 When Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni signed the anti-homosexuality bill into law that will put people into prison for life if they are LGBT, he maintained that it was because homosexuality is a choice. The man accused of stealing $5 million per month from the national workers’ pension fund gave pastors $500,000 last November to mobilize anti-LGBT sentiments throughout the country by convincing congregations and radio station audiences that LGBT recruiters intended to sodomize children.
Helen Epstein, an amateur biologist with a Ph.D in the subject, writes about the genetics of homosexuality in an article in New York Books called “Uganda’s Anti-Gay Law: The Missing Science.†Her theory is that all sexual preference is at least partly genetic because a high degree is hardwired for human survival. “A wide range of sexual preferences ensures that human populations will remain genetically diverse overall, avoiding genetic ‘bottlenecks’ and lowering the risk of genetic diseases.†Epstein compares sexual preference to the unique nature in the immune system: humans avoid distinction by different people having immunity to different germs.
Sexual preference may be analogous to the immune system. In the 1950s and 60s, Peter Medawar, Gerald Edelman, and others discovered that everyone’s immune system is unique. The complex collection of genes that determine how each one of us will respond to a particular germ are incredibly diverse and no two of us have exactly the same set of such genes—not even identical twins. That’s because the building blocks of our immune systems are created partly upon conception when sperm and egg meet, partly during embryonic development, and partly after birth in response to real-world germs. People can no more change sexual preferences than they can their immune systems.
Epstein’s hypothesis  deserves research. It is far more valid that the religious belief promulgated by such U.S. right-wing radicals as Scott Lively have advocated around the world, including Russia. At this time, Lively is facing a lawsuit in Massachusetts that accuses him of violating international law by inciting persecution of LGBT Ugandan. It is the first case to hold U.S. citizens accountable for this action. Lively is currently running for governor of Massachusetts.
