Same Sex Science

from Stand Firm by Jackie

First Things has an excellent article on same sex science that uses a - well - scientific approach to looking at same sex attraction.  I am sure the usual suspects will be up in arms with accusations of homophobia and bigotry proceeding any actual reading of the article.  In any event, I highly recommend you hie thee hence.

Is homosexuality biologically determined at birth? A pervasive understanding is settling into Western culture that homosexual orientation, indeed any and all sexual orientations, has been proven by science to be a given of the human person and rooted in biology. Why does this falsehood—that homosexuality has been proven to have an exclusively biological cause—matter? It is the basis for asserting that sexual orientation is the same sort of characteristic as race or skin color, which has become, for instance, the foundational metaphor in the push for the right to marry someone of the same sex.

One reason it is generally believed that homosexuality is conclusively caused by biological factors is the supposed lack of a credible alternative. Two astonishing examples: The 2009 APA task force report on Sexual Orientation Change Efforts (SOCE), Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation, presents over and over as established “scientific fact” that “no empirical studies or peer-reviewed research supports theories attributing same-sex sexual orientation to family dysfunction or trauma.” Neuroscientist Simon LeVay, author of a major book on the science of same-sex attraction, in considering environmental and psychological factors influencing sexual orientation concludes that “there is no actual evidence to support any of those ideas.”

There are, in fact, many such studies and a lot of actual evidence. Recent studies show that familial, cultural, and other environmental factors contribute to same-sex attraction. Broken families, absent fathers, older mothers, and being born and living in urban settings all are associated with homosexual experience or attraction. Even that most despised of hypothesized causal contributors, childhood sexual abuse, has recently received significant empirical validation as a partial contributor from a sophisticated thirty-year longitudinal study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. Of course, these variables at most partially determine later homosexual experience, and most children who experienced any or all of these still grow up heterosexual, but the effects are nonetheless real.

Hat tip: Rev’d Dr. Leander Harding