Drinking the "Milk", Not the Kool-Aid!

I saw Milk tonight. I developed a habit of watching what I termed gay rights propaganda movies when I was in grad school at Mich State. I also entered into a Greg Boyd "Letters from a Skeptic" style email exchange with my high school biology teacher on the subject and learned from him a good deal of the scientific research on the issue. I found this to be quite helpful because it often impresses people when you know a good deal about both where they're coming from and the background facts of issues.
I learned from that dialogue and others that the popular usage of the word homosexuality actually covers a variety of heterogeneous phenomena and that gay rights activists have been often dismissive of scientific research based on identical twins studies that showed there was no such thing as a gay gene, or genes, and scientific research based on empirical evidence by Herr Günter Dörner, found among Germans in the womb during the Allied bombings, that our sexual orientations are likely due to the hormonal balances formed in our brains while we are fetuses.

I challenged Dr Cornel West once on the issue while I was at MSU and argued that while homophobia was clearly wrong, heterosexism was not necessarily wrong. Of course, this depends on how one defines these two terms. I found out a while later, in a difficult dialogue I had with other steering committee members of the MSU Graduate Employee Union, that gay rights activists conflated the two and insisted that any perspective that made a normative distinction among sexual orientations/acts was homophobic or unenlightened. Sadly, my relationships with my friends probably never fully recovered, though I have fortunately kept one friend from that time, with whom I actually got into an extensive dialogue with in the comment-section of my old blog, the Anti-Manichaeist. What I value most from that experience is that it led my friend to explain to me his, very much Cornel West-influenced, understanding of Christianity.

From this, I have emerged to take a position in opposition to the Heterosexual Marriage Amendment, but insisted that one needs to qualify the parallels made between the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement and that legal marriage had no practical value-added over civil unions. Homosexual legal marriage is a cultural wars issues; the essence of which is when a particular legal conflict becomes associated with a much wider and almost intransient set of issues. And we need to make dialogue, not polemics to keep the cultural wars wedge issues from continuing to poison our democracy by crowding out other issues from being important in our elections.

And so I've pitched my tent as being firmly in opposition to the biological determinism (my genes make me do it) and sexual libertinism (it shouldn't be wrong to love someone) implicit among many gay rights activists and yet, also making a distinction between the Biblical Ideal of Marriage (The lasting complementary and inherently bilateral union of two others that creates new life.) and the human-made cultural institutions surrounding our marital civil unions. The latter of which inevitably accommodates our human fallenness. What this stance does for me is remove the issue of legal marriages for committed homosexual couples from questions about the authority of the Bible, or biblical world-view found in the OT and NT. It also makes me view the heat generated among traditional USAmerican Christianity and others as fundamentally counter-productive and due to a misreading of Scripture. For there's no way that Jesus would have countenanced the violence (state-sanctioned and otherwise) in the US against people with homosexual orientations and/or who engage in homosexual acts. I loved the movie Milk because it showed the selflessness and willingness to lay down one's life for others necessary for successful activist movements. I loved the way they developed solidarity and self-defense tactics and worked the system, picking their battles very carefully and yet with a great deal of passion that lives were literally at stake in the issue. And yet, it seems they may have taken on some of the rhetorical excesses of the fundamentalists they were opposing, as is illustrated by the gay rights activist community's virulent reaction to president .... The simple fact of the matter is that "homosexuality" is both chosen and not chosen and so it might be better if we used separate terms for its distinct phenomena and, as followers of Christ, approached the distinct forms of homosexuality with different ministry strategies.

Does this matter? Very much so. It seems that Frederick the Great of Prussia was brutalized by his father for his effeminate nature. This happened in the beginning of the 18th century, when the Brandenburg-Prussian Pietists (associated with Jacob Spener and August Hermann Francke, who influenced the development of both liberal and conservative branches of European-American Christianity) had become the orthodox version of Christianity in that part of the world. Apparently in 1730 ce, young Frederick tried to flee the country with his best friend and was caught and made to watch his best friend being shot. Needless to say, Frederick the Great became an atheist later on and dethroned Pietism, launching it on a hundred year trajectory to its becoming a very intensely personal/private dualistic form of Christianity that would later be embodied by traditional USAmerican Christianity and Count Otto Van Bismarck whose RealPolitik helped Prussian Absolutism to pave the way for Hitler to come into power. If the Pietists had taken a strong stance against their benefactor, decrying his inhumane treatment of his son (it doesn't matter how one understands homosexuality to do that.), who knows maybe Frederick would have become a Pietist? And then who knows maybe he could have influenced his friend Voltaire to become far more Wesley-like reformer of France, instead of calling on other enlightenment rationalists to "ecrasez l'infame" of organized Christianity/religion and its claims to special revelation or authority. It's hard to say about these sorts of things, but one thing is sure in my mind the long trek towards secularization in Europe and the peculiar and intransigent and dysfunctional incarnation of Christianity in the US were not inevitable. If we had been more deliberate in cleaving to reasoned understandings of Scriptures in light of its original historical context then many terrible errors could have been avoided as well as much suffering and death.
dlw

Comment by Steve on January 24, 2009 at 4:42pm: dlw,
This (and the article on your old blog) is an interesting and well reasoned article...thank you for taking the time to submit them.

