Is Homosexuality Normal?
I grew up in a family environment that included gay men and two very close to me—my brother and first cousin. One of my neighbors was gay and also a good friend and we would sometimes go out boating together. I loved my brother and older cousin, and really liked some of my cousin's partners and saw them as good people. One of his partners was a bank president. My cousin has a doctorate degree. Yet, something inside me gave me the impression that while I loved them and liked being in their company I did not necessarily view them as ordinary people. While I did not judge them for their sexual preference I noticed my other family members did not bring up in any conversation about my brother's lifestyle or my cousin's for that matter, and especially not about his different boyfriends he lived with.
What eventually did disturb me was what happened to my brother. He seemed like any other ordinary boy—to me. He played with the usual boy toys and rarely played with his three sisters. He had a room by himself and the girls all slept together in another bedroom. Then, after I left home something changed him where he became very introverted. Years later I learned from my older sister what could have been the reason.
When my brother came into the world I was awestruck. I was four years old and I adored him and continued to love him dearly as we grew up. When he was small I would sometimes just sit next to his bassinet and just look at him. He was the third child and the only boy. Five years later our youngest sister was born. They became close and worked at the same movie theater together for years.
I don't remember exactly when but sometime when my brother was around seven he began teasing or provoking me. He only did it to me. As I had adored him I did not know how to respond and it hurt me. As sometimes happens, my parents rarely intervened and I was on my own, defenseless, even though I was older. The teasing continued up until I was married when I sometimes returned for a visit where my brother would make derogatory comments about my diet, religious beliefs, or lifestyle. I was always a bit self-conscious and his remarks hurt. I did not drink alcohol, smoke, or take drugs, and I always had the bent towards eating healthily. I eliminated refined sugar and even tried vegetarianism for a while and these changes made me "different" from the rest of the family. Whether my lifestyle was offensive to him or it bothered him that I was different, we never talked about it—or much else.
My brother's teasing adversely affected me psychologically that later rolled over into my family dynamics with two of my children. Since the problem with my brother was never handled correctly by my parents or me, as an adult I had to get professional help to uncover the hidden psychological wound that caused me to "freeze" when my third son started "picking" on his younger sister, seemingly in a replica of what I had experienced as a child. I could not defend my daughter nor stop my son from his constant teasing of her. I would go into my "inner child" mode and I could not handle the situation in a balanced manner.
The first big change with my brother happened when my brother was about 12 and I was about 15 or 16. He and I had ridden our bikes to the store and on the way home we got separated. The store was across a four-lane major highway that runs up the east coast of Florida. We often crossed it with no problem as there were lights and we crossed when the traffic stopped. On that particular day, we crossed over and I kept going down a neighborhood road. Yet, for some reason, my brother decided to stay on the highway and did not follow me. A couple of blocks later I got home and then looked back for my brother and did not see him. But up at the highway, which was visible from our house, I saw a crowd of people.
The scene involved my brother. He had gotten hit by a hit-and-run drunk driver. His leg was broke but he seemed to have not sustained any other major damage, although the broken bone was very serious. The break was high up on the femur bone. He had to be in traction for a month and then in a body cast for a long time. He then went to a wheelchair and then to crutches. It took a year before he could walk and he supposedly sustained permanent damage, with one leg shorter than the other.
The hit-and-run driver was driving a company car at the time. My parent's sued to recover medical costs and compensation for my brother's trauma. For whatever reason, I was barely informed of any details of the court case or final outcome. Years later I learned that after paying his medical bills he had money left over, something like $10,000. While that does not seem like much today, with interest over ten years, he was able to make a substantial down payment on a house and qualify for the remaining loan with no problem with only his movie theater job. He thus started living independently at a young age, buying his first house in his early twenties.
The year that he was recovering was life-changing for him—and for me. Suddenly, my brother was elevated by my mother to godhood. He did need special attention and care, which my mother gave profusely, but to the detriment of my brother I believe, and the rest of the family. Basically, he was given free rein to do and get what he wanted. He lost true parental authority and he became selfish and unloving towards the rest of the family. His needs and wants came first and my parents allowed him to control the family home.
I was busy with my life during his recovery period, working a part-time job while going to school, and then the summer following his accident I volunteered to be a junior camp counselor at a summer camp for special needs children. I returned to a different home and a different brother. For example, he would blare his rock music in the house, music that was not my parents' listening pleasure, and far from my own as well, and certainly not pleasurable for anyone while being playing so loudly. Yet, he was given free rein to do so whenever he pleased.
