The Saletan article contains the statement that "the vast majority" of people would not want their children to be gay. The phrase vast majority is underscored as a hyperlink. Yet, when I clicked on the link, all I got was a previous "Human Nature" column, which contains no supporting documentation for the idea that the "vast majority" or even a narrow majority would be horrified to have a gay child. While one can easily imagine that there are many places in the world where parents would be motivated by cultural prejudices against homosexuality, Saletan doesn't give any indication of where those tendencies are strongest, most entrenched, or where specifically people would have the least inhibitions about using medical technology to implement "character designing" of unborn fetuses.

Somehow this isn't surprising. Saletan oozes a kind of high-handed smugness about the thinking of those who haven't grasped the deep implications of his research. Those whose assumptions are undermined by technological advances will be forced, according to Saletan, to ditch their faulty predispositions. Why that is so is hard to fathom at first glance. Why shouldn't people resist the advance of technological progress that threatens their moral assumptions? How can he blithely and baldly assert that moral thinking simply has to give way to the news from the labs? Morality and scientific knowledge, as even a rudimentary ethicist can tell you, exist in separate realms.

In any case, if Saletan is so self-confident of his cutting edge insights, why doesn't he go more fully into the substance of these earth-shattering developments? Do we really expect to be able to design the genetic and hormonal bases of human existence down to the fine points of character, as well as any and all physical attributes? Who will really want to do this and under what conditions might they be allowed to do this? This idea has actually been around for some time now; it's not a "breakthrough," in general, to assert that future generations will be in position to "fix" their babies in the womb. The moral implications, however, have yet to be broached in any serious way. It is certainly far from decided as a question of political practice who will get to appoint themselves the gods of human nature and issue decrees as to which character traits are considered "defects" amenable to chemical or surgical amelioration and which aren't.

Saletan self-righteously offers himself as the only person forward enough in his thinking to have caught up with science, but he doesn't really present anything new here. The Nazis were ahead of us all in positing the idea of genetic manipulation (through forced breeding/ genocide) for the purpose of creating "ideal" human types. Left to their vile devices, the entire species would have been re-formed to produce a mass of blond, blue-eyed, magnificently straight drones by now. If William Saletan wishes to justify this prepossessing tone of his, let him explain how that kind of thinking could represent an advance in human progress. Or at least, let him get his hyperlinks right, so they provide the evidence for his arguments his readers are led to assume is supposed to be there, somewhere, out there in cyberspace.

Interestingly enough, I have heard a number of gay people themselves say, "Do you think I would purposely choose to be gay, if I had a choice? It would have avoided a whole lot of problems if this wasn't the case." This is, of course, an answer to people who claim that being gay is a choice. I am gay myself and it has certainly made my life complicated, but I have dealt with it and am happy with my life. Anyway, straight people have more than enough complications of their own!

So I would agree that a lot of parents would make that choice. Heck, we have so many of them now tinkering with the process. In vitro fertilization is a good example. And that has produced a significant risk of subsequent birth defects. But it goes on anyway.

the only reason gay people would want to be str8 is because society made it difficult for them, just as alot of light skinned blacks often passed for white because it made life easier.

once the culture comes around it would be as superficial a question as asking someone if they would prefer to have redhair vs black.

people with blue eyes have worse eyesight than those with darker eyes and they can have longer term problems with their eyes as a result.

if we are going to spare homosexuals of a hard life, then i say we spare blue eyed people of the same difficult life.

same thing goes for left handed people.