It is understandable why homosexuals reject the hormonal imbalance hypothesis, as it suggests that homosexuality is abnormal and it suggests the possibility of a medical cure. Homosexuals (at least those that I know/knew personally) vigorously rejected that they were in any way abnormal.

Has the twin study really been rejected by the homosexual community? I read the study after it first came out, and was appalled by the conclusions of the researchers that homosexuality is genetic, even though their study demonstrate otherwies. I was more appalled by their explanation of how they came to that conclusion. Yet, inspite of the obvious results of that study, homosexuals and their supporters still cite the Twin Study as the preeminate scientific evidence that homosexuality is genetic.

As for the way forward, I find your conclusions reasonable, persuasive, and well intentioned, but I'm not sure I agree that we should grant civil unions. A casual observer can discern that the extremist homosexual activists will not stop at civil unions. Once they achieve legal recognition and acceptance they will seek more rights, more concessions, more proactive programs and governmental policies to do things like educate people (especially young people who might have homosexual tendencies) about the true nature of homosexuality. If, as you say, homosexuality is the result of biological and/or enviornmental influences, then the worst possible course of action is to expose impressionable children to homosexual propaganda.

I know that the scenerio I just painted might seem paranoid, but the truth is that we are already seeing efforts to insert homosexual behavior into school curriculum. Also, my best friend, and room mate for nearly four years was a homosexual. I hung out with his friends, and he did the same with my "straight" friends." We were a real life version of the "Odd Couple." His friends were nice people; I liked them and didn't mind calling them my friends. However many of them could be categorized as extremist activists. Personal experience convinces me that if we give an inch the homosexual community will try to take a mile.

We need to find a way to implement the spirit, of your post, as well as some of your specific ideas, without opening doors that cannot be closed again.

Comment by dlw on January 24, 2009 at 6:35pm: I try to avoid using the word "cure". I believe that we might develop an intervention during the fetal period that would prevent a fetus from later developing a homosexual orientation, although the same could be said for an intervention to enable a fetus to later develop a homosexual orientation. But the option should be available and we should make it clear that our sexual orientations aren't critical parts of what make us human beings, as such I can make a normative distinction among sexual orientations without implying that people with homosexual orientations are lesser beings.

I'd rather just take the gov't out of the legal marriage business and just have bilateral civil unions.
dlw

Comment by dlw on January 25, 2009 at 2:10am: IMHO, the worse possible scenario is a lapse into the sort of paganism that prevailed in the Roman Empire and is strong in Europe and parts of the US. I know in Sweden, there are "omnisexual" men who emulate gay males in their dress and what-not. After all, "It's all good."... I can also recall "sex clubs" being referred to as an alternative lifestyle preference.

It's hard, because the issue generally causes more heat than light and is often used as a litmus test. I described a while back how Anglican Social Gospellist church historian Gary Dorrien, "demonstrated... that, as long as he affirms Social Justice and LBGT rights, he can get away with preaching a very, very Evangelical-sounding sermon...at Plymouth Congregational Church...[whose senior pastor had, in a previous sermon,] apologized for his strong use of Scripture and, at the end, affirmed being on the paths, not shared dogma.

This is a hot-potato issue. I remember how hard it was for me at times during my dialogue exchange w. my hs biology teacher. I'd read his letter and need to go do something else for a spell because it was hard for me. I reacted emotionally to what he was writing and needed to let myself simmer down. I don't think this was because I was a die-hard anti-gay person, it's just that the issue in my mind was so tied into other stuff I believed strongly that it was easy to get worked up.

So my goal is to be a peace-maker and to do so in a way that is recognizably evangelical and openly antagonistic to the prevalent orthodoxies on both sides of the cultural wars in the US.

dlw

Comment by Steve on January 26, 2009 at 12:14pm: I respect your goal of peacemaking, and I agree about the use of terms such as cure. The problem I see with all of this, is that the terms we use won't really matter because any suggestion that they are abnormal is unacceptable.

