Concerning Steers, Queers, and the Catholic Clergy...

For more than a few years the debate has raged:  is it nature or nurture sets the most basic attitudes and orientations of humanity?  Is it genetics or upbringing that ultimately defines who we are, what we become?  I’ve never officially taken a side in the debate, I’m in the same position as the combat correspondent who gets close enough to the action to hear things flying by his head, but no, the pistol riding in my camera case is strictly for looters.  I’m just documenting the battle, not really taking part in it.  There was an interesting little firefight crossed my perception the other day, and it resulted in a small but potent tidbit of a thought I’d like to share with you.

IF (huge little word that one is!) there is some degree of validity to the nature side of the argument THEN there are some interesting commonalities created between rather unlikely components of society.  Consider what the three groups named in the title have in common.  What do the Steers (voluntarily childless hetero) and the Queers (homosexual) and the Catholic Clergy (celibate) all have in common?  They do indeed have something in common, as a matter of fact what they have in common is an error that could have destroyed an entire timeline, an error I first heard of concerning the awesome Ambassador Spock back in his youth when he served as science officer aboard a Federation starship.

Spock was there the first time a human vessel ever successfully emerged intact from a time warp.  Well, to be more precise he was there the first time a human vessel ever successfully emerged intact into its’ own time returning from such an adventure, there are always the legends concerning Leonardo DaVinci.  In the episode a twentieth century human ends up spending a few days aboard the twenty third century Enterprise.  He was a prime specimen of his vintage, he was the fighter pilot who had gotten entirely to good a look at the massive Enterprise fighting her way back into orbit from a dangerously low dip into the atmosphere, they had to beam him out of his cockpit or let him return to base and report what he’d seen.

Intelligent, well educated, physically and psychologically fit, orphan and unmarried, few  connections to his time beyond those he served with in a calling where it is known that sometimes someone doesn’t make it home and no one ever really knows what happened to them... if ever there was a candidate to make a successful jump three centuries into his future he would have been your man.  They almost made the mistake of taking him with them as they attempted what most would have called suicidal, a deliberate attempt to drive a starship though such a torture folded form of space as to emerge three centuries into the future.  But then Commander Spock realized their almost fatal error in time to avert it, he realized why he had to plot a trajectory where they could return the pilot to his own time a split second before he’d first laid eyes on them, closing the potential that could have resulted in there being no future of their own for the Enterprise to return to, leaving the great starship and her crew orphans of the universes.  Did you see the episode?  Have you figured out what the three groups have in common with that fine work of fiction from four decades ago?

Of course.  The issue at stake is in genetics, the unique pattern of DNA that results in more than any one individual human, it equally defines every potential human timeline that might ever come of that pattern blended with another equally unique pattern.

Steers, queers, and the Catholic clergy... what do they share in common?  What they share is that they are all voluntarily sterile, they choose not to reproduce.  With their choice they are essentially casting their vote in the nature/nurture debate.  If they believed that nature had any  major influence on what a person turns out to be they’d never choose sterility of their own volition, it would be counterproductive to their prime agendas.

All three of the groups in question are, in point of fact, genetic black holes consuming for all the eternities the patterns of those who comprise the groups.  Regardless of how you might feel about the relative ethical and moral status of these people the fact remains: they are each and every one of them the utter end and destruction of who can say how many possible futures based not on their actions but on the potential deeds of those who might have come into existence from their contribution to the human genome. 

Seriously.  She was a nun in the seventeen hundreds, a beautiful woman who retreated from the psycho-sexual-social manipulations of her world to hide her beauty beneath a habit in a cloistered convent.  But had she not retreated, had she stood up to her father and married the man of her choice from her loins would have come the line from whence came the man who touched the heart of Adolph Hitler’s grandmother in her youth before the bitterness and the cruelty became a matter of her habit.  How different might our world be?

Anyway, like I said in the beginning of this post, I’m just a combat correspondent and I think it is time for me to move.  I’ve got a serious hunch where I’m sitting on this issue is right about where a serious skirmish is likely to go down since there’s a counter attack due any old time now.  Frankly I really don’t want to be this close to the action when that goes down, once a bullet is in flight it doesn’t give a damn how many possible futures might be decided by where it happens to hit.