Posted on 11/24/2008 8:55:18 AM PST by Invisigoth
The real problem with the gay marriage issue is that the truth can only be found in either the spiritual or the scientific. The question that matters most is whether or not a person can be born gay. And the only possible way to answer this seems to be by discovering a gene that determines sexual preference or by believing in the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality and assuming this means everyone is born straight.
Simply posing the question generally infuriates gays. First, the question seems to carry with it the tone that homosexuality is some sort of handicap, like asking someone if they were born cross-eyed. Second, there’s the it’s-none-of-your-business” factor. And third, there’s the argument that says, “Of course I was born gay, you idiot. Why would I choose this?” It is pretty understandable for someone who believes with all his heart he was born gay to want to shove his foot up your butt for even asking this question.
But to anyone who believes that we’re all born straight, he must somehow explain why someone would choose to be gay. To be asked this question is about as enjoyable as realizing there’s one tattered square of toilet paper left five minutes too late.
(Excerpt) Read more at northstarwriters.com ...
If they would keep it in the bedroom, frankly, most people do not care. But to want to parade half naked down the street, and indoctrinate kids and to silence Bible-believing Christians, is when it becomes other people's business.
There is no science to back your assertion, there is no evidence than anyone is born gay, period. Like I said, there may be a predilection, but a predilection is not destiny. We can do a brain scan and find that I may have a predilection to be a serial killer, it doesn’t mean I’ll act on it, it needs triggers.
Comments -
1. - True. It is part of the victory of the liberal forces that this rather fundamental point of abnormality has become unspeakable.
2. - Not in my observation. Some of the most dysfunctional people I know were indeed raised fatherless, etc., but they were not for the most part homosexual. Homosexuals I know were often raised in perfectly normal families.
3. - The “gay genes”, like almost all genes that drive human behavior, are extremely difficult to isolate, because its never one “gene” - these things are caused (when they are rooted in “hardware”) by huge numbers of interacting genes and other factors that affect their expression. This is the morass that researchers into intelligence have run into, for instance. Its quite easy to predict intelligence according to parentage - or rather, to give much better than random odds for the outcomes. But it is next to impossible to do the same by merely examining an individuals genes. The same is probably true of sexual proclivity, or probably its even more complex, as the phenomenon is relatively rare and therefore its not clear at all that there is a heritable factor that breeds true enough to trace. If its genes they are going to be devilishly difficult to find.
But then, genes aren’t everything. Some studies show that there are powerful effects of the environment in utero, which is well known as the cause of some of the more physically evident problems in sexual formation. If this is clearly the cause for problems in the sexual organs, why shouldn’t this be a cause for problems in the brain ? Indeed, there is solid reason to believe that, whether or not there are gay genes, there are indeed many “gay brains”.
4. Indeed. The 10% figure is clearly ridiculous as an estimate of the proportion of people who would prefer to be predominantly homosexual, and cannot achieve happiness in a heterosexual relationship. I think the right number is closer to 2%, if not lower. Granted, there probably are at least 10% of males who may be induced to behave homosexually under the right circumstances, there are in fact cultures where this number is probably low - theres no other way to explain prison sex or parts of Afghanistan, to take two examples.
I think homosexuality in our culture is driven primarily by “hardware” problems of one sort or another, across a continuum of dysfunction. However, this does not excuse homosexual behavior. People vary in how strongly they feel the power of a particular temptation, but this does not excuse the sin.
Why are there more gay men than lesbian women?
It’s a liberal/homo got-ya question Chris Matthews uses all the time. Are men ‘born’ with the desire to spread genes? Isnt the DNA tests on men for child support a violation of privacy given born gene spreading orientation?
Liberals have NO trouble regulating sexuality when they want to (parts of Violence against Women Act like the one that nailed Clinton ) but by declaring this behaviour as a ‘right’ of birth, they can make the claim that even a constitutional amendment cannot take the new rights away. Yes, and yell and scream.
All that means is that they're both bisexual (bisexuals are the only ones who have a "choice").
I have a relative who is a 35-years dry alcoholic. Every day he has to make a decision...does he do the right thing in God's eyes that will produce the best possible future for him, or does he do what his body tells him feels good, and suffer the after-effects and consequences of his bad behavior? Every day he must choose, no matter what the behavior stems from.
