Bleeding Hearts and Propaganda: Chapter Three

The 1960s revamped how Americans view sexual behavior. Before then Americans honored sex only within marriage. They wrote laws against adultery, fornication, prostitution, pornography, and homosexuality. In fact, American medicine and science considered homosexuality a disordersomething to be treated. The sexual revolution of the 1960s changed all that; much of American society rejected all forms of sexual restraint.

The sexual liberation movement, under the banner "free love," set up headquarters in San Franciscos Haight-Ashbury district and championed all sexual expression.

Americas new radical sexuality provides an excellent example of how passion robs reason.

Human sexuality is a tremendously complex subject, threading through every aspect of mankinds physical, psychological, and moral being. Because sexuality is so powerful, society has always spelled out what is sexually right or wrong.

True, sexual codes have not always been pefectly consistentwhat has been moral in one time and place has sometimes been immoral in another. Some societies of the past, it is true, did accept homosexuality. However, Western civilization has normally condemned it. Gay activists who suggest that in the past homosexuality was widely accepted are trying to rewrite Western history. As the Encyclopedia Britannica states:

&Experts disagree over whether the literary praise of homosexuality [in ancient Greece] meant that it was acceptable for society in general or only for the elite&M. K. Opler has note: "Actually, no society, save perhaps ancient Greece, pre-Miji Japan, certain top echelons of Nazi Germany, and &scattered [other] examples&has lent sanctions in any real sense to homosexuality.

By the same token, Western nations in the modern era have treated homosexuality as a sexual deviation, cataloging it with transvestitism, pedophilia, fetishism, incest, bestiality, necrophilia, exhibitionism, sadism, voyeurism, sadism, rape, and nymphomania. It was not until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association dropped homosexuality from its official manual of mental disorders.

Sodomy once was illegal throughout the United States and continues to be against the law in many states. The United States Supreme Court continues to uphold the right of individual states to outlaw sodomy.

However, the gay lobby fights a relentless public relations battle to persuade America that homosexuality is normal behavior. They have convinced many Americans.

The gay lobby wants to prove that homosexuality is genetic. While public opinion has bought the argument, science has not. Of the four main theories for the origin of homosexual behavior: psychological disorder; hormonal disorder; learning disorder and genetic disorder; the genetic theory is the least scientifically supported.

During the last two decades, the gay movement has insisted that nature produces homosexuals; they are born gaythey do not choose their orientation. They believe that if they can prove that homosexuality is genetic, they will have proven that it is "natural." If it is natural, they reason, it cannot be sin. It must be as good as heterosexuality. Gay author Randy Shilts, (author of the 1987 bestseller And the Band Played On) who recently died of AIDS, said "It would reduce being gay to something like being left-handed."

Homosexuals have tried to find scientific proof to back up their theory. They have come up with studies which they say proves their point. Most of the so-called "straight" world has gone along with the published reports about these studies. Today, public opinion largely accepts that gays are born gay.

However, there is no scientific reason to conclude that gayness is genetic! On the contrary, scientific evidence which indicates that homosexuality is genetic is scanty and flawed. Further, mainstream scientific studies consistently point to other causes.

Homosexual advocates of the genetic theory use two kinds of studies to make their case. However, these studies are flawed in many ways. One of the major studies, for example, was conducted by a homosexual scientist who believed in advance that homosexuality is genetic.

Simon LeVay, a neuroscientist, is head of the Institute of Gay and Lesbian Education. LeVay says he knew he was homosexual by the age of twelve. He also knew "within himself" that homosexuals are born gay. When his homosexual lover died of AIDS, LeVay went into deep depression. About that time he read of a scientific study which attempted to demonstrate that a particular portion of the male human brain was different in size and shape than the female brain. The study suggested that a portion of the hypothalamus was larger in men than in women. LeVay theorized that this difference might be found when comparing the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men.

LeVay wondered if he could prove that a cluster of neurons in the hypothalamus (known as INAH 3) was larger in heterosexual males than homosexuals. In fact, he hung his scientific career on making that discovery. "I felt," he said, "if I didnt find anything, I would give up a scientific career altogether." He claims he found what he hoped to find when he examined the brains of 41 cadavers: 19 self-avowed homosexual men, 16 heterosexual men, and 6 heterosexual women.

Immediately, gay rights organizations rallied behind LeVays research, claiming a victory for the genetic theory of sexual orientation. However, most of the scientific community refused to buy into his conclusions.

In 1994, Scientific American published a critique of LeVays research. The author, William Byne is a research associate in the Albert Einstein College of the Yeshiva University in New York, where he investigates the brain structure of humans and other primates. He is also an attending psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Byne challenges LeVays research on three grounds.

First, Byne points out that other scientists have not been able to reproduce LeVays worka requirement for research which is to become accepted among other scientists. According to Byne, brain studies of the kind LeVay bases his conclusions upon have "a very poor track record." Byne says similar studies produce inconsistent results when scientists attempt to duplicate them.

Second, Byne says LeVays study, instead of proving that the brain produces homosexuality, may really prove that AIDS affects the brain. "&It is possible," Byne says, "that the effects&[LeVay] attributed to sexual orientation were actually caused by the&AIDS."

Third, Byne said that LeVays work is "founded on an imprecise analysis of the relevant&research." A problem, Byne says, is that the region of the hypothalamus in question is a cluster of cells the size of a snowflake and it has not even been definitely proven to be the center of male sexual behavior.

