Surprising what you find hard-wired in your DNA these days
An archbishop has been reading The Little Golden Book of DNA, and he has derived much wisdom therefrom.
Archbishop Timothy Dolan yesterday said advocates of gay marriage “are asking for trouble,” arguing that traditional, one-man/one-woman marriage is rooted in people’s moral DNA. “There’s an in-built code of right and wrong that’s embedded in the human DNA…Hard-wired into us is a dictionary, and the dictionary defines marriage as between one man, one woman for life, please God, leading to the procreation of human life.”
Uh huh. Traditional one-man/one-woman marriage is rooted in people’s moral DNA – which would explain why there is no such thing as polygamy anywhere on earth: it’s because it just ain’t in our biology, that’s why. We can’t fly, we can’t dig tunnels with our snouts, we can’t hide in cracks in the woodwork, we can’t lick our crotches, we can’t scurry up walls, we can’t decipher olfactory messages left on bushes and trees and bits of grass, we can’t digest bamboo – and we can’t do polygamy. Traditional one-man/one-woman marriage is the only way human adults have been managing sex and reproduction and child-rearing and economy for six million years, so now it’s gotten into our DNA and we’re stuck with it. Ask us to have one man married to two or ten or thirty women, and we all just look at you blankly, puzzled, unable even to figure out what you’re talking about. We can’t process it. It’s not in our moral DNA.
It’s also not in the dictionary that is hard-wired into us. I actually didn’t know that – I learned something new today. I never realized we have our very own dictionary hard-wired in. (But in which language? How does the wirer know which language to use? What if something happens and the kid has to move and then is stuck with a DNA dictionary in the wrong language? Is there a 1-800 number to call, or what?) I never realized that, but now I know, and in that dictionary it defines marriage as between one man, one woman for life, and anything else is not marriage, and that’s that. All these funny people who have been calling other things marriage all this time are just wrong, because they don’t know how to consult the dictionary that is hard-wired into us.
Actually…I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I don’t know how either. I guess that’s not suprising, since I didn’t know I had such a dictionary until just now, but the archbish seems to think everyone does know how to consult it, because that’s his point – it’s in our DNA and it’s hard-wired and we can’t change it without messing everything up in a big way, so we must know about it, the same way we know we can’t fly or dig tunnels with our snouts. But I seem to have been behind the door the day that lesson was covered. I don’t know how to consult my wired-in dictionary, and I don’t know how to check what the archbish says.
But I should just take his word for it, you’ll be thinking. Well maybe, but how can we be sure he’s not an impostor? Maybe he’s really a geneticist dressed up as an archbishop. Ah – you didn’t think of that, did you. It pays to be careful.
What in the hell is moral DNA?
I looked in my intra-molecular dictionary, conveniently in English for my purposes, and couldn’t find an entry for moral DNA. I did find pontificating, asshole, gasbag, droning on and on, and no evidence.
I’m surprised that the Archbishop did not cite the case of King Solomon to clinch his case. You know, the exception that proves the rule.
Alternatively, when the hard wiring was being done on the divine assembly line, there was the occasional slip of the soldering iron.
Makes just as much sense…
“What in the hell is moral DNA?”
Why, it’s the underlying chemical medium for the naturalistic fallacy, of course.
Even if humans *had* only ever done traditional one-man/one-woman marriage, that still wouldn’t be a moral argument – just an empirical fact.
If I’ve got this DNA dictionary, why is it that I feel the need to have a whole shelf of dictionaries and thesauruses in my study? Surely, the need for the Shorter Oxford and Roget’s would disappear if all I needed to do was consult my DNA.
Also, the poor Archbishop seems to think that dictionaries are immutable. This is a difficult lesson for many, but – outside of countries with a French-style government body dictating language – a dictionary is a descriptive guide to language, not a prescriptive guide to how one ought to use language.
Also, if the dictionary is telling us that marriage is one-man-one-woman, surely that’s just semantics: he’d have no problem agreeing to civil unions that are the same in all ways except the wording. Would that offend against the hard-wired and utterly immutable dictionary of moral values that’s hidden within our DNA?
[…] In April 2009, for example, claiming that “traditional, one-man/one-woman marriage is rooted in people’s moral DNA.” In March 2010, for another example, arguing that it’s all so unfair because other people failed to stop child abuse too so why pick on the Catholic church? Yes really. He kept a blog, the then archbish of New York did. […]