You are absolutely correct that we must approach this issue, and the people involved in it, with love. You are also correct that their humanity is not defined by their sexual preference or orientation. However,in order to hold to a recognizably evangelical position we must be clear that homosexual behavior is sin (just to be clear, I don't think you are suggesting that we don't call sin). We can deliver that message carefully and thoughtfully, avoiding harsh or misunderstood terminology saturated with hate and contempt (and we certainly don't have to yell it from the mountain tops), but because the LBGT community will accept nothing less than full acceptance, that message (no matter how it is delivered) will cause us to be branded as ignorant-intolerant-hateful bigots. So, I'm not sure that peace-making is a realistic goal.

Is there a better way? I'm not sure there is anything we can do to change public perception, but we can do the one thing that is truly evangelical: evangelism! Jesus doesn't need a positive public perception of Him to tranform the hearts, values, and lives of individuals. If we deliver His message in love, He can overcome any objection and that will lead to real change.

Comment by Steve on January 26, 2009 at 12:32pm: dlw,
I don't believe my last post was clear enough, So if I may elaborate on the distinction between humanity: members of the LBGT community don't make that distinction. They view their sexaulity as an integral part of their humanity. Evangelicals can try to employ the old addage "love the sinner, but hate the sin," but that will fall on deaf ears. The LBGT community will interpret any suggestion that their sexuality is anything other than perfectly normal as a personal attack.

Comment by dlw on January 26, 2009 at 3:29pm: My first response wd be to them, "Wtf(udge) is normal, anyways? Look I'm sorry you're offended but my first priority in life is not not offending you."

I don't use the word sin too often in public contexts because it is something that I think is meaningful first and foremost among communities of faith and that when I use it with others, they can too easily read unintended stuff into it.

I am not convinced either that all forms of affection among couples w. homosexual orientations are "sins". For me, the biggest sin is to make our sexual "whatever" as central to our identity and to deny the ideal of community/family as set out in Gen 2, which I think has serious implics that go well beyond the proper venue for sexual intercourse. It's the sense of wholeness/complete solidarity among others that would exist if we all truly loved our neighbors as ourselves.

"realism" is another word for "pessimism". Let them call us bigots or homophobes, if we endure this verbal violence then we will turn the politics of Jesus that Harvey Milk employed against those who claim to follow in his foot-steps.

Evangelism tends to presuppose a shared tacit understanding of what constitutes Christianity. We don't have that in our world so much anymore and that's not all bad. Some of our understandings of traditional USAmerican Christianity may need to be dissolved to reinvigorate our witness/commitment to the Great Commission(where we don't have to make ideological/cultural clones of ourselves but rather disciples).

last reply: Yes, many may view it as such. That's why I avoid using the word "sin" in these sorts of dialogues and, for the most part, also lower my expectations about what will likely be the result of any dialogue. I don't plan on winning people over, but I do want people to understand me and that I don't want this issue to get inflamed in the way the politics of abortion did and come to prevent us from working together to deal with the many critical issues/crises that we are faced with today.

Comment by MichaelTh on January 31, 2009 at 9:10am: I for one am all for full marriage equality for gay/lesbian couples. I do not understand the obsessive disdain of gays by social conservatives.

Homosexuality seems to be a natural variation of human behavior (or animal behavior as well).

Some social conservatives state they are for civil unions but the truth is most states that have banned gay marriage also ban civil unions. Let's also be clear that civil unions are not equal to marriage.

Also, I am very thankful for the gay activists who are fighting for such an important issue in our culture. Some people, for whatever reason, may not feel they can openly advocate for their rights. So at least there are some who will stand up for their beliefs and will continue to fight for equality.

Though it shouldn't have to be stated but there are gay Christians. There are gay men and women in the church already. Some closeted and others not so much. There are gay Christian websites and social networking sites.

The genie is out of the bottle and gay men and women are our brothers and sisters. They are our family. They are mainstream and they are here to stay. No more going back in the closet and no more keeping quiet when they are being verbally abused and assaulted by homophobes and radical religious right wingers.

Thanks,

Michael

Comment by dlw on January 31, 2009 at 9:28am: Hi, Michael. I believe that political marriages are a vestige of that good old saw-horse bug-a-boo I like to call "Constantinized Christianity" and that it would be best if we simply just had bilateral civil or marital unions and left whose relationships are considered "marriages" to religious organizations. I know that many who oppose gay marriages also oppose gay civil unions, but just because they bundle them together, doesn't mean that we need to.

If we remove legal marriages then that inequality due to its perceived "social approbation or disapprobation" can be mitigated.

