or a judicial nominee's commitment to gay rights? One answer to this question is that there's a demonstrated correlation in polling between opposition to abortion and opposition to gay equality. When a person is silent on gay issues, the next best indicator of his likely views is his stand on abortion. There are people who oppose abortion and support gay rights, of course, but these are the exceptions.

But gay-rights groups go further than this, insisting that there's a connection in principle between abortion rights and gay rights. That supposed principle is the right to privacy. "The privacy rights decided in Roe were at the core of the landmark Lawrence v. Texas sodomy case," Solmonese argues, referring to the 2003 decision in which the Supreme Court declared sodomy laws unconstitutional.

This is wrong. True, the constitutional right to privacy underlies both Roe and Lawrence. But the mere fact that both opinions spring from the same root does not mean the loss of one will erode the other.

For starters, it's remarkable how little the decision in Lawrence relies on Roe. The Lawrence opinion called on a phalanx of earlier privacy precedents and other authorities but mentioned Roe only sparingly, and never for a crucial point. The reason is obvious. Even for many liberal scholars, the reasoning of Roe is an embarrassment.

As a matter of both the individual and societal interests at stake, Roe presents a much weaker case for privacy protection than does Lawrence. First, the individual's privacy interest in abortion is weaker. Both abortion and sex involve things that are deeply personal to people and so implicate what some theorists call "decisional privacy." But there the similarity ends. Abortions are performed outside the home, often involve payment to state-licensed medical professionals, and always destroy an unwilling third party (the unborn child). Sex, as constitutionally protected, involves none of these things. It's typically done in the home, involves no commercial exchange, and imposes on no unwilling third party. Sex is a classically "private" activity in a way that abortion is not.

Second, the state's interest in regulation is much stronger in the case of abortion than in the case of sodomy. Every abortion kills an unborn child who has no choice in the matter and who is, at the very least, a potential person. The stakes are high. By contrast, the state of Texas in Lawrence could not come up with a single reason for prohibiting homosexual sodomy except "morality." Abortion is always killing; sex is often loving.

Just about everybody gets this distinction, including the opponents of gay equality. Much as social conservatives may disagree with Lawrence, they will not be organizing mass protests and annual marches on its anniversary thirty years hence, as they do now against Roe. While the sodomites may be harming themselves, they reason, at least they're not killing others.

To resolve both the policy and constitutional matter of abortion, we must surely weigh the autonomy interests of the individual woman. But we must also analyze the moral and legal status of the unborn child. Is it human life entitled to all the rights of a person? Or is it just neutral growth matter, inhabiting a woman's body, which she may dispose of at will? Or is it something in between?

These questions involve complicated matters of biology, medicine, religion, and moral reasoning. I have not answered them to my own satisfaction. But I am quite sure the answers do not depend on anything intrinsic to the case for gay rights.

First published August 3, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

Most of us realize that there are many people who have had sex with both sexes but that that does not necessarily means they feel equal desire for both sexes. As Masters and Johnson wryly observed, "The label of bisexual often means whatever the user wishes it to mean."

Now a new study published in Psychological Science by Northwestern University psychologist J. Michael Bailey and two Ph.D. candidates claims to advance science by reporting that none of the men in their study of male bisexuals experienced "strong" desire for both sexes and that most experienced much stronger sexual arousal by men than women.

Whether or not Bailey's conclusions are true, the study fails to demonstrate them effectively. Bailey has repeatedly in the past employed problematic research procedures and this study is no exception.

Bailey and his team recruited 33 "bisexuals" as well as control groups of homosexuals and heterosexuals by advertising in the gay and "alternative" press. They then showed all three groups of men "several" two-minute-long erotic films, including two of two men having sex and two of two women having sex. The subjects' genital arousal was determined by a device placed around the penis that measured any increased circumference. Bailey says, "For men arousal is orientation."

It turned out that one-third of each group of subjects had no significant genital arousal at all from the films, which means that either they had no sexual orientation or else the technique for testing orientation was flawed. But Bailey ignored that possibility, simply eliminated the non-responders and used the 22 bisexual who did have an arousal response.

It also turned out too that three of the 25 gay men who had measurable genital arousal were more aroused by the female films than the male films. Bailey should conclude ("arousal is orientation") that they were heterosexual but does not and does not say why. This interesting fact is buried in a footnote in a manuscript version of the study but I missed it in the uncorrected page proofs Bailey kindly provided.

In any case, the final result was that although all the bisexual men reported equal subjective (mental) arousal to both types of films, all of them "had much greater genital arousal from one sex than to the other" and three quarters of the 22 men had stronger genital arousal from the all-male films than the all-female films.

It is noticeable that there is no mention of heterosexual films - a man having sex with a woman. The study assumes that a film of two women having sex will always generate a heterosexual arousal response but offers no evidence or argument for the claim. No doubt some men are titillated by lesbian sex but whether it is as uniformly effective a heterosexual arousal agent as a heterosexual film seems questionable.

Some bisexual men, for instance, are far more interested in their own performance, their impact on the other person, than the gender of the partner. Masters and Johnson call them "ambisexuals" and C. A. Tripp mentions that some researchers describe them - somewhat inaccurately - as ready to "stick it in anywhere." If such men are to be aroused by brief films it would more likely be one of a man having sex with another person, male or female, than by a film lacking any male participant. This could help explain the greater number of men aroused by the all-male films.

Since the bisexual men did report substantially equal subjective (mental) arousal to both types of films, someone might wonder if two-minute films were long enough to generate genital arousal particularly for the female films since they presumably did not involve specific arousal cues such as copulatory activity. As psychologist Murray Davis points out, the move from everyday life to erotic reality can take time, the right mental set, and the right cues.

Finally one might wonder if the recruitment ads were specific enough. If Bailey had advertised for men with "equal sexual desire" for men and women he might have obtained a more interesting study group. As it was, he defined "bisexuals" as people with Kinsey ratings of 2, 3 and 4 thus including people with stronger heterosexual responses (2s) and stronger homosexual responses (4s).

One might also wonder if most of the bisexuals solicited through ads in gay publications might lean toward the gay side of bisexuality - which could be why they were reading gay publications and saw the ad. That in turn might help explain the larger number of bisexuals who were more aroused by males than females.

These and related difficulties lead to me wonder why Bailey continues to try to do sex research when he demonstrates so little understanding of the human psychology involved in sex and sexual arousal and seems so unself-critical about research designs that include sample bias, dubious testing procedures, built-in assumptions, unaccountable anomalies, etc. Whatever he is doing, it is not psychology and it is not science.