Whether my brother was inherently gay or not only he knows, he never told me what happened and I was not living at home. The introduction to gay life happened a few years after he healed from the leg break. When I was eighteen I moved out to be closer to the college I attended and to be near my boyfriend whom I met at the college. We married six months later and then moved to the Bahamas to work as civilians for the navy base AUTEC (Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center). We lived there for the next three years until I became pregnant and returned to the states. Then we soon moved out-of-state to try and live on a 100-acre parcel we had bought years earlier that had no house, phone, or even electric. We lived in a travel trailer.
Consequently, I saw my siblings very little over those years and long-distance calling from overseas was not easy, nor did we have cell phones or a landline. My family was very uncommunicative—except on occasion with my older sister with me. Visits to me were also rare. My grandmother and younger sister came to the Bahamas once, but never my brother or parents, or to any other home I lived in over the years. If we saw one another it was because I traveled down to see them for Christmas or some other special event.
To this day my brother and I do not talk other than ordinary small talk and only when we see each other in person. He was always quiet, as I was, and neither of us would introduce any subject of depth to talk about, let alone his private life. What I eventually found out from my older sister was that my brother had been taken to Key West on a holiday by my cousin and partner and introduced to sex for the first time—but not with a girl. I did not learn of this until many years after the incident.
My brother never had a prominent partner that I was aware of as I had witnessed with my cousin. Whether he ever had any he lived with no one has ever talked about and he did not bring any boyfriends to my parent's home. Today my mother and older sister live with him. He had a stroke many years ago and barely talks at all anymore. He can talk, but his words are not clear and it takes him time to get the words out. That makes him uncomfortable, so he chooses to speak as little as possible. He also hibernates from everyone, staying mostly in his own space even with guests in his home.
The Kinsey Report
The Kinsey Reports on human sexual behavior came out in two books published in 1948 and 1953. Immediately after the first book was published, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, there was controversy both from the political and scientific community and from the general public. He lost funding after certain members of Congress became outraged. Suddenly, it appeared from his book's data that homosexual and bi-sexual behavior was almost more common than heterosexual relationships in males. Data had been compiled from 5,300 males taken over a 15-year period, according to their records. And their conclusion was that "46% of the male subjects had "reacted" sexually to persons of both sexes in the course of their adult lives, and 37% had at least one homosexual experience."
One of the criticisms was that the data represented only those volunteering to participate in the discussion of taboo topics, as most Americans in that era were reluctant to discuss the intimate details of their sex lives even with their spouses and close friends. The volunteers were also predominantly white, middle class, and of the Midwestern population. Another criticism was that a significant portion of the samples come from prison populations and male prostitutes. Men who have had sexual experiences with children were also interviewed although it is not clear if their data was included.
One line of reasoning for homosexuality, the Kinsey authors claimed, was a predominant cause for homosexuality in 85 percent of gay men and had to do with role models. If a boy sees himself as an inadequate male the child turns to members of the same sex for fulfillment because his desire for the opposite sex seems like an unreachable goal. This pattern is said to happen in families where the mother is dominant or overprotective and the father remote, harsh or absent, causing the male child to identify with the mother.
Their discovery was not new. Sigmund Freud had come up with the same conclusion many decades earlier. Freud did not label homosexuality as an illness yet he did not think it was entirely normal either. He called it a “developmental arrest,” meaning that it was a kind of stunted growth or psychological immaturity. He concluded that one’s relationship with one’s father and mother was crucial. He believed that in “normal” development, we all pass through a “homocrotic” phase. Boys, he argued, could become fixated at this homosexual phase if they had a poor relationship with their father and an overly close relationship with their mother.
In his book Psychogenesis, he writes: “ ... homosexual men have experienced a specially strong fixation on their mother ... in addition to their manifest homosexuality, a very considerable measure of latent or unconscious homosexuality can be detected in all normal people." Freud's belief was almost the same conclusion the Kinsey scale shows (pictured on the left) where many heterosexuals had experimented with homosexuality. I personally do not accept Freud's conclusion. I consider myself normal and I have never had any unconscious desires toward the same sex. Nor have I ever picked up from other normal heterosexual people showing signs of homosexual or bisexual desires. Yet what is normal?
