‘It’s unnatural’, said illogical

I have heard it said that history repeats itself. But does it have to keep banging on about the same old issues indefinitely? It is starting to sound like a cantankerous old bore.

Take the introduction of civil unions, for instance – in particular, the legal recognition of same-sex couples with the inevitable consequence that these have now been accorded the same rights as their heterosexual equivalents. On this score, history seems to have dug deep into its repertoire to produce all the usual logical fallacies, in roughly the same order, as we see each time an issue rears its head to trouble the morally unimpeachable amongst us.

But because there is now a political motive to discredit the civil unions bill (on top of all the usual moral outrage and indignation, etc.), these same fallacies have been dusted down to make them slightly more palatable to people who would otherwise dismiss such arguments for the illogical tripe they really are. But common to all these varieties is a single premise that goes something like:

It’s unnatural.

And in most cases it will just stop there: as if, having determined something to be ‘unnatural’, no further argument is even required.

OK, leaving aside the tiny detail that this premise is simply untrue – homosexuality is not unnatural at all, but I’ll come to this later – there are two varieties of this particular fallacy in current circulation at the moment. The first – probably more widespread – concerns homosexuality as a whole. It is ‘unnatural’, we are told, for same-sex couples to even exist, let alone to raise children. People who reason like this do not limit their outrage to same-sex adoptions, by the way. They oppose the civil union bill in its totality, usually on the following, patently flawed grounds.

Motorised transport, for instance, is unnatural. Otherwise, nature would have endowed all living things with wheels and their own internal combustion engines.

Nature, they argue, expects children to be raised by a mother and a father, otherwise nature would have made it possible for same-sex couples to have children naturally. And because two people can only come to live together for the sole purpose of bringing children into the world – another fallacy unto itself, but let’s bear with it for a while – there can be no justification for either the existence of homosexuality as an orientation, or even less for a law that gives recognition and rights to same-sex couples.

Inherent throughout all this is the rationale that we simply must all bow our heads to whatever nature thinks or does, in all things, everywhere.
Small problem. Even if the premise were true, and homosexuality really were unnatural, the same conditions would also have to apply to practically everything else humanity has ever cooked up or concocted in its measly little two-hundred thousand year career as a species inhabiting planet Earth.

Motorised transport, for instance, is unnatural. Otherwise, nature would have endowed all living things with wheels and their own internal combustion engines. So if you plan on driving to work tomorrow, please note that you will be committing a gravely unnatural act. You will be perverting the natural order by indulging in activities that are not contemplated anywhere in Mother Nature and we all know what happens when Mother Nature is defied. It’s driving to work tomorrow, abortion the day after, and the re-introduction of human sacrifice the middle of next week.

Even the fact that you have a place of work to drive to, by the way, is something that lies entirely outside the natural world. Look at the lilies of the field, as a certain someone once said. They neither toil nor spin. And look at the birds of the air, too… at least, the ones that haven’t been blasted to smithereens. They neither reap, nor sow, nor even gather into barns. Does it follow from this observation that toiling, spinning, reaping, sowing and gathering – in a word, work – are suddenly big no-nos? That because lilies and sparrows can get by comfortably without such nuisances as contractual agreements with employers, or social security contributions, then everybody else should do the same? 

Does it also mean that reaping and sowing – i.e., the cultivation of food to eat through agriculture; another unnatural invention if there ever was one – is to be prohibited as an affront to nature? I don’t think so. Otherwise, where would that same certain somebody have found a piece of bread to break, two thousand years ago last Friday?

He would have had other problems too. Religion, after all, is another human invention that has no place anywhere else in nature. Certainly no comparable phenomenon exists in the animal kingdom, outside of man. And I think we can safely exclude plants and bacteria, too.

Of all the countless animal species to have emerged and gone extinct on this planet, only one – humankind – has ever developed the faculty of believing in such concepts as all-powerful deities, an invisible and immortal soul, the afterlife and Universal Judgment. The rest of the natural world has spent the better part of the past four billion years without such fanciful notions, and looks none the worse for it as far as I can see. Certainly no other animal apart from man slaughters its own kind mindlessly in the name of its own version of the same unnatural invention. No other animal performs absurd rituals on its newborn offspring, and then bases its treatment of other individual specimens on whether they went through the same rituals themselves.

Above all, no other animal apart from man bases its judgment of others on what they may have read somewhere in a book, be it the Bible or the Koran (which, on this issue, are pretty much identical), or any other canonical sacred text. There are good reasons for non-human animals to avoid this sort of behaviour, by the way. It involves other deeply unnatural (and therefore abhorrent) behaviour patterns such as reading and writing. These, too, are uniquely human inventions which have no natural equivalents anywhere else, unless, that is, you count the scent-marking of territory, which does leave ‘messages’ to be ‘read’ by others, usually in the form of urine sprayed against a tree.

