I've just read an excellent post by Jason over at Positive Liberty, 'The Psychology and Politics of Love and Lust', which explores some political underpinnings of "fact" and how radically scientific discoveries can be colored by ideology. Here he looks at a recent article by researcher Lisa M. Diamond that has serious potential implications for civil liberties, the SSM issue and more broadly, privacy policy. Jason writes:

A few days ago I discovered a new fact, and right away I began asking myself about its politics. The fact comes from the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol 13 no. 3; the article is by Lisa M. Diamond and is entitled simply, "Love and Sexual Desire." A PL reader passed the article to me, but it is apparently unavailable online. Dr. Diamond's professional page can be found here.

The relevant fact comes from the article's abstract:

Although sexual desire and romantic love are often experienced in concert, they are fundamentally distinct subjective experiences with distinct neurobiological substrates. The basis for these distinctions is the evolutionary origin of each type of experience. The processes underlying sexual desire evolved in the context of sexual mating, whereas the processes underlying romantic love--or pair bonding--originally evolved in the context of infant-caregiver attachment.

In other words, you can all breathe easier: It's okay if your loves and lusts don't perfectly coincide with one another. It doesn't mean that your brain chemistry is wrong. It certainly doesn't mean that you've picked the wrong life partner. And no, some traumatic childhood event is probably not worming away at your subconscious. Multiple sexual desires are natural, even in the context of a committed, long-term relationship. You feel them because you're human; you're just built that way. The author then gets even more specific:

Consequently, not only can humans experience these feelings separately, but an individual's sexual predisposition for the same sex, the other sex, or both sexes may not circumscribe his or her capacity to fall in love with partners of either gender... [E]xtensive cross-cultural and historical research shows that individuals often develop feelings of romantic love for partners of the "wrong" gender (i.e., heterosexuals fall in love with same-gender partners and lesbian and gay individuals fall in love with other-gender partners). Although some modern observers have argued that such relationships must involve hidden or suppressed sexual desires, the straightforward written reports of the participants themselves are not consistent with such a blanket characterization. Rather, it seems that individuals are capable of developing intense, enduring, preoccupying affections for one another regardless of either partner's sexual attractiveness or arousal.

Here is where the politics comes in. Given that romantic love and sexual desire are independent, what relationship should they have? The implication of the article itself is that homosexuality still allows an otherwise "normal" life, including romantic love--with either a same-sex or an opposite-sex partner. The politics, then, are tantalizingly ambiguous. [read more at Positive Liberty]

This kind of scientific research [Diamond's] is often a lot like an optical illusion, full of ambiguities and contradictory interpretations. But no matter how essentialist theory tries to explain the minutiae of human behavior by evolutionarily-ingrained pathways, like art, love and sex can't be explained solely by the cold cage bars of numbers and charts.

Of course choice, free will and individual rights all come into play as well, in re I would love to recommend a very good post on Galois, "Choices and Marriage" and a comment post by Gabriel Rosenberg on Marriage Debate.

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