What is Normal or Natural?
Gay activist and author Urvashi Vaid said, “We have an agenda to create a society in which homosexuality is regarded as healthy, natural, and normal. To me that is the most important agenda item."
Normal is used to describe individual behavior that conforms to the most common behavior in society. Psychologists have four general criteria that they use to identify abnormal behavior: violation of social norms, statistical rarity, personal distress, and maladaptive behavior. I believe abnormal is what is not normal for yourself, not normal for your society and not normal for the bodies God created for us. Proverbs 14:12 says, 'There is a way that seems right to man but in the end it leads to death'.
A Bible commentary on this verse states:
This may refer to the blinding effects of passion and self-will; for these make a man think his own way best and most desirable. But it seems better to take it as a warning against following a perverted or uninstructed conscience. Conscience needs to be informed by God's Word and ruled by God's will to make it a safe guide. When properly regulated, it is able to pronounce a verdict upon contemplated action, and its verdict must always be obeyed. But warped by prejudice, weakened by disuse and disobedience, judicially blinded in punishment and in consequence of sin, it loses all power of moral judgment, and becomes inoperative of good; and then, as to the way that seemed at the moment right, the end thereof are the ways of death.
A professor of philosophy once said, "What people generally do becomes what they ought to do; in other words, statistically normal behavior becomes the social norm for behavior. On the other hand, the common habits and strategies that successful and powerful people use often become social norms to which others are expected to conform." There is an unwritten assumption by many that strong feelings should determine behavior; in fact, this is not acceptable in almost any other area of life. Emotions can be governed by the unconscious mind causing us to act first and think later. If one is controlled by the feelings of lust their action could cause harm to another. They might force themselves upon someone to satisfy their needs and wants. If someone envies another with more, society doesn't accept that that envy sanctions stealing.
Many of the articles I studied on the Net, from within the field of psychology, websites, and blogs were written by gays or bisexuals. They identified themselves in several ways by using words like "us", "we", etc. It was hard to find unbiased views about the conclusions on the studies connected with homosexuality. One of the best books I have read about homosexuality is Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything by Robert R. Reilly. It is well worth the read to understand how homosexuality, until recent years, was largely rejected as normal and how the change came about to now be accepted as normal by large majorities of people.
The thorn in the side to the homosexual community had been the label upon them that they had a mental illness. Until 1973 homosexuality had been defined as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and that, the gays believed, needed to change first. As one gay activist in the 1970s said, "The sickness label was an albatross around the neck of our early gay rights movement." They knew it would be difficult to promote a mental illness or pathology as a human right without changing this first. So gay protestors began interrupting APA meetings.
For four years, Dr. John P Spiegel—a gay, but closeted, psychiatrist—and some of his allies had engaged in illegal entry, name-calling, and terrorism at APA conventions. In a 1971 convention in Washington, DC. the protestors “broke into the auditorium through a stage door during the opening ceremony, and stormed the podium.” They engaged in name-calling and also threatened bodily harm. Yet, there were no arrests.
Spiegel, along with other closeted psychiatrists, made a deliberate effort to take over key positions in the APA. By 1973 he was President-elect of the APA. Finally, after a 1973 convention, the gay rights movement had their victory. Psychiatrist Robert Spitzer and an official of the Gay Activists Alliance jointly composed new language making homosexuality ‘normal’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), which is psychiatry’s scientific ‘bible’. There were no scientific studies to back up this change.
In the book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of the Gays in the 90s by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, the authors wrote,
In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be cast as victims in need of protection so that straights will be inclined by reflex to assume the role of protector...The public should be persuaded that gays are victims of circumstance, that they no more chose their sexual orientation than they did, say, their height, skin color, talents...Gays should be portrayed as victims of prejudice."
The campaign worked. Those who do not accept this rationalization are now labeled as homophobes. They are blamed for the misfortunes in homosexual life, ignoring the behaviors that produced them, and turning on those who do not accept homosexual behavior as moral.
Is Homosexuality Immutable?
In the 2015 landmark decision recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed a question long held between science and law: Is sexual orientation an “immutable” characteristic? The Court declared that, in recent years, “psychiatrists and others [have] recognized that sexual orientation is both a normal expression of human sexuality and immutable”.
