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Recent church dialogues about homosexuality have convinced me we are missing the real issue we should be discussing.
In these dialogues, I’ve heard articulate and sincere persons tell how they came to their personal understanding that they were “gay” or “lesbian.” With conviction, they tell how they became convinced “This is who I really am. This is how God made me. I cannot change.”
These stories are affirmed by some pastors and laypersons, who are eager to give compassionate support. They, too, express certainty that gays and lesbians are born this way and cannot change. This view gained momentum twenty years ago when one of our bishops wrote his pastors, telling them homosexuality was “a mysterious gift of God’s grace.”
Now the matter that never gets discussed in our church dialogues is the presuppositional question: Is homosexuality, in fact, innate (inborn, genetic, biologically caused) and immutable (unchangeable), or is it not?
On p. 30 of this issue of Good News is an important article by A. Dean Byrd and two associates which looks again at the innate-immutability argument about homosexual attraction. Byrd is vice president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) and is a trained scientist and licensed clinical psychologist. In this article, Byrd states that “Scientific attempts to demonstrate that homosexual attraction is biologically (innately) determined have failed.” Much of Byrd’s evidence comes from scientists who are themselves homosexual and lesbian.
For example, Dean Hamer, a gay researcher, tried to link male homosexuality to a stretch of DNA located at the tip of the X chromosome, but failed. He concluded, “Homosexuality is not purely genetic…environmental factors play a role. There is not a single master gene that makes people gay.”
Byrd cites Simon LeVay, a homosexual scientist whose studies comparing the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men received dramatic coverage in Time magazine years ago. Commenting on his work, LeVay admitted, “It’s important to stress what I didn’t find. I did not prove that homosexuality is genetic, or find a genetic cause for being gay. I didn’t show that gay men are born that way, the most common mistake people make in interpreting my work.”
Byrd also cited established researchers such as Byne and Parsons and Friedman and Downey who have reviewed the studies linking biology and homosexual attraction. They concluded that there was no evidence to support an innate, biological theory. They claimed, rather, that homosexuality is best explained by a model where “temperamental and personality traits interact with the familial and social milieu as the individual’s sexuality emerges.”
Byrd also notes lesbian activist biologist Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling of Brown University, who says about the biological argument: “It’s bad science and bad politics. It seems to me that the way we consider homosexuality in our culture is an ethical and a moral question.” And we would add, it’s a theological question as well.
Byrd’s conclusion is that the innate-immutability argument “finds no basis in science.” Yet many United Methodist pastors continue telling their parishioners, with apparent authority and competence, that we must accept the practice of homosexuality on those grounds. One of our bishops even claimed in his conference paper that being homosexual is “no different than being left-handed.”
In the church’s debate on this issue, we need to claim our Lord’s promise when he said, “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). At the 2000 General Conference, Good News distributed a sampling of comments from 14 of some 36 mental health authorities who have spent years treating persons struggling with problems of sexuality, including homosexuality. These eminent professionals, psychiatrists and psychologists, are respected practitioners who report from years of experience. They include persons such as Reuben Fine, Edmund Bergler, Irving Bieber, Lawrence Hatterer, Arthur Janov, Charles Socarides, Masters and Johnson, Robert Kronemeyer, Mansell Pattison, Gerard van den Aardweg, Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, William P. Wilson, and others. The truth is, success rates of persons reverting from homosexuality to heterosexuality varied from 28 percent to a high of 71.6 percent. These professionals attest that there is nothing immutable about homosexuality. Persons have and are changing.
Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse sums it up well, insisting “The frequent claim by ‘gay’ activists that it is impossible for homosexuals to change their orientation is categorically untrue.” The sad reality is that such claims only diminish the desire of persons to seek help in leaving homosexual behavior. Scientific data simply does not support the innate-immutable claim.
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