As this man's letter shows, the true yearning of homosexuals is not for sex, but for intimacy and love. This is the strongest and most fundamental human yearning -- not the desire of genes to reproduce, as you wisely point out below -- as is implicit in St. Augustine's insight, "Our hearts will never be at rest, Lord, until they rest in Thee." The high rates of suicide and depression among gays indicates that though they seek their heart's content in same-sex erotic relationships, these do not satisfy.



The best, and most hopeful, book on homosexuality I've seen is Briar Whitehead's Craving for Love
. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the question.

There's an interesting issue in this for (at least) the left; if you believe in 'Darwinism', and that homosexuality is an innate property rather than a purely cultural construct...



Well, you have a problem.



If there's a 'gay gene', why hasn't it disappeared? (Perhaps only those with two copies are homosexuals; those with one are empathic snappy dressers and get more women).



If it isn't genetic, can the developmental cause be determined? Controlled? What then?

Whitehead draws on the work of Elizabeth Morley, a developmental psychologist, to argue that homosexuality arises from a psychic breach between the child and the same-sex parent, usually in the first three years of life, which causes the child to fear that the parent will withdraw support & care, to which the child responds by seeking desperately to find ways to 'win' the same-sex parent's love. This yearning for intimacy from a same-sex partner later becomes eroticized. It turns out that there's a great deal of empirical evidence for breaches between homosexuals and the same-sex parent; and many behavioral patterns are shared between homosexuals and others who suffered from unreliable parental care, e.g. adult children of alcoholics.



This hypothesis has a certain plausibility to me because the gays & lesbians I've known have all fit the pattern -- they had highly conflicted love/hate relationships with their same sex parents. But this remains only a hypothesis, and it seems that academics aren't really ready to mount serious investigations into possible causes of homosexuality.

Orrin's remark about God's love is not universally

shared among Christians. I have before me a printout

(thanks to Taranto at opinionjournal) of the Westboro

Baptist Church: THE 7 ARE IN HELL!



"God's Arm hurled Columbia in fragments (shoudn't that be fagments?) to the ground, and hurled the 7 fools into the everlasting fires of Hell -- in wrath and vengeance, laughing, mocking and deriding this nation of fags."



This passage casts some doubts on pj's analysis for the alleged high rate of suicide, doesn't it?



Makes me wonder how many of these suicides came out of social settings like this.



If I were inclined to worship a God, I'd pick Orrin's. On the other hand, that He doesn't take action against the libels of the Westboro Baptist Church argues strongly for his disinterest in human affairs, or, perhaps, his non-existence.

Harry:



Let's put this in your terms: Westboro Baptist is to Christianity as Richard Dawkins is to Darwinism.

Mike:



Any "gay gene" is not likely to be a single gene but rather a combination of genetic factors, that interact in a non-linear manner with environmental factors.



That said, though, I would tend to think "sexuality" is somehow hardwired into us as opposed to a cultural response, since gays generally report that they "knew" they were different before they were sexually aware. This makes sense to me. Long before I knew the mechanics of sex I knew Christy Brinkley was more interesting than Arnold Schwarzenegger, even if I couldn't pinpoint the reason.







Noel Erinjeri

Orrin, I entirely agree that Westboro is in the heterodox minority, although maybe not quite as heterodox as Dawkins.



But what does God think? If I were an almighty, short-tempered deity, I wouldn't put up with that crap in my name.

Harry:



If God were short-tempered he'd not have spared Noah.

The cause of homosexuality need not be a moral choice nor genetic. There is an alternate theory, and it goes something like this:



All fetuses start out female. XY fetuses, combined with appropriate kinds, and amounts, of hormones at the proper times during gestation result in a male fetus.



Just as with anatomy, female brain structure is different than male brain structure--Broca's Area is a good example.



Except for Marxists, it is pretty widely agreed that certain aspects of our humanity are hard wired into our brains. Gender affinity is one of those things. A previous poster illustrated the point perfectly. Long before he knew of sex, he was attracted to Cheryl Tiegs, not Ahnahld.



Outside of simplistic things such as binary logic, there is no such thing as a deterministic process. Building a Ford Taurus is a doddle compared with building a human being. The blueprint for each car is the same, but the resulting Tauri are clearly not identical. A few are lemons, a few will run relentlessly for 200K miles.



Therefore, it is entirely possible that homosexuals have brains that, due to variations in hormonal expression during pregnancy, did not fully differentiate from their female origins. This means they retained female gender affinity despite acquiring male anatomy.



This is analagous to cleft palate/spina bifida/Down's etc, which are neither moral choices nor genetically inherited. As in these conditions, Darwinism has nothing to say.



This theory isn't fully testable, yet. But I believe it will ultimately will be shown to be true. When that happens, a lot of people--the Catholic Church and certain funadementalist Christians (yes Pat Robertson, I mean you) are going to have a lot of explaining to do.



Sincerely,

Jeff Guinn

Well, this was supposed

to be some highfalutin

biomathematics

(I was looking at the

propagation of a

"gay gene" through

Hardy-Weinberg and

Punnet square analysis,

but my computer discon-

nected before I could

post it.