There is ample fluidity in sexual orientation, especially in the early years. Straight men have become homosexual and homosexuals have become straight. In 1994 the National Health and Social Life Survey, funded by almost every large government agency in connection with the AIDS epidemic, studied every aspect of sexuality. Dr. Jeffrey Satinover testified before the Massachusetts Senate Judicial Committee on this subject.
Quoting the study he said,
"7.1 [to as much as 9.1] percent of the men [we studied, more than 1,500] had at least one same-gender partner since puberty. ... [But] almost 4 percent of the men [we studied] had sex with another male before turning eighteen but not after. These men. . . constitute 42 percent of the total number of men who report ever having a same gender experience."
Let me put this in context: Roughly ten out of every 100 men have had sex with another man at some time the origin of the 10% gay myth. Most of these will have identified themselves as gay before turning eighteen and will have acted on it. But by age 18, a full half of them no longer identify themselves as gay and will never again have a male sexual partner. And this is not a population of people selected because they went into therapy; it's just the general population. Furthermore, by age twenty-five, the percentage of gay identified men drops to 2.8%.
This means that without any intervention whatsoever, three out of four boys who think they're gay at age l6 aren't by 25.
With the decision by the APA to remove the category of homosexuality as an illness, having been voted out as a formal "disorder," the next step was to change in the courts the right to legally treat individuals and especially minors of any desire to change their homosexuality tendencies. Therefore, the change desired is that homosexuality need not, cannot and should not be "treated", regardless of the principle that in a free society individuals should be free to pursue happiness each according to his own will, in harmony with the well-being of others.
Conversion therapy that has been highly endorsed by some Christian groups is now seen as harmful and is now decried by secularists as immoral. What seems more upsetting to homosexual activists than calling their behavior sinful is saying that their behavior is changeable. The founder of reparative therapy, McKrae Game, has disclosed that he is gay. He was fired because he continued to watch gay pornography. He is still married to a woman and has two children although he said he always remained gay even with therapy. Alan Chambers, the former president of Exodus International, once the world’s largest conversion therapy ministry, is also gay who also married a straight woman. He also denounced reparative therapy as harmful.
On May 25, 2020, the Calgary, Alberta city council passed a “conversion therapy” bill by a vote of 14-1. According to the bill, any councilor who offers to reduce a person’s same-sex attraction or reaffirm a person’s birth sex is subject to a fine of up to $10,000. The by-law also applies to anyone making such an offer in a private conversation or during a public sermon. One of the councilors proposed an amendment that would allow conversion therapy for a person who freely chose it, however, that amendment was defeated.
Twenty states in the United States have banned conversion therapy for minors. Brazil, Ecuador, Germany, Taiwan, and Malta have also banned the practice. While you can find hundreds of articles on why conversion therapy is dangerous and psychologically harmful you cannot find anything about the effectiveness of past treatment. Dr. Satinover testified that after a review of the research over many years demonstrates a consistent 30-52 percent success rate in the treatment of unwanted homosexual attraction. Masters and Johnson reported a 65 percent success rate after a five-year follow-up. Other professionals report success rates ranging from 30 to 70 percent.
Yet what about the far greater dangers in living the homosexual life? The risk of anal cancer soars by 4,000 percent among those who engage in anal intercourse. Anal intercourse also increases the risk of rectal prolapse, perforation that can go septic, chlamydia, cryptosporidiosis, giardiasis, genital herpes, genital warts, isosporiasis, microsporidiosis, gonorrhea, viral hepatitis B and C, and syphilis! Homosexual men have a 430 times greater chance of getting AIDS than the heterosexual population at large. Even apart from AIDS, the gay men have a much shorter lifespan than married men.
Reilly pointed out that there are warning labels now on cigarettes, alcohol, and many packages of food, mandatory use of seat belts in cars, air pollution warnings, recommendations on changing the health hazard of obesity, yet no cautionary admonitions regarding homosexual practices? He suggests that this would disturb the rationalization for homosexual behavior by inviting the observation that there is something in Nature itself that rebels against it. (Nature with a capital N denotes the metaphysical concept.)
Remarkably, Dr. Spitzer, who was largely responsible for removing homosexuality as an illness from the DSM, said in his 2001 paper that "There is evidence that change in sexual orientation following some form of reparative therapy does occur in some gay men and lesbians." He also said, "I approached this quite skeptical, and I've been convinced otherwise."
