30-09-2011
During an interview for Tertio in 2011, Minister Pascal Smet made some remarkable statements. The fact that young people who go to the World Youth Days can count on financial support from the government in the future will have surprised many (pleasantly). What was probably less surprising is the statement that homosexuality is innate. But is that really the case? Cavaria, in her brochure Everything you’ve always wanted to know about gays (title translated from Dutch), literally writes (translated): “Sexual feelings can’t really be tested. After all, feelings are not absolute: they can change your whole life. There have been hundreds of studies into what exactly determines whether you are gay or straight. Research into genes, hormones, brain, upbringing… Actually, we don’t know.”
See: watjealtijdalwildewetenoverholebis.pdf (cavaria.be). In doing so, they more or less articulate what the American Psychiatric Association has been writing for several years: “Although much research has been done into the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social and cultural influences on sexual orientation, scientists cannot deduce which factors determine sexual orientations. Many think that nature and education both play a complex role.” See: Answers to your questions for a better understanding of sexual orientation and homosexuality (apa.org)
So where does this apparently well-established idea that homosexuality is innate come from? In 1985, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen wrote an article “The Gay Agenda” in Christopher Street magazine. It stated that it was important to focus the debate on homosexuality on a kind of homosexual identity. One had to be able to accuse opponents of homosexual behavior of not respecting the civil rights of homosexuals. For this, they considered it important that public opinion should be convinced of the idea that homosexuality is innate.
At first, the gay movement was not enthusiastic about this, but that changed when in the Bowers v. Hardwick case in 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that individual states could retain the right to criminalize homosexual behavior. A new approach proved necessary, and since American Civil Law provided that being born a certain way can entitle you to protection as a minority group, the idea that homosexuality is innate became an important strategy for obtaining so-called gay rights. Kirk and Madsen then wrote a new article, “The Overhauling of Straight America” that detailed how to convince the American public that homosexuality is innate. More about this can be read in the study made by Ryan Sorba on the development of the gay movement, entitled “The Born Gay Hoax”. See: http://www.massresistance.org/docs/gen/08a/born_gay_hoax/TheBornGayHoax.pdf .
Thus, the idea that homosexuality is innate turns out to be an idea promoted for political reasons without scientific evidence. That this has had certain consequences that are anything but innocent is demonstrated, for example, by the resolution adopted by the European Parliament in January 2006, which equated homophobia with racism, which refers to the idea that sexual orientation, like race, is innate (and unchanging). See: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&reference=P6-TA-2006-0018&language=EN .
Such a resolution effectively makes anyone who dislikes homosexual behavior (phobia stands for irrational fear or disgust) a potential criminal, and we know all too well how easily anyone who criticizes certain “gay rights” like marriage and parenthood is accused of homophobia these days. There is even an official international day against homophobia! Criminalizing the disapproval of homosexual behavior is a logical consequence of equating sexual orientation with race. Similarly, in America, the ban on same-sex marriage is compared to the ban on marriages between different races at the time, and the fact of opposing same-sex marriage is enough to be called a “hateful bigot”!
What is also striking is that other forms of sexual behavior are not taken into account. Sexual orientation only seems to apply to the gender you’re attracted to. What to do with, for example, nymphomania, sadomasochism, necrophilia, all kinds of fetishism? Can we still express one’s disgust without being accused of phobia or hatred?
In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.) removed homosexuality from its list of sexual deviances, and in 1990 the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) would do the same. The A.P.A. later also removed sadomasochism (by mutual consent) and nymphomania from its list of sexual deviances. Even pedophilia was scrapped for a short time (in 1994)! The argument that applied to homosexuality, that it does not in itself give rise to social or other problems and that the persons themselves did not regard their sexual orientation as undesirable, could just as easily be applied to other ‘deviations’. Pedophilia has been claimed from certain angles to be not necessarily harmful to children! (see, for example, the study Boys on friendship and sex with men by Dr. Theo Sandfort in 1986). How long before sadomasochism and whatnot is called a kind of “race” and there is an international day against SM-phobia and so on? What applies to homosexuals is equally true for sadomasochists isn’t it? They didn’t choose it, they can’t change it, and they’re not hurting anyone, are they? Will a homosexual sadomasochist only become depressed if one does not socially accept his homosexuality?
