Apparently, you can tell someone is homosexual just by looking at them! A recent single study using facial recognition software has had its research importance amplified by press in the past week. Just as every crackpot scientistic fragment that “proves” homosexuality is “natural” now does. No matter that many large-scale social surveys conducted over time demonstrate that human desire tends, for most, to wander in its object, even just a bit. The search for proof of the natural and pure homosexual continues.

The claim that there are those born homosexual is often made by those who support the passage of same-sex marriage into law. However, such ideas of “naturalness” may be, and have been, ultimately inimical to truly progressive politics.

In the marriage equality debate, this urge to depict gay as genetic, even evolutionary, is elevated. No matter that the power to predict or detect a “natural” tendency may, in a different time, also became the power to eliminate. I mean, who knows? Perhaps it’s partly true that there are those with a strong and inflexible preference for a particular route to climax. It’s certainly true that there are times when we humans are especially eager to prove the “naturalness” of all our human behaviour — usually times when the social and the economic impacts us most. “Naturalness” was a big deal during the Great Depression, a time that is of great current interest to the dismal science.

Some of those dismal scientists handy with a graph now make the point that income distribution in the West is approaching, or in some nation states, has approached, disparity unseen since that time. Some of those handy with a critique of the nature of unemployment measurement — not so much “fake” as fundamentally unsound — show, per ABS figures, that underemployment continues to trend up, also in the 1930s style. Some of my associates who like to yell during mealtimes see further similarities between that immiserated age and the present. We have now, before us, vulgar populists, a culture full of “reality”-based aspirational competitions and a bunch of loonies who believe that biology — whether of race, gender or physical strength — is social destiny.

Even leaving aside the psychotic racism of the Third Reich, we had in more “moderate” quarters a strong belief that a “good” human body was the only sure route to a good political one. Margaret Sanger, founder of the US organisation Planned Parenthood, firmly believed that birth control was a marvellous way to ensure that fewer undesirable babies would be born. Former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has had perplexingly mild things to say about this woman who urged for a “race of thoroughbreds”. After all, Sanger founded an organisation that permitted poor women to terminate pregnancies whose endpoint they could not financially sustain.

Oh, but Helen. Don’t get into a whole thing about today’s short-sighted Pro-Choice movement that overlooks that current economic conditions do not permit many women to make a choice other than termination — a little like Andrew Denton’s views on assisted killing that, as Shakira Hussein has pointed out often in Crikey, do not take into account that some people will top themselves for socioeconomic reasons if permitted to do so. Let’s get back to the eugenicists of the 1930s who may not have shown the extreme and brutal hostilities that played out across Europe, but were fairly committed to a “natural” view nonetheless.

In his US history of eugenics, the writer Harry Bruinius reminds his audience that the ideas of “purity” and in-born goodness was not a little fad, like phrenology, but a widespread belief among intellectuals, moreover one ardently advanced by progressives and liberals. According to some of our local scholars, the story was even worse throughout the Great Depression here. Not only did it give life, in part, to the White Australia Policy, but was even enacted on “undesirable” British people, who were thrown out of Australia House if they’d ever spent time in an asylum. We never invited the “huddled masses” here, with exceptions in times of labour shortage.

This 2012 panel on Radio National, featuring the views of two historians and a curator of a current exhibition on the 1930s at a major Victorian gallery, serves as a good Australian introduction to the “natural is best” fervour felt even among progressives of the Depression-era.

Such beliefs among progressives are not so easily explained away as “that’s what everyone thought in the olden times”. For a start, socialist texts of the time and those that had come so recently before were pretty clear about the whole “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” deal. Such a view does not weigh the biological merits of an individual, but urges society to build virtue into itself so that all, no matter their natural gifts or shortcomings, can flourish. Socialism, widely read at the time, was opposed to a “natural” view of anything, save for the human right to a decent life. In other words, no intellectual excuses.

But, as curator Isobel Crombie notes in the Radio National panel, there are particular conditions when people rest on such biological “truths’. To wit: when people are worried about a nation’s direction.

This, as I have yelled and had yelled back to me at mealtimes, is such an era. People are worried about the “national direction”, which is another way of saying that they are very worried about how much wealth they may or may not have in the future. This uncertainty gives rise to extreme nature-based bigotry, like racism or the view, now expressed very often in the press, that homosexuality is “unnatural”. Let’s not bother with those No-voting zealots, though, as these ideas are too thin for weighing.

Let’s look instead at how the intellectual descendant of eugenics can still take root in the “progressive” movements of today.

Perhaps you know the Lady Gaga hit Born This Way. If you do not, make no attempt to remedy your ignorance, as it certainly isn’t her best song. It is, however, a popular and progressive expression of the view that homosexuality is natural. Or, more precisely, that the naturalness of homosexuality is its truest defence.

It is not just prominent pop allies of same-sex marriage — the impetus for Gaga’s song — who say that homosexual people are nature’s gift. It’s academics as well. Here, in a pro-Safe Schools piece, Australian Professor Catharine Lumby makes the claim not only that people attracted to others of their biological sex were “born that way”, but they came out of the womb with an entire identity. In other words, social organisation should always be organised according to biological “law”, and cultural identity is “natural”.

Advocates for same-sex marriage, both same and opposite-sex attracted, have made claims for their “naturalness” that are too numerous to list. For me, it’s hard to read this as terribly different from, “the poor things can’t help it”.

Just as neuroscience may be used perversely as a biological proof of racism by progressives opposed to racism, or Pete Evans “Paleo” shtick serves to apparently (and ineffectively) criticise agribusiness, the natural law of homosexuality is used in the fight for changes to law. For mine, this is the most static and conservative form of progressivism.

John Locke insisted that good men were acting both naturally and divinely when they sought to amass as much property as possible. Pro-Zionist anti-Semites argue that Jews are better off away from “us” due to their imagined natural difference. I mean, for heaven’s sake, there are even neuro nuts who say that the tendency to engage in suicide bombing can be clearly seen in scans. While these “scientists” — who did not lug their MRI machines to terror sites, I checked — concede that certain psychological experiences changed the “biology” of predicted criminals, they still make the error of erasing the social world from study of a social fact.

Are some people naturally homosexual, heterosexual, avaricious, violent, compassionate, racist, anti-racist or stupid? While the answers — if they ever come — may be interesting (and in the exceptional case of mental ill health, actually useful) the question itself is deluded about liberty.

We do not need “naturalness” as a basis for justice and freedom. We have relied upon it many times in the past, however, as a basis for injustice and enslavement. When any movement prefers natural entitlement to social good, we should worry, and not cheer.