Reilly gives the example of Franklin Kameny whom President Obama singled out for special praise at a 2009 White House meeting (with 250 gay leaders) to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the birth of the modern "gay rights" movement. Kameny coined the phrase "gay is good". In a published letter to Americans for Truth he said, " Let us have more and better enjoyment of more and better sexual perversions, by whatever definition, by more and more consenting adults. We will all be the better off thereby...If bestiality with consenting animals provides happiness to some people, let them pursue their happiness. That is Americanism in action...Let us have more and better enjoyment of more and better and harder-core pornography by those to whom such viewing provides happiness." This is the man Obama praised.
The Gay Rights lobby presupposes that what comes naturally is good. By contrast, the Bible's view is that the whole world and human beings themselves are polluted by sin which has affected our bodies, minds, wills and feelings. The result is our thoughts and choices are not in line with what they were intended to be. The apostle Paul speaks of leaving the natural for the unnatural. "Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error" (Romans 1:27). Thus, in the BIble, 'natural' means not 'what comes naturally' but rather what God intended (and intends) us to be.
Homosexual Causes
Several studies on the origins of homosexuality by psychologists and psychoanalysts have found that sexual orientation seems to be shaped through complex interactions with the cause or origination of homosexuality falling into two very large categories: theories that point to nature (biological variables) and theories that point to nurturing (influence of experience and psychological variables). Those who emphasize nurture, sometimes known as the psychoanalytical theory, see powerful psychological forces at work, shaping and molding children from their birth, while those who emphasize nature contend that early homosexual traits attest to a biological cause.
A recent study by Washington State University (WSU) analyzed data from a survey of over 33,000 U.S. adults and found that a “taxonic” model (categories of individuals with distinct orientations) was better suited for describing sexual orientation than a continuum model like the famous Kinsey scale (ranging quantitatively along a spectrum). The authors of the WSU study conclude that the vast majority of people are heterosexual with their sexual identities, attractions, and behaviors. They state "from a population-based perspective, there are fairly clean dividing lines between adults who are straight and those who aren’t. A small percentage of people aren’t straight, (3 percent of men and 2.7 percent of women in the sample were gay, lesbian, or bisexual) and their sexuality is far more complicated.
An earlier study by psychologists Bell and Weinberg (1981) concluded that no particular phenomenon of family life could be singled out as responsible for homosexual tendencies. Other studies refute Freud and the Kinsey study of any nurturing involvement with molding children, claiming, the Kinsey Report "is based on the faulty assumption that family and peers cause sexual orientation." Researchers have also explored a number of biological factors that may contribute to homosexuality, but nothing definitive has been concluded. Studies on gender nonconformity have been based on the adult’s memories of themselves as children who are not reliable. Another study concluded that finger lengths are askew in homosexuals. Another theory for the cause of male homosexuality is that gay men have older heterosexual brothers and their mother starts to create antibodies targeting a protein needed in brain development. The latter was not the case for my gay boyfriend, my brother, or cousin. None had brothers.
Family Dynamics
My brother and my cousin both fit in with the conclusions of the early studies where distant fathers and over-domineering or over-protective mothers as noted in the upbringing of many adult male gays. In my brother's case, there was a clear propensity to be mentally and emotionally propelled towards same-sex attraction. My father was fairly distant to all his children but there was only one boy in the family and my brother had no male role model to identify with. I could understand my father's distance because it was the way of life for us and I knew no other but this could have adversely affected my brother.
My great uncle, the father of my gay cousin, was very loving. We only got to see him on yearly visits but I adored him. He played cards with us, cooked and washed the dinner dishes, and gave us money on the side. In other words, he was like a very loving mother. My great aunt was the boss of the family. She controlled the money, purchases and to the best of her efforts, her son's life. She had no problem giving him money and put him through college and supported him over the years. He was no slouch, having a doctorate degree, and was highly intelligent but he also was an alcoholic. Most of my memories of being with him included a lot of drinking and laughing. Under alcohol, he was also highly vivacious.
As mentioned earlier, my mother controlled my brother's finances way into adulthood, if she ever stopped at all, starting with his lawsuit award. He allowed it, although I do not know if he ever tried to set his foot down and take back control. I also do not know if he welcomed my parents to move in with him or it was my mother's doing. His first house he bought was a few miles away from them. When he sold that house he bought another on the same canal that my parent's home was on. In other words, they lived just down the street from each other. When my parent's sold their home, for quite a hefty profit, I discovered that they moved in with my brother. They did not need to, they had enough money to buy another house. Had my mother controlled even what houses my brother bought?