I'm gonna try writing a

computer program that'll

do it for me.

I'll post the results

and methodology if I

ever get it done.



-Noel Erinjeri

Jeff:



Yes, that's another possibility. But all those conditions are a lot rarer than homosexuality seems to be; if they were that common there'd be extreme evolutionary pressure to find some mechanism for reducing their incidence, if one was possible and not too expensive.



I'd be curious to see how Noel's number-crunching comes out.

Another random elaboration on Jeff's comment:



If that's true, it's possible (not certain) the process could be influenced. Suppose that pharmaceuticals were availble that would assure the sexual orientation of a developing child in either direction; I suspect an impressive socio-political firestorm would ensure.

There are three moments during pregnancy, one in each trimester, when the child's physiology undergoes spikes in the production of testosterone. I believe this is what Jeff is referring to. These can be interfered with by the production of adrenaline, caused by stress, which, depending on which trimester it comes in, can mess with the gender of the brain, or of the entire child. I've read that male children born during the Blitz were far more likely to be homosexual than the rest of the population.

The evolutionary argument for this is that it is a population control mechanism, and a less painful one than, say, everyone eating up all the food and starving to death, per bacteria. Instead, when too many humans get cramped into too small an area, adrenaline levels rise, resulting in not only an increase in homosexuality, but in child abandonment, child abuse, dead-beat dads and various other Biblically-condemned (and Biblically predicted--see Isaiah) ways of keeping the population lower.

So, does that make any of them right? Hardly. And a biological component to homosexuality does not make fornication (of either variety) any less immoral than, say, the biological component to anger makes violent outbursts acceptable.

Jeff - The hormonal explanation is quite possible - but why do you suppose this would cause trouble for the Catholic Church?



I think everyone has already accepted that homosexuals are not morally responsible for their sexual orientation -- it develops too early. Moreover, Christian churches have always held that homosexuals are just as lovable, and beloved by God, as heterosexuals. But everyone has a moral obligation to respond properly to the circumstances he find himself in. Just as blind people have to deal ethically with their blindness, so homosexuals have to deal ethically with their homosexuality. If homosexuals are dealt a particularly difficult hand which calls for heroic courage from them, why is the Church wrong to call them to it?

mike:



There was a play years ago called Twilight of the Goldbergs, in which a family found out they were going to have a gay son but could genetically engineer him to make him straight. Folks who blithely accept a future of such engineering tend not to want to grapple with such issues.

PJ:



Because the Catholic Church says that homosexuals are "objectively disordered," and that to act on their orientation is a sin.



So, two gay men acting together consistent with the way the were born is a sin, but a man and a woman doing the same thing isn't?



Yeah, that could stand some explaining.



Respectfully,

Jeff Guinn

RE: Homosexuality as an adaptive means of population control.



That can't possibly work. How many homosexuals would there have to be before the remaining heterosexual men were unable to impregnate the available women?



Jeff Guinn

Jeff:



We know too much about the nurturing of homosexuals to believe it's mostly nature, unless you'd argue that the fathers are predisposed to mate with the domineering overly sexualized mothers.

Mr. Guinn beat me to the punch here.





Most people (die-hard Marxists excepted) recognize the influence of genetics and environment upon man's behavior. Few seem to consider fetal ontology (as Mr. Guinn does) as a cause/contributor to a panoply of mysterious conditions, from homosexuality to affective disorders (including schizophrenia and autism). I also am willing to bet, when it is all said and done, that this will solve at least a few medical mysteries.

Homosexuality is only one of a number of effects of increased adrenaline, brought by increased population density. This is seen in all social animals, as well as humans.

It might be a couple days before I get the number crunching done. I'm sure you all await with baited breath. :)



Noel Erinjeri



nerinjer@umich.edu

Timothy:



Odd then that it would prevail in societies with the lowest density--because affluent--and be rare in the most dense--because there's no privacy perhaps.

I'm dubious about claims of the nature of

the one about boy babies born during the

Blitz. We can scarcely define homosexuality

and certainly there is no agreement

what proportion of the population is

homosexual.



Also, this line does nothing to explain

lesbianism.



The ready acceptance that homosexuality

is inborn is also dubious. I have a theory,

which I won't bore you with because I

don't know how to test it, that rather

easily explains at least a large fraction

of sexual desire and is, moreover, applicable

to everybody -- not just homosexuals.



But I came to it by realizing that -- contrary

to the dogma of the homosexual lobby --

homosexuality can indeed by taught.

The evidence is overwhelming. John Money's

books on what he calls paraphilias contain

lots of examples.

Jeff -- the "objectively disordered" is just stating that homosexually oriented is not how God wants people to be -- just as blind, or deaf, or Downs Syndrome is not how God wants people to be. All of those conditions are also objectively disordered. And after Judgment Day, when the faithful are resurrected and made perfect, the blind will not be blind, the deaf will not be deaf, and the homosexual will not be homosexual. That is all the Church is teaching by "objectively disordered."

And to call it so is not in the least to blame homosexuals for their orientation, anymore than it is to blame the blind for their blindness.