Before turning one-by-one to the Scriptures that supposedly condemn homosexuality, I want to examine a few prejudices that are always hanging around in the mind of the conservative. One theme of the Christian war against homosexuality is that God created each individual either male or female, and thus anyone that is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered is rebelling against their own nature. So it is by nature that they were created, and only by some poor choices or circumstances that their natures were corrupted.
A full account of the phenomenon of homosexuality is probably impossible. In any event, it is unnecessary to do here. Instead, I want to focus on one piece of evidence that shows that the conservative is clearly mistaken in his belief that homosexuality is always a matter of personal or social conditioning.
The motive behind the idea that God would not make anyone homosexual in nature or in disposition is motivated by the desire to “rescue” God from wrong-doing. That is, being gay is just so horrible as it seems to the conservative, that God could not possibly be guilty of creating someone with this disposition. It must be that the individual chose his or her own fate. But that just doesn’t square with the facts. We know that there are “intersex” individuals, sometimes called “hermaphrodites,” born with both sets of genitalia. By some counts, there are 50,000 of these individuals in the U.S alone. Even though we can admit that it is not the ideal of nature to be born with both sets of genitalia, we must also acknowledge that it just happens, and that it is clearly “natural.”
So we must let go of this notion that nature only produces males with a masculine nature and desires and females with a feminine nature and desires, for it is demonstrably untrue. I don’t want to get into the business of making judgments about something that I know almost nothing about, and saying how nature and nurture contribute differently to homosexuality. But I certainly do know that those individuals who are born with both male and female genitalia certainly did not choose the genitalia they received, and they could not have been given one, fixed nature that corresponded with their gender.