There is no doubt that family dynamics play a large part in who we become. I have inherited the tendency to be quiet and uncommunicative. How could I not? No family member talked about anything personal in their lives to me but my older sister. No one asked me how I was, what I wanted or needed or even expressed to me that I was loved. While I adored my father because he allowed me to be a free spirit inside and outside my home, my mother I fought to distance myself from because of her moods and unpredictability and demands upon me within the home that I felt was unjust. My father had no say in the home part of our life although my mother contends in private they discussed our actions but she carried out the disciplines. For example, every Saturday we had chores which meant we couldn't go out and play with our friends until those "boring" chores were done. Every night, from a young age, my sister and I had to do the dinner clean up and dishes. Every night we were sent to bed a 6 p.m. way before our bodies needed sleep.
Thus I knew my mother as the disciplinarian. She set the rules and enforced them, often with beatings. Sometimes waking me up in the middle of sleep to angrily punish or berate me for not completing a chore properly. She was emotionally unstable and I had to keep my "radar" attuned to her moods in order, I believed, to protect myself from her anger. She was lonely and disappointed with her lot, although I did not know that then. I finally came to understand it much later that she really did not like children or being stuck at home with them. She also had few neighborhood friends but none that she went out with. She did not go out shopping either. She bought everything she needed through the Sears catalog and my father did the once a week grocery shopping on payday. Even on weekends, my father was always working and she had no hobbies or outlets to express herself. Consequently, she played the television all day to bring some adult sounds into the house.
My father was easy to love even if he never expressed back to me that he loved me with words. I could count the number of times my father got angry with me on one hand yet with my mother it created a wound in me that changed my personality and response to people, especially being sensitive to people's moods. My father was also pleasant to be around because he rarely spoke to me and put no demands on me.
One year he bought a 40-foot sailboat that had hit a reef in the Dry Tortugas and had sunk. He was a boat builder so he bought it to rebuild. That year he would often take me to help him work on his boat—to take one less child off my mother's watch, for the most part, but never my brother. After I would help him with projects I was free to go off and explore and play in the boatyard. We would vacation every year on one of his sailboats and it was one of the highlights of my youth. Without my father's talent and sailing abilities, I would have lost out on the most positive memorable experiences during my youth. Although he rarely played with us we did not know that was unusual. There were no games, sports or outings just for us, and no boy activities with my brother, unfortunately. When I started working and going out into the world I discovered that other children and their parents had different relationships, especially a daughter could have a friendship with their mothers and a son a closeness with their fathers.
My brother was not subject to my mother's moods or beatings. While my older sister and I got punished, my brother, rarely, if at all, was. A few times I fought back when my brother teased me incessantly and then my mother would finally do something, as we would then be in a brawl. Although older than my brother, he was still a boy and stronger than me, and on occasion, I would not give up so fired up to stop his words and actions. Yet, while we were stopped by my mother, my brother was never punished. I don't fault my mother entirely. Having children of my own I know trying to discover who started a fight is not easy. Still, I knew without a doubt that my brother was favored.
While these two examples in my life do not prove that male homosexuals are caused by these parental dynamics with sons, many, including other homosexuals, have discovered the same correlation. Yet, some male homosexuals have shared that they have had good relationships with their fathers. Obviously, there is no one reason a person turns to same-sex relationships. I do believe past lives come into play. Subconscious memories we are not conscious to do propel us to make certain life choices. According to some past life regressionists their clients have stated that we may choose to discover what it is like to be someone society does not accept as normal, for example wanting to experience what it was like to become a pirate just as we may choose to be born in an abusive family dynamics in poverty vs. a wealthy environment with balanced parents.
The Christian Response
While it is important we do not judge others for their choices we also have laws set in place to govern our choices so that we do not harm others. Governments do not allow us to kill, rape, or deliberately do physical harm to others. God gave us laws as outlined in the Old Testament. When the Son of God was born and crucified we began the New Testament and new covenant with God. Our sins were and are forgiven. Whatever happened to cause Adam and Even to sin is still with us today. We sin. Some of us unabashedly sin and others, with great restraint, attempt to thwart that tendency.
