Why homosexuals are wrong

Regressive child molesters are generally attracted to other adults, but may "regress" to focusing on children when confronted with stressful situations.

Groth found, as Herek notes , that the majority of regressed offenders were heterosexual in their adult relationships. Most child molesters, therefore, are not gay people lingering outside schools waiting to snatch children from the playground, as much religious-right rhetoric suggests.

In fact, the so-called college is a tiny breakaway faction of the similarly named, 60,member American Academy of Pediatrics that requires, as a condition of membership, that joiners "hold true to the group's core beliefs Gary Remafedi, a researcher at the University of Minnesota who wrote a letter to ACPeds rebuking the organization for misusing his research. In spite of all this, the anti-LGBT right continues to peddle this harmful and baseless myth , which is probably the leading defamatory charge leveled against gay people.

THE ARGUMENT Most hard-line anti-gay organizations are heavily invested, from both a religious and a political standpoint, in promoting the traditional nuclear family as the sole framework for the healthy upbringing of children. They maintain a reflexive belief that same-sex parenting must be harmful to children — although the exact nature of that supposed harm varies widely.

The American Psychological Association APA noted in that "same-sex couples are remarkably similar to heterosexual couples, and that parenting effectiveness and the adjustment, development and psychological well-being of children is unrelated to parental sexual orientation. Similarly, the Child Welfare League of America's official position with regard to same-sex parents is that "lesbian, gay, and bisexual parents are as well-suited to raise children as their heterosexual counterparts.

A review of research on same-sex parenting carried out by LiveScience, a science news website, found no differences between children raised by heterosexual parents and children raised by lesbian parents. In some cases, it found, children in same-sex households may actually be better adjusted than in heterosexual homes.

A preliminary study in Australia found that the children of lesbian and gay parents are not only thriving, but may actually have better overall health and higher rates of family cohesion than heterosexual families. The full study was published in June Despite all this, the Regnerus Study is still used in the U. MYTH 3 People become homosexual because they were sexually abused as children or there was a deficiency in sex-role modeling by their parents. This argument is used to counter the common observation that no one, gay or straight, consciously chooses his or her sexual orientation.

Joseph Nicolosi, a founder of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality , said in that "if you traumatize a child in a particular way, you will create a homosexual condition.

A side effect of this argument is the demonization of parents of gay men and lesbians, who are led to wonder if they failed to protect a child against sexual abuse or failed as role models in some important way.

The American Psychiatric Association noted in a fact sheet available on the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists, that dealing with gay, lesbian and bisexual issues, that sexual abuse does not appear to be any more prevalent among children who grow up and identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual than in children who grow up and identify as heterosexual. Similarly, the National Organization on Male Sexual Victimization notes on its website that "experts in the human sexuality field do not believe that premature sexual experiences play a significant role in late adolescent or adult sexual orientation" and added that it's unlikely that anyone can make another person gay or heterosexual.

Advocates for Youth, an organization that works in the U. In , Dr. THE ARGUMENT Anti-LGBT organizations, seeking to promote heterosexuality as the healthier "choice," often offer up the purportedly shorter life spans and poorer physical and mental health of gays and lesbians as reasons why they shouldn't be allowed to adopt or foster children.

On the basis of the same obituaries, Cameron also claimed that gay men are 18 times more likely to die in car accidents than heterosexuals, 22 times more likely to die of heart attacks than whites, and 11 times more likely than blacks to die of the same cause.

He also concluded that lesbians are times more likely to die of murder, suicide, or accidents than straight women. Remarkably, these claims have become staples of the anti-gay right and have frequently made their way into far more mainstream venues. However, like virtually all of his "research," Cameron's methodology is egregiously flawed — most obviously because the sample he selected the data from the obits was not remotely statistically representative of the LGBT population as a whole.

Even Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has called Cameron's methods "just ridiculous. Anti-LGBT organizations have also tried to support this claim by distorting the work of legitimate scholars, like a study conducted by a Canadian team of researchers that dealt with gay and bisexual men living in Vancouver in the late s and early s. The authors of the study became aware that their work was being misrepresented by anti-LGBT groups, and issued a response taking the groups to task.

The following books are highly recommended for those wishing to carefully study issues of homosexuality as related to the Christian Church:.

Boswell, John. Christianity, social tolerance, and homosexuality: gay people in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the fourteenth century. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, Countryman, Louis William. Morehouse Publishing, Furnish, Victor Paul The Moral Teaching of Paul. Nashville : Abingdon Press. Pilgrim Press, Hanks, Tom. God So Loved the Third World. Helminiak, Daniel A. San Francisco : Alamo Square Press, Heyward, Carter.

Harpercollins Horner, Tom Philadelphia : Westminster Press. McNeill, John J. The Church and the Homosexual. Boston : Beacon Press. Scroggs, Robin The New Testament and Homosexuality. The study of biblical interpretation is called hermeneutics, and helps us to address these kinds of questions. More specifically, we are seeking to determine if the biblical writers were condemning specific practices related to sexuality in the ancient world, or were they indeed condemning all same-sex relationships of any kind for the rest of time?

While gender complimentarity is indeed rooted in passages from Genesis 1 and 2, it is worth noting that these stories say God began by creating human beings of male and female sex defined as the complex result of combinations between chromosomes, gonads, genes, and genitals but there is nothing that indicates in Scripture that God only created this binary.

This account says little to nothing about gender, the social and cultural norms and practices corresponding to what is considered masculine and feminine. Two dimensions of the text that become important in considering the biblical affirmation of intersex, transgender, non-binary, and other gender diverse people, discussed at more length here. This was what allowed the first Christians to decide to include gentiles who were not keeping the Old Testament law in the early church Acts What they did suggest was that the obvious exclusion, injustice and destructive outcomes of widely held beliefs should take Christians back to the text to consider a different perspective, one which might better reflect the heart of God.

While some Christians say that the Bible presents a variety of hard teachings as well as promising suffering for followers of Jesus Matthew , it never endorses oppression. In order for suffering to be Christ-like, it must be redemptive.

Redemptive suffering does not uphold oppressive forces but always expresses resistance against them. While the six passages that address same-sex eroticism in the ancient world are negative about the practices they mention, there is no evidence that these in any way speak to same-sex relationships of love and mutuality. Kirk reminded me of an example from the gospels where Jesus actually has his mind changed by, of all people, a Canaanite woman. When she comes to ask Jesus to heal her daughter, Jesus says that his ministry was primarily for Jews.

Were Jesus to befriend gay couples committed to each other in love and fidelity, I find it tough to believe he would reject their relationships on the grounds that all same-sex love is necessarily abominable. If the essence of Torah is love, as Jesus says it is , then committed gay relationships are hardly unbiblical. But by thinking along with, or inside of, the memory of Jesus, which is dynamic and always contemporary, and constantly on the move, we can hazard a guess that this same Jesus—who is always coming to the aid of those cast out of polite society, who is always challenging religious ideologues, who is constantly wrestling with the scriptures and re-imagining their applications—might some day find himself being asked to create wine at a gay wedding.

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