The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

Genetic, immutable, etc, I see absolutely no advantage in how we define the basic concept. There are all sorts of things that are immutable that we don't accept as a society, so saying sexual orientation is immutable solves absolutely nothing. There has long been an argument that pedophiles are "born that way" but it is certainly not going to help advance the acceptance of pedophiles in society. The immutability argument solves absolutely nothing, so maybe that pesky horrible ethnocentric Western idea isn't so bad.

>terrible enough to want to "cure" homosexuality or detect it before birth

Curious, why do you think that this is a terrible thing? I see that there are two parts to this. As for wanting to "cure" homosexuality, if a gay person consents, is this such a bad thing? I believe that forcing such a conversion on anyone (straight to gay or gay to straight) is not right, but if a person wants to change their sexuality, and we have the technical means to do it, should we not allow them to?

And as for detecting homosexuality before birth (and presumably either "correcting" it or aborting the baby), I'm curious as to your views on "designer babies", as this seems similar to me. Would you compare changing the sexuality of one's child to changing that child's eye color, or do you think it's a different matter? And say a mother would only want her child to be heterosexual, and could do this before birth without any harm or changes otherwise to the offspring. What would you think about that scenario? Is the mother within her rights (morally, or otherwise), and what might you say to her?

Interesting topic, curious as to your (or anyone else's, for that matter) thoughts.

A segment of society. Other segments of society don't care. "Society" is not a homogenous blob, it's just 7 billion individuals.

> I think "the big question" some people still have is whether being gay is perfectly fine or not.

I think this is very true and is a more fundamental question than what I've posed here.

Another way of stating my point is that the question of "innateness" allowed large swaths of the community to sidestep this question.

And this question is a very deep rabbit hole for the current cultural and political situation in the U.S.

Ask anyone who is comfortable in their sexuality whether they would be willing to take, say a course of therapy, that would change their sexuality. I think the majority would be unwilling, far more than the number of people who would be willing to sign up to a lecture that would promise to make them love the Simpsons. And I think that would be true for people who cherish, abhor, or are even indifferent to homosexuality (the exact proportions among those populations are probably different, but I suspect all of them would rise into the majority). There is of course, often due to mainstream pressure, many homosexual people who are intensely uncomfortable with their sexual orientation and wish to change it, but even taking them into account I still don't think they would make up the majority.

> Nobody will bat an eye if someone discovers they are straight after thinking they were gay.... What is objectionable though, is to try to force someone into a given sexuality, instead of letting them be and discover their sexuality in their own terms.

The problem is what counts as discovering their sexuality on their own terms. To borrow an example from one of my sibling comments, should schools be allowed to offer a gay conversion therapy course? Should schools be allowed to offer a straight conversion therapy course?

I suspect your answer would probably be "yes" if they're electives or both if they're mandatory, but this would already demonstrate how thorny of an issue this is. Nobody would care if a school only offered a "Simpsons' appreciation course" and not a "Simpsons' criticism course" or vice versa. (Of course the riposte is that sexual orientation, as a central component of one's identity, is a far more important topic, but there is yet another endless set of back-and-forths to be had on that topic). But the important thing is that these questions fade into irrelevancy if sexual orientation is immutable, but come immediately to the forefront if sexual orientation is mutable.

To recap my point is not to say that mutability of sexual orientation is the only big or even among the biggest questions, but to emphasize that it is a big question with many implications. To say that the mutability of sexual orientation is irrelevant is to miss a lot of the policy implications that hinge on its truth or falsity.

EDIT: A more apt comparison is probably religion, to the extent that you accept beliefs to be mutable. Should parents be allowed to send their children to religious camps? If yes, should parents be allowed to send their children to conversion therapy? If conversion therapy is too coercive, should they be allowed to send them to conversion camps? At what point does it become coercion?

All of these questions are very nicely sidestepped by immutability. No parents shouldn't send their kids to conversion therapy or conversion camps because they're ineffective and because they are ineffective at best they're a nuisance, at worst they inflict psychological trauma. But if they are effective then all of a sudden the parameters of the conversation shift drastically.

Even if it were an easily changeable characteristic, we should consider it wrong for any society to threaten harm or punishment or ostracization for this. That the characteristic is or isn’t easily changed is not relevant.

It’s not a question of moral relativism. You’d have to argue that any behavior is a crime in order for it to be legitimate for perpetrators to suffer consequences. Otherwise, it is wrong that someone should suffer consequences, all else equal.

I like nachos. Tomorrow I might not like nachos. It is wrong in any society if my liking or disliking of nachos results in me being killed, bullied, shamed, etc. Any society that claims a right of legitimacy to impose social norms in this way on the liking or disliking of nachos is a morally wrong society. There’s no debate about this. You can either argue convincingly that nacho preference is a crime, or else any attempt to treat it like a crime is wrong.