Christian counselors are very divided on how to approach the issue of homosexuality. Traditional approaches range from seeing homosexuality as a mortal sin, or as a sickness, or problem incompatible with Christian teachings. How to respond varies much with the approach of “love the sinner, hate the sin,” to tolerance, inclusion, and acceptance. Some Christian counselors have done mental and emotional harm with their zealousness to force homosexual tendencies out of their flock. This has given a bad name to conversion therapy, unfortunately.
I am grateful I was exposed at such a young age to gay men. It has given me the gift of loving tolerance. I also experienced that being around gay men, as a woman, could be fun and entertaining. You could talk to them about emotional subjects and they could easily converse with you, sometimes more than your own father or husband. This does not mean that I view homosexuality as healthy.
Being around gay men has given me a radar to recognize who is gay or not. Not to say I can spot every man who is gay. I just learned body language which my mother and father instilled in me by their behavior and personalities. What this did was to "separate" gay men from everyone else in my mind. Why? It was an unconscious response. Something inside me was telling me that they were different, not a part of the 'normal' life of human beings and the 'Natural' God created. As stated already, some studies have shown that normal sexual orientation is straight and not gay, For a gay person to live in a society where they are the minority or have had to remain hidden to avoid some form of persecution has led to the high level of depression and anxiety in them. Yet today society has swung to punishing the normal straight people for their religious beliefs that view homosexuality as unnatural.
My propensity in life has been to help others. As a child, I would gravitate to help the underdog in school. I felt compassion for those who were unfairly treated or were outcasts for some flaw in their physical bodies or some mental incapacity. When I volunteered at the youth camp it was for mentally handicapped children, those who had Down syndrome or other developmental birth defects. It was so rewarding for me to be with those children. These children are so loving and seemingly, unaffected by the sin consciousness we all carry.
As a teen, I wanted to help autistic children. When I went to college I studied to be a psychologist. I did not finish my studies because I dropped out of school to get married and move to the Bahamas with my husband, putting a halt to my career choice. I also was highly disappointed in Freud and the traditional psychologist's beliefs that were hammered into psychology students as the ultimate truth. I went back to college after my divorce but by then I knew I could not devote the years to schooling with four children. So I decided to be an occupational therapist. Again, I could not follow through because I was put in the category of "too old" to qualify to get into the limited programs in the state. So I went into untraditional healing methods, both physically and mentally.
Having worked with and studied many psychological issues in our psychology, as well as being a Christian, I have the belief and understanding that God created male and female with different sexual organs to perform different functions. A male impregnates a woman and a woman carries and child and gives birth. That is the norm, outside of man's intervention, that God has given us. Whether we choose to fit into the normality of procreation God created is our choice. Whether we choose to have sex with animals, children or the same sex is our choice. Whether we choose to abort an unborn child is our choice. Having the choice is our God-given gift in free will. We have the choice to sin or not sin. Are there consequences in our choices? Of course. Everything we do has ramifications. What one person does to another person, animal, or some part of nature has ramifications.
Sometimes we can feel those ramifications immediately when someone cries or is hurt, or we see the dead animal we just killed or the tree we just felled. We learn from those experiences what our actions can do to other parts of life and hopefully, we develop compassion and cease any unwarranted destructive behavior.
One example that comes to mind is John Denver, the popular songwriter and singer. He was having trouble in his marriage to his wife Annie, and coming back from a tour of Britain, he noticed to his horror that Annie had summoned loggers to cut down a stand of his favorite oaks in the garden. The next morning, he marched into their house and neatly sawed through the kitchen table and cabinets, and the big wooden bed he had once shared with Annie. He took revenge, a wrong choice. Yet, Annie had in some way taken revenge by cutting down the trees she knew meant a lot to John. Both of their actions caused harmful and hurtful ramifications. Forgiveness is hard to learn but absolutely necessary.
For Christians, having a non-monogamous relationship is not ethical or godly. All sins fall under the Ten Commandments and homosexuality falls under the seventh commandment (sixth for Catholics). Romans 1:26-28, 1Corinthians 6:9-11 and 1 Timothy 1:9-11 all refer to homosexuality as a sin. If we accept homosexuality as normal we are in essence accepting sin as normal behavior. Sin is not normal behavior although it is normal that humankind sin. Some sins only hurt ourselves while other sins hurt others. The Gay RIghts agenda to push societies to accept homosexuality as normal is pushing society members to accept sin as normal. The Bible tells us what sin is and Jesus sets the example on how to overcome sin. The apostles taught about repentance, faith, and salvation. The Word of God continues to teach us if we have an ear to listen.
