Republican Representative Brian Duprey

has
submitted a bill to the Maine State
Legislature that would make it a crime to abort
an unborn child if that child is determined to
be carrying the as-yet-undiscovered and
possibly-fantastical "homosexual gene."



Duprey calls this an "Act to Protect Homosexuals
from Discrimination." One hopes that Duprey
devotes comparable energies to protecting queer
people from discrimination who have actually
managed to be born. But I suspect that true to
conservative form Duprey can smugly love the
fetus and hate the child, protecting wee dykes
and fags only so long as they are more or less
wads of gum in Mama-incubator's womb, but always
knowing full well that they can be bullied
subsequently into suicide or clubbed to death by
some Christian soldier in a full-froth of "gay
panic" or forcibly therapized in an ex-gay
ministry once they have actually burst
fabulously upon the scene to find themselves in
Bush's America or its devoted, deluded
aftermath.



If you thought the vile "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"
policy of the American military was nonsensical,
Duprey's proposal pretzels the paranoid
conservative discernment of queerness into
unprecedented convolutions. "Don't Ask, Don't
Tell" has the effect of turning the declaration
"I am gay" into the quintessential "act" of
homosexuality itself, an act for which a soldier
is queered and expelled dishonorably even if
they haven't had a chance yet to engage in such
key homosexual acts (to my mind) as buttfucking,
giving a blowjob, or even watching an episode of

Strangers
With Candy and getting the jokes. But
in this latest efflorescence from the
conservative mindset a fetus can already manage
to "come out" in the womb by exhibiting a
genetic marker that predisposes it to develop
into a homosexual should it be lucky enough to
grow to such an age as to get dishonorably
discharged for saying "I am gay" to the wrong
person in the wrong place at the wrong time.



Duprey reputedly got the idea for his bill from
conservative fountainhead Rush Limbaugh. "I
heard Rush saying that the day the 'gay gene' is
determined to be real, that overnight gays would
become pro-life," said Duprey. I can only hope
Rush is as wrong in thinking such a thing as he
usually is.



Setting aside reasonable suspicions that actual
queer desires, acts, identities, and communities
stand in a considerably more complex relation to
genetic markers and dispositions than is
conjured up in the weirdly stainless-steel
technocratic fantasies of genetic determinists,
I have to think lesbian and gay people know
better in any case than to imagine a queer child
would be better off being raised in a household
so homophobic that a marker for a mere
disposition to queerness would otherwise inspire
their parents to annihilate them.



If a "gay gene" is indeed some day found and the
genocidal energies of homophobic eugenicists are
bodied forth by its discovery I can only hope
that they will be a benighted minority too small
to diminish through their sad shortsighted
impoverishment of imagination the beautiful
complexity and richness and diversity of the
human family. But as far as I am concerned a
woman's body is her own, and she is always
absolutely right to end an unwanted pregnancy if
she wants to -- even if she were my own mother
and wrongly imagined she would have been happier
to give birth to a straight child rather than to
me.



The way to protect queers, people with
disabilities (so-called), or other vulnerable
humans from the fumigatorial fantasies of future
eugenic moralists is to celebrate queer and
differently-abled lives today, to display their
joys and ennobling struggles, and to document
their many contributions to us all here and now.
Only a Bush-era conservative would pretend that
the way to protect some vulnerable people from
harm is to violate and enslave other vulnerable
people.