Let us suppose for a moment that alchololism has a genetic component, and some people are more prone to experiencing the problem. So what? I would never think of walking up to someone whom I knew was an alcoholic and saying, "Hey, you know what? God made you just the way He wants you to be, and you can't help yourself to prevent this behavior that feels good to you! Here, drink up! Let me buy you a beer!" But that is exactly what the Libs want all of us to do in the case of this disability...smile and rubber-stamp the bad behavior as being just fine.
I have known probably five homosexual men and a couple of women in my life, and without exception they were smart, kind people trying to do the best they could. They were also, every one, from homes where I could see either emotionally absent or overbearing authoritarian fathers. And every one of them was, at some time in their history, recruited.
What is more, in each case, I could chart for you how the "lifestyle" (that's "sin" to you and me) gradually enveloped them and took them completely. They each began as well-rounded people: athletes, singers, scholars, teachers and more. But over time, what they became was "gay"...it permeated every aspect of their lives, became their sole and central point, with no other factor given any real weight. It is the ultimate in narcissism, because the person becomes more important than anyone else on the planet. It is his or her feelings that matter more than friends, relatives or society.
As everyone who has seen this knows, it ultimately becomes required for everyone around the homosexual to endorse their choice or be cast out into the night, because no disagreement with their behavior will be tolerated. I have lost some good acquaintances because I would not bow down and pronounce what they did as good.
If I had a good friend who thought that sticking their face in a glass furnace sounded like a really fun time, I would have to warn them that the after affects could kill them. If I had a friend who was trying to drive their car off a cliff, I would be honor bound to try and prevent it...even if they intended to.
Suppose that I am a vegetarian, and I stand on a soapbox in front of an Outback Steak House, and announce the following:
You probably don't want to hear this, but what you are doing is morally wrong. It is insensitive of you to put your own desires ahead of all the damage that your own lusts creates all around you. Firstly, you endanger your own bodies with behavior that is scientifically shown to put you at great risk of several diseases, risking even your own deaths! Secondly, the money that you are costing the medical insurance industry because of your own self-driven choices could be used to help protect the health of thousands of other people. Thirdly, by giving in to the desires of your flesh, you are causing worry and grief to those around you who care about you! And fourthly, you are in the end the only one who can prevent these bad choices in your life, because you can, at any time, decide to stop behaving irresponsibly! For your own moral good, for your health, and for your families and friends, I plead with you to reconsider what you are doing!"
The news media would portray you as "a bright, concerned individual, unafraid to take an unpopular position on a controversial subject, who bravely has stood up to warn those about him about their moral obligations to everyone around them, and the dangers of their own self-centered behavior."
Now, instead you are an evangelical Christian, standing outside of a gay bar. Go and repeat the previous paragraph.
That's right...you are tarred and feathered in the media as "a small-mided, self-centered Bible-thumping conservative who wants to take away the natural rights of others, cruelly limiting their choices and brutally committing hate-speech that belittles and condemns them."
It is usually the Liberals who wail about their goddess "Tolerance" who are first in line to throw stones when you won't tolerate the things THEY hold dear. I wish that all the people who are standing line to tell us what we can eat, where we can smoke, what firearms we are allowed to protect ourselves with and how much of our pie we should give to others were half as ready to hear what we think.
If your family history includes a lot of addicts, it would be best to CHOOSE to avoid recreational chemistry of all sorts.
I agree, though I would caution readers to be careful which elements they mentally connect in parallels and allegories.
My point in parallel or comparison would be that one's choice of homosexuality might well be (on a varying scale) attributed to an heightened response or attraction to physical stimulation from an early age. One cannot discount the extreme importance of authentically positive parental relationships in formative years. Now, off for a Margarita...it's 5 o'clock somewhere.
It is not a GAY GENE! It is a SIN NATURE. We all are born with it. We inherited it from Adam. We are all capable of perversion. Homosexuality is a sin just as any other sexual sin. The Bible teaches us not to engage in it. It is a choice to be involved in any sin. God said choose life of death. We have choices. Granted we all have experienced abuse that can help drive us further into the arms of sin, sexual or not. Because it is done in ignorance God will grant us mercy and forgiveness. As The Apostle Paul so well states:
1 Tim 1:13
13 Who was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: but I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.
