The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life by Jesse Bering Page B

question honestly] You know what, in my country and in my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there but that’s how I was raised and that’s how I think that it should be, between a man and a woman. 35
     
    Pageant watchers still contend that the bluntness of her answer cost Prejean the crown; she ended up as runner-up to an allegedly more tolerant Miss North Carolina. Another drama unfolded in the lobby after the show, where Miss New Mexico’s mother lapsed into a tirade of even more obvious design-stance language, shouting at one outraged audience member the old refrain, “In the Bible it says that marriage is between Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” 36
    Tempting as it may be, however, we mustn’t just take the easy road of picking on beauty pageant contestants and their Bible-blinded mothers. In doing so, we would miss psychological clues that run deeper than scripture. In fact, as medical interventionist approaches to “correcting” homosexuality have attested in even recent decades, it’s not uncommon for scientific atheists to demonstrate passionate antigay attitudes, and these prejudices are at least partially rooted in the teleo-functional bias. This nonreligious maligning of homosexuality is something often mistaken for religious intolerance. In The God Delusion (2006), for example, Richard Dawkins asks us to consider the case of Alan Turing, the doomed British mathematician and German Enigma code breaker who crimped Nazi intelligence efforts and singularly helped end the Second World War. Turing was famously convicted in 1952 under British sodomy laws for an exposed tryst with a young man, and forced by psychiatrists to undergo chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones—which caused him, sadly, embarrassingly, to grow breasts. Faced with the prospect of continued injections of these hormones or a lengthy prison sentence, Turing escaped both nightmares by biting into a cyanide-laced apple and committing suicide. Dawkins sees Turing, wrongly, as an example of gays being persecuted because of religiously motivated moralistic beliefs. He writes,
    After the war, when Turing’s role was no longer top secret, he should have been knighted and fêted as a savior of his nation. Instead, this gentle, stammering, eccentric genius was destroyed, for a “crime,” committed in private, which harmed nobody. Once again, the unmistakable trademark of the faith-based moralizer is to care passionately about what other people do (or even think) in private. 37
     
    In fact, the British government, especially its legislative arm, was among the most secular regulating establishments in the world at that time, and although the legislation of sodomy laws may have occurred against a general backdrop of religious belief in England (and even this was considerably less noticeable compared to other Western nations), the truth is that the 1950s psychiatric community, wholly independent of religious sentiments, regarded homosexuality as a medical disorder mandating curative treatment. So although Dawkins is right to condemn Turing’s unspeakable sentence at the hands of the British elite, it is in fact scientists (conducting flawed science, but science nonetheless) who were more to blame for this man’s demise than that era’s “faith-based moralizers.”
    There is, needless to say, a genuine adaptive purpose in heterosexual intercourse, which is a very direct route to reproductive success. But we must continually remind ourselves that adaptive biological design offers no intrinsic directives, or prescriptions, for moral behavior. One wouldn’t normally say that men should be promiscuous because, after all, the pulpy underflaring of their penises’ coronal ridges is specially tailored by God for excessive use with multiple women, retracting competitors’ sperm. Likewise, one wouldn’t usually be concerned about the unnaturalness of