Whether we believe homosexuals are born that way or shaped that way by other people we need to pray for them and pray for our world. Homosexuals have been hurt in the past by arrogant, self-righteous individuals who point out other's sins while hiding their own. We need to ask God for guidance, pray to Jesus for His love and mercy, and above all, pray for justice and righteousness to prevail for all the sinners while repenting of our own sins and then determining to overcome them.
Today, black people are standing up to those who they believe have placed them as inferior beings to white people. Prejudice is nothing new. Black people have always been in this world but introducing them as slaves from their home countries changed how other countries viewed who they were as human beings. Homosexuality is nothing new. Gay priests hurting young men may not be common in the past but today it has risen to unimaginable proportions. These priests have stepped over the line to force their sexual practices on others and this is not only unacceptable in the laws that govern nations, it is totally unacceptable morally and religiously. I will address this issue in a future article.
Is normal in societies right and the only way? Absolutely not. I was horrified to discover that in the South Sea islands cannabilism was normal for tribes that captured their enemies. Infanticide was also normal for mothers who had no understanding of birth control and did not want or could not have more children to raise and properly care for. Transgenderism is becoming normal and acceptable. The normals for society is whatever they accept. So there has to be something that keeps people from accepting sinful acts (according to God's laws) as normal.
Morality is not the answer, as societies sanction what is moral, right, and acceptable. Many reading the Old Testament today believe that some of the acceptable behavior of that time was deplorable. American's founding fathers had slaves, which today is another behavior that is seen as deplorable in free nations. Historically, morality has been closely connected to religious traditions which morals remain fairly constant. Religious people can choose to follow their own moral conduct but they have to do so within the framework of their society's morals.
Nature is what is, regardless of what anyone desires or abhors. Whether we like it or not, agree or disagree, we are a part of it and subject to it. We cannot make Nature, it already is. And, it is not subject to us. Aristotle claimed, "Nature is a cause that operates for a purpose." The laws of Nature are preexisting, immutable, and universal. From the Journal of Religion and Science, "Aristotle distinguishes artifacts, which serve ends external to themselves, from natural things, whose ends are internal. “Those things are natural which, by a continuous movement originated from an internal principle [arche, beginning, foundation], arrive at some end: the same end is not reached from every principle; nor any chance end, but always the tendency in each is towards the same end, if there is no impediment.”
What is naturally good for us, in the debate on homosexual marriages, is defended as natural by both sides. Yet, can both sides be correct? If we understand Nature according to its reality, not our own created reality separate from Nature, no, both sides cannot be correct. There is only natural things. The regularity of the earth revolving around the sun—no matter what mankind does on this planet—is the product of Nature. Sperm fertilizing eggs that create human life is a product of Nature. Sure life can be created in a test tube but the natural is Nature's method. The purpose, we learn, is to create a child between the one who released the sperm and impregnated the female who carried the egg. The end is to create a family.
In nonhuman creations, the design or reason for which it is, manifests through either instinct or physical law. Animals have no self-conscious volition, but man does. If man chooses to act contrary and move against "the tendency for something to move towards the same end" that thing created is unnatural. It means that what something would become at its end is being worked against, according to the principle of its own development. Man is the only species that can choose to conform himself—or not—to this preordained end in Nature with any given thing. Man understands things through reason by logic and experience.
Both Socrates and Aristotle said that men's souls are ordered to the same good and that therefore there is a single standard of justice that transcends the political order of any city. Aristotle wrote, "Universal law is the law of Nature. For there really is, as everyone to some extent divines, a natural justice and injustice that is binding on all men, even on those who have no association or covenant with each other."
In the end, law that is made contrary to natural law is unjust. As Reilly pointed out, "Reason becomes normative. It is through reason—not from the gods of the city or from custom—that man discerns what is just from what is unjust, what is good from what is evil, what is myth from what is reality. Behaving reasonably or doing what accords with reason becomes the standard of moral behavior." When behavior is consistent with reason there you can find the standard for moral behavior.
If you accept that the cosmos reflects some sort of rational order, then acting rationally would be consistent with the order of the cosmos. Let us pray that we each act rationally toward the good God intended for us and morally toward the highest standard of God-good.