KJV
It is only Jesus Christ that can heal any soul from the sickness of sin. Not any amount of psychology can do that. Any soul that is void of its creator is a soul doomed to destuction. IMHO.
Before they lost their effort to overturn homosexual sodomy laws in Bowers v. Hardwick in the Supreme Court in 1986, sodomites typically took the position that it was a lifestyle choice. The arguments were the same as the current arguments you can find today in feminist and other circles that “gender”, etc. are socially constructed. The problem was with the rest of society that had these outdated notions about sexual preference being fixed.
After they lost their privacy/fundamental liberty argument before the SC (Justice White referred to their argument as at best facetious), the sodomite activists embarked on a new media and litigation strategy. The litigation strategy and media strategy focused on trying to convince people that engaging in homosexual sodomy was as innate as being black (Gee, I dunno, Fred. I just woke up one morning and there I was buggering Bob.) Over time this line became the official orthodoxy in all “the best circles” and ultimately led to the Lawrence decision.
The media/propaganda effort is set out in full in Kirk and Madsen’s “After The Ball” (Kirk and Madsen devised the strategy). Naive conservatives ought to read the book, and then they can do some pennance hitting themselves on the head with it for having been taken in.
FWIW, what seems to be common among homosexuals statistically is that they were molested by older men while they were preteens or teens. This, psychologically, probably accounts for the high levels of rage and violence among homosexual men. As one retired law enforcement officer told me once, if you have a murder scene in which the victim was stabbed 50 times or shot 20 times, you probably aren’t dealing with an unusually thorough murderer - it is almost certainly a homosexual “relationship” gone bad.
Sorry that would be life OR death - Not life OF death.
*Everyone* is born with innate urges — both morally good and bad. What separates us from the animals is the ability we’ve been given to temper and overcome the bad ones, while nurturing the good ones, for the greater good. That is our “humanity”. Once we deny this ability, we deny our humanity, and morally speaking we become animals. Undeniably, the homosexual community has its own “cross to bear”, or “hill to climb”, or “burden to carry” — whichever euphemism they prefer. But ... we *all* have our own challenges. Most of us deal with them without all the drama ... They are not *special*.
The Kinsey report generated the often quoted "one in ten people are homosexuals". It is worth noting that the criterion of bein a homosexual for Kinsey was not "committed a sexual act with another person of the same sex." The threshold for this study was "have you every, at any time in your life, had a sexual thought about someone of your sex. It is easy for me to imagine that the second case might be true, but far more unlikely that one person in ten has actually done anything about it. (Especially in the 1950's or 60's, when you might suffer real threat for admitting it, not just the shattering emotional effects of knowing that someone out there disapporves of you.) However, like so many things that are not true, the tiny homosexual lobby has repeated the mis-information so often that it is today touted as fact.
Males are more prone to develop extreme expressions of all sorts of traits than females.
All of us are born with many kinds of terrible urges. We choose to indulge some of them.
And yet, if you warn a smoker that their behavior is disgusting to you, that it can kill them, and that it disappoints and emotionally hurts their friends and family, somehow that makes you a hero. Oh, yes, society applauds you for that.
I'm watching my young son grow up. It's been pretty clear since he was about five months old that he likes girls, extremely clear since he was two. It's entirely plausible to me that sexual orientation is determined very early, probably in utero. This is supported by the fact that the chances of a woman having a gay son increases with the number of sons she has already had.
It seems clear that a certain subset of people feel an attraction to both sexes. IMHO these are the only people who can actually make a decision about which "lifestyle" they will pursue.
I agree, I was answering the question which I took to mean the desire for same sex partners. That is far more complex than a simple decision (for most people).
On the other hand, it is a sin like all sin. I’m guilty of something sinful every day, just not that particular one.
All I know is that conservatives are wasting far too much energy on this debate and need to get focused on the only issue that really matters - cutting spending and restraining the growth of government. Every group in the "Big Tent" will benefit tremendously from such a focus, that's why the "Big Tent" came together under Ronald Reagan in the first place.
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