There is, of course, a difference. Homosexuality becomes more easily public than sadomasochism and hence there is probably more need for homosexual activism than with SM. However, this does not get to the heart of the matter, that is, that one should no longer disapprove of certain forms of sexual behavior, because certain people say “that they are so”. People with certain sexual feelings will usually find them “normal” because they experience them as a part of themselves. This does not only apply to sexual feelings. It is our environment and upbringing that holds certain standards and confronts us with certain tendencies within ourselves that do not correspond to them. For example, those who have never learned that excessive snacking, being attracted to pornography, or other “spontaneous” tendencies are inadvisable, have a good chance of never realizing this or too late and never getting those tendencies under control. Self-correction is part of the school of our humanity.
A “feel-good” society that eschews any kind of criticism of individuals’ self-analysis ultimately helps no one. We are also starting to notice the same with the so-called transgender people. Apparently, it is enough for them to claim that they prefer to be the opposite sex, so that this must be accepted and granted uncritically, otherwise they will become depressed. Strangely enough, on the one hand it is stated that sexual orientation is immutable, but gender is not! If there is one thing that is clearly genetically unchanging, it is gender!!
In addition to the idea that (gay) sexual orientation is innate, there is also the idea that it is immutable. If one wants to put sexual orientation on the same level as race, then one must also be able to say that it is immutable, because race is also immutable. Again, scientific research has not provided evidence for what is constantly claimed. The 1994 Laumann study, The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States, whose findings were repeatedly confirmed by other large-scale studies, has shown that homosexuality is not an immutable trait and that it can spontaneously transition into heterosexuality with age, that sexual “identity” is not fixed during adolescence but continues to change throughout the rest of life. Why don’t we hear about it? There are far too many interests at stake. Legislation has been adjusted, LGBT people are massively open and out in society. The consequences would be dramatic if it suddenly turns out that everything is based on lies!
That is the real drama of the gay movement. A movement that stands up for more respect for people, but does so through deception, ultimately harms those people themselves. It is the tragedy of thinking that one is born and unchanging, while there are often factors that play a role that may no longer even be negotiable due to such deterministic thinking. Often there are problems in a person’s life that are repressed and for which one seeks a way out through other channels, which then have a kind of drug effect. They give a feeling of happiness, but are in fact a flight from reality. For example, it took twenty years for a man to understand why he was gay. His testimony is in the book “Ne deviens pas gay, tu finiras triste” (“Don’t get gay, you’ll end up sad”) under the pseudonym Sébastien. In it he talks about his experiences as a practicing homosexual and how he only understood very late that the death of his fiancée and son (in an accident) was at the root of his homosexual feelings.
We also know that sexual abuse causes a lot of emotional distress to the victims. Can it also be said that when a boy is abused by an adult man, this can give rise to a homosexual “orientation”? No, that is not allowed nowadays, because then one might think that homosexuality is not perfectly normal and equal. In this way, the gay movement harms to its own people!! The founder of today’s gay movement, Harry Hay, was himself sexually initiated as a child by a grown man and, unsurprisingly, he also supported the controversial Lambda organization that sought to legalize sexual relations between teenage boys and adult men.
Rather than investigate and dare to name the whole complexity of causes and psychological reactions, public opinion is told that everything is normal and good, as long as there is no more homophobia! This self-deception is very unfortunate in itself, but it becomes harmful to society when education, media and politics conform legislation, programmes and teaching materials to such ideas and there is a kind of correct thinking in which dissent is criminalised.
D.B.
Forumcatholicum 