Gayness in the News, Please Deposit Two Cents

First of all, let me qualify this article by saying that I am not gay, I am not immersed in the gay culture, nor do I know a whole lot of gay people. I know a few homosexuals, but other than that, my experience is rather limited. I do not have an inside track on all this gayness or some special insight. I am not a homophobe, I am not uncomfortable around gay people, flagrant or otherwise.



But I've been seeing a lot of this stuff in the news, a lot of this stuff in discussion, and a lot of blogs with this as the topic. The straw that broke the camel's back to make me comment on all this stuff was the blog entry "I Protest. In particular, a phrase on the page caught my attention: "The ignorant still believe that when a gay couple raise a child, that child will also be gay, as if homosexuality is something that is learned. "



The implication of this statement is that if we as people don't believe that homosexuality is genetic, we are unenlightened and ignorant.



I'm not meaning to slam a gay person. I'm not meaning to bash on gay people, I'm simply stating that I don't remember when the irrefutable evidence came out that homosexuality was anything but adaptation or learned behavior.



This may be flawed logic, but I have always reasoned that the nature of homosexuality dictates that if there were a gene for it, their own sexual proclivities would prevent it from being passed on indefinately, and thus the gene would die out. But moving past that, let's say for a moment that it is genetic. Down's Syndrome is genetic, yet we do not consider this as a positive, life affirming physical state.



Homosexual behaviors are fraught with serious mental health and physical consequences--all of which are well documented in scientific literature. In 1999, the Medical Institute of Sexual Health reported that, "Homosexual men are at significantly increased risk of HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, anal cancer, gonorrhea and gastrointestinal infections as a result of their sexual practices." One doesn't have to consider homosexuality to be sinful to understand that such behaviors places its participants at risk for mental/physical illnesses.



Through my scans of various medical articles during the research of this piece, a cursory glance at one medical research site revealed about five seperate gay activists that they themselves attempted to prove the genetic ties to homosexuality and did not reach the conclusion they sought.



Researcher Dean Hamer, for example, attempted to link male homosexuality to a stretch of DNA located at the tip of the X chromosome, the chromosome that some men inherit from their mothers. Referring to that research, Hamer offered some conclusions regarding genetics and homosexuality.

"We knew that genes were only part of the answer. We assumed the environment also played a role in sexual orientation, as it does in most, if not all behaviors....



Homosexuality is not purely genetic...environmental factors play a role. There is not a single master gene that makes people gay....I don't think we will ever be able to predict who will be gay."

When Hamer's study was duplicated by Rice et al with research that was more robust, the genetic markers were found to be nonsignificant. Rice concluded.

"It is unclear why our results are so discrepant from Hamer's original study. Because our study was larger than that of Hamer's et al, we certainly had adequate power to detect a genetic effect as large as reported in that study. Nonetheless, our data do not support the presence of a gene of large effect influencing sexual orientation at position XQ 28."

Simon LeVay, in his study of the hypothalamic differences between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men, offered the following criticisms of his own research:

"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. Nor did I locate a gay center in the brain.



"INAH3 is less likely to be the sole gay nucleus of the brain than part of a chain of nuclei engaged in men and women's sexual behavior...Since I looked at adult brains, we don't know if the difference I found were there at birth, or if they appeared later."

I'm not going to cut and paste every one of these -- my only point in writing this article is to blow the whistle on this whole stating of facts that aren't really facts as proven facts. It's unfortunate that a lot of seemingly intelligent people do this. I've had a lot of discussions with people with college degrees and people with proven track records of achievement that degenerated into namecalling simply because they simply won't try to prove statements like "You must be ignorant if you believe that homosexuality isn't genetic," or statements like "That man evolved from apes through Darwinian evolution is a proven fact, to believe otherwise means you've bought into Judeo-Christian propaganda."



All I'm asking of you people is to question the authority of what you're told once in a while. It's possible to have too open of a mind. If you mind is too open, just about anything can (and will) fall in.



/rizzn