I'm not against the humanity of individuals with homosexual orientations or who choose to engage in homosexual acts (or who are culturally conditioned to being open to dabble a little, variety is the spice of life and it shouldn't be wrong to love someone...). I am against lumping the heterogenous phenomena popularly associated with homosexuality today into one category and linking all aspects of their activism with the civil rights movement without some significant qualifications that take into account that LGBT issues do vary from other civil rights issues in the details...

As far as I know, the apostle Paul might have had a homosexual orientation as his thorn in his flesh. That changes nothing in my mind about his teachings and the way he followed Christ in continuing to deemphasize the import of sexual/kinship relations for the formation of community. My sexual orientation is not a critical aspect of my identity. Neither is my gender or my mental prowess for that matter, but we may tend to make such peripheral stuff to be more important or critical than they truly are, imho.

dlw

Comment by JoshuaChayne on February 4, 2009 at 8:52pm: Homosexuality definitely has some biological basis. The leading explanation of homosexuality is the hormone disruption theory. Every fetus begins in a proto-female state. If the fetus is male then the Y-Chromosome activates androgens like testosterone to make the genitals masculine and to make the brain masculine. Brain tissue seems to naturally resist this process which creates a continuum of males that range from having very masculine brains to very feminized brains. Conversely, female homosexuality may be influenced by females being exposed to too much androgens during their fetal development.

As a teacher, this theory seems true. There are always every gradation between very masculine to very effeminate among the male students. Its the same for the female students as well. They range from very masculine to very feminine too. And there are always a handful of gay and lesbian students.

Homosexuality also occurs in the animal kingdom in respect to sex and pair bonding. In animals that pair bond for life or extended periods of time-- there are homosexual pairs as well.

Studies have shown differences in heterosexual and homosexual brains in respect to the amygdala, anterior commissure, and anterior hypothalamus. Homosexual sheep have the same differences in their hypothalamus that homosexual humans have.

Nobody chooses their sexual orientation in terms of the sexual attractions and desires that they develop during puberty. Sure people can choose their behavior but to expect homosexuals to pretend to be straight or to practice life long celibacy and to give up on love, sex, and companionship is simply cruel.

Gay marriage would be better for the children of gay couples and would help to encourage monogamy in the gay community. Gays and gay couples should be afforded their equal rights and protections under the law. It is also up to all of us to fight irrational prejudices and discrimination.

The "ex-gay" thing is a sham in my opinion. It is not approved by mainstream psychology or psychiatry and most of the ex-gay people (Alan Chambers, Ted Haggard, etc) admit that they still have same sex attractions. They simply change their behavior for a time due to internalizing extreme religious views. Also many ex-gays have been caught in gay sex scandals. Many of them don't really change their behavior either.

Here are some links to articles about studies on the biology of homosexuality...

Homosexuality and the hypothalamus..

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_n9_v140/ai_11315232

Homosexuality and the amygdala...

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/sex/dn14146-gay-brains-structured-like-those-of-the-opposite-sex.html?feedId=online-news_rss20

Homosexuality and the commissure...

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=49673

Again, homosexual sheep have the same differences in hypothalamus that homosexual humans have...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3008-homosexuality-is-biological-suggests-gay-sheep-study.html

Homosexuality and Twins....

http://www.tim-taylor.com/papers/twin_studies/studies.html

Homosexuality and X-Chromosome...

http://general-medicine.jwatch.org/cgi/content/full/1993/806/1

Homosexuality and Birth Order...

http://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/news/20060626/birth-order-may-affect-homosexuality

Homosexuality and the Animal Kingdom...

http://www.news-medical.net/?id=20718

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_animals

http://www.nhm.uio.no/againstnature/index.html

Homosexuality, fruit flies, genetics, and brain hormones….

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071210094541.htm

Comment by dlw on February 5, 2009 at 2:33am: thankyou, I'll respond sometime perhaps in the coming month...

I'd say I still believe it's fallacious to refer to homosexuality as not a heterogenous set of phenomena and am also concerned about how Hume's Law that one "cannot infer an ought from an is" (without accepting an intermediary normative premise) seems to be missing in the above. It's like the argument, "God made me Gay, so it must be okay." This is based on faulty and very much contested theological notions that subvert the ways we use Natural-speak to posit certain ideas as being self-evident.

Also, as I recall, research has shown that someone with a homosexual orientation can in fact develop their heterosexual potentialities if they are highly motivated and have a strong supportive community. So in that case, even if the attraction to the same sex never goes away, it's existence does not mean they cannot choose a different path. It's simply a matter of how it is not wise to coerce folks into doing such...

dlw

Drinking the "Milk", Not the Kool-Aid!

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