Apply the same logic here and you will reduce humanity’s most seminal intellectual achievement – the invention of a spoken and written language and all that has accrued as a result, including the aforementioned Bible and Koran  – to the equivalent of a dog cocking its leg against a lamp-post. This is what happens when you allow Nature to determine the laws that govern man. You automatically undo some five thousand years of human civilisation and turn the calendar of evolution back to when humans were scarcely distinguishable from the animals he hunted.

This brings us to the second (and even more contrived) version of the same argument. The one in current use among people who would, under ordinary circumstances, both champion equal rights and welcome such developments as a civil union bills but who, presumably because the law came about on the initiative of the detested Labour Party, feel they have to somehow find a reason to disagree.

In this scenario, the argument is slightly different. Homosexuality does exist in nature, they concede. Homosexuals should be permitted to exist – yes, terribly generous of them, I know – but should not insist on things for which there is no correlative in nature... such as the ability to adopt children. They should, in a word, simply be grateful for the fact that they are tolerated by society and stop bothering others with their outrageous demands.

Health may exist as a phenomenon all it likes. But nowhere in the rest of the animal kingdom will you find the practice of preserving health through entirely unnatural interventions – sometimes even involving that most unnatural of all contrivances, surgery.

Well, you can’t really argue with the first part. Homosexuality not only exists in nature but is also prevalent among most animal species. Bonobos – our closest relatives in the animal kingdom – seem to have an entirely ambivalent attitude towards gender stereotypes when it comes to sexual appetite and behaviour. And the difference between a bonobo and a human being amounts to less than one per cent of our respective DNA.

But to perceive the astounding fallacy in the second part, you need only substitute the words ‘same-sex adoption’ for any other totally unnatural human practice that we not only accept in our everyday lives, but in many cases cannot live without.

Let’s try ‘healthcare’, and see how far we get. I have nothing against health (or so the argument would now go). Health exists in nature; you can see that some animals are healthier than others. Its existence goes without saying, so nobody is going to argue that you don’t have a right to be healthy. The issue concerns whether you have a right to healthcare.

Health may exist as a phenomenon all it likes. But nowhere in the rest of the animal kingdom will you find the practice of preserving health through entirely unnatural interventions – sometimes even involving that most unnatural of all contrivances, surgery. No species other than man has created a system whereby an entire substratum will specialise in treating the physical and psychological ailments of all its specimens, with the declared aim of improving standards of public health across the board. Only humans do this. They do this to other animals too, and anyone who’s ever taken a dog to a vet will surely observe the animal’s reaction. The dog will have to be dragged and shoved bodily into the clinic, often leaving claw-marks on the doorstep. Would its reaction be the same if ‘going to the vet’ was an everyday occurrence in the animal kingdom?

All these things are alien to nature, yet this fact is never used as an argument against their very existence. For like most fallacies, the one about same-sex adoption being ‘unnatural’ seems to lead a double life. The same people who argue this way will also defend all sorts of other similarly unnatural behaviour patterns that they themselves indulge in every day. They will have no problem with any amount of unnatural behaviour that makes their own daily living more tolerable or comfortable. But when it comes to a phenomenon that might affect the happiness of others, suddenly these people insist upon strict adherence to the natural way of doing things, even as they sit at an unnatural computer and produce reams of drivel in the form of an equally unnatural written language.

So much for the hypocrisy. There is, however, another aspect to this argument that also betrays ignorance. Not just of nature, but also of the law.

For what is the law, if not yet another manmade invention? Why does it exist? To emulate nature? To enforce a ‘natural’ code of conduct among human beings? Hardly. If that were the case, there wouldn’t exactly be much point in having any laws in the first place. Nature’s world, after all, has been in existence for billions of years. Throughout that time it has wielded its authority with absolutely no need for any assistance by man-made laws and it will continue to do so long after mankind is gone and all its precious laws with it.

The law does, however, have a purpose. It serves to regulate human – as opposed to natural – behaviour. And the human behaviour it regulates can and does extend to the rearing of children by same-sex couples, even here in Malta and even before the introduction of the civil unions law. Same-sex couples exist, with or without society’s approval. They adopt children anyway, and have been doing so for years. Faced with this situation, the law has a duty and an obligation, under the civil canon, to acknowledge and regulate these realities. As for nature’s opinion in the matter… that is quite simply irrelevant.