The Real Story on Gay Genes. But 21st-century Western society, and the homosexuals therein, could be something of an anomaly in human history, according to Paul Vasey, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta.
“Do I think the social contexts are less representative of our evolutionary past? I’d say yes,” Vasey says. “The kind of gay men and lesbian women we are familiar with in Western culture express their homosexuality as egalitarian—they’re not differentiated as far as gender.” In other times and other places, one partner typically adopts a masculine role, while the other adopts the feminine. Another problem with kinship selection studies that look only in England and, in particular, the United States, is that kinship ties for homosexuals might not be as strong as they would be elsewhere. Equality chief: Religious are not above the law. The chair of the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission has said religions must defer to the public laws of the state. Trevor Phillips said the religious should leave their views “at the door of the temple” and be governed by public law when providing public services, Catholic newspaper The Tablet reports.
Mr Phillips also pointed to the case of Catholic Care, which last year lost its bid to be exempted from equality laws which make it illegal to discriminate against gay couples who wish to adopt. What the Gay Brain Looks Like. What makes people gay?
Biologists may never get a complete answer to that question, but researchers in Sweden have found one more sign that the answer lies in the structure of the brain. Scientists at the Karolinska Institute studied brain scans of 90 gay and straight men and women, and found that the size of the two symmetrical halves of the brains of gay men more closely resembled those of straight women than they did straight men. In heterosexual women, the two halves of the brain are more or less the same size.
In heterosexual men, the right hemisphere is slightly larger.