LeVays study was also criticized by Kenneth Klivington, assistant to the president of the prestigious Salk Institute. Klivington points out that most scientific evidence suggests the brain-shape more often responds to human behavior rather than shapes it. He points to a study by the National Institutes of Health which found that people who learn to read Braille change the configuration of the brain. They show that the portion of the brain which controls the movement of the index finger gets bigger as they learn to read Braille.

The worst indictment of LeVay is, of course that he was never objective in his study. He is a homosexual who was convinced that homosexuality was genetic before he began his investigation and set out to discover what he already knew to be true. He is hardly an unbiased observer.

Finally, Byne refers to Stephen Jay Gould, one of the worlds most well known scientists, a paleontologist from Harvard. Gould points out that scientists in the past attempted to measure the brain in ways as to justify their prejudices against women and other social groups. Their work, he says, has been discredited.

In other words, attempting to measure the shape and size of the brain in a way which accurately describes the psychological make-up of individuals is, at the present time, no more scientific than phrenologythe now discredited attempt to measure the shape and bumps of the skull in order to reveal character and mental capacity.

The second kind of study attempting to prove that homosexuality is genetic involves the study of homosexuality among twins. Half-a-dozen such studies have been conducted since 1985, beginning with one done by psychologist Michael Bailey of Northwestern University, and psychiatrist Richard Pillard of Boston university School of Medicine. These studies suggest that the identical twin brother of a homosexual is more likely to be gay than if he were a fraternal twin. This, homosexual advocates assert, is proof of a genetic origin for homosexuality. Further, the studies suggest that a fraternal twin of a homosexual is more likely to be gay than if he were simply a brother (not a twin brother).

The gay lobby, naturally, not only jumps on such data as proof that homosexuality is in the genes, but that it proves homosexuality cannot be immoral. Pillard declares "A genetic component in sexual orientation says, This is not a fault, and its not your fault."

However, the rest of the scientific community is no more ready to accept these studies than it was the LeVay study. Anne Fausto Stirling, a developmental biologist at Brown University says the attempt to use the study to underwrite the gay position represents, "badly interpreted genetics."

William Byne doesnt like the twin study either. He said Bailey and Pillard yielded "paradoxical results." "Some [of their] statistics support a genetic hypothesis, and others refute it." Another problem for Byne is that these studies invariably examine twins reared together. This, he says, confuses the issue; is the homosexuality genetic or is it caused by the environment and upbringing of the twins? Stirling agrees: "In order for such a study to be at all meaningful, youd have to look at twins raised apart."

Byne suggests genetic studies really serve only to tell us how little we really know about the cause of homosexuality. The results of the studies, he says, are far from convincing:

Perhaps the major finding of these heredity studies is that despite having all of their genes in common and having prenatal and postnatal environments as close to identical as possible, approximately half of the identical twins [werent homosexual]. This finding underscores just how little is known about the origins of sexual orientation.

The next time someone tells you homosexuality is genetic, rest assured they either are not familiar with current scientific thought or they are ignoring it. They are simply parroting the propaganda of the radical gay rights movement.

Even if homosexuality were genetic, that would not make it moral. Morality must ultimately be decided by God. However societyeven a secular societyalways excercises the option and responsibility to determine what it deems in its best interest. Society forbids blind people to drive; it doesnt matter if they were born blind or became blind. We declare blind drivers unsafe. People may be denied privileges in a society because of their infirmities, regardless of the cause, if their activity is dangerous.

Again, society outlaws murderit does not become moral simply because someone is a born killer. We do not overlook the crimes of rapists because they cant help themselves. We will not decide that since murder and rape seem to be "normal" for some people we should decriminalize those acts.

Proponents of homosexual practice will say we cant compare murder and rape to homosexuality because homosexuality doesnt harm anyone. That point, however, is arguable. For a couple of thousand years Western civilization has said just the opposite: it has said homosexuality, adultery, fornication, pornography, and other sexual deviations are, indeed, harmful.

We do not have to look further than the current AIDS epidemic to understand that homosexuality is harmful to society. Without rampant homosexuality (and the sharing of dirty drug needles) there would be no AIDS crisis in the United States. Northern AIDS (in the United States, Europe, and Japan), say researchers, is primarily spread by anal sex and IV drug use. I do not say that with rancor; I simply state an irrefutable fact.

In writing this book, I spent dozens of hours reading hundreds of news stories on the AIDS crisis as it came to national attention in the mid 1980s. The subject of AIDS literally dominated the headlines for several years. I was amazed at the change in opinion which occurred in the United States as the AIDS story unfolded.

In the early years, there was much discussion for example about promiscuity among homosexuals. Reports circulated that homosexual men might have had thousands of partners:

A Center(s) for Disease Control study showed that homosexual men infected with the AIDS virus had averaged 60 partners&a year. And Dr. Thomas Prendergast, chief epidemiologist for the Orange County (California) Health Care Agency, said some studies &suggest that some AIDS-infected gays may have averaged 1,100 partners in the early 1980s. But he [added] that "thats changed&"

And now, some fifteen years after the discovery of the disease, homosexuals as a group seem to be returning to their early promiscuity. The London Sunday Telegraph reported in August of 1994:

"Back rooms" in pubs and clubs, where men go for quick sex with other men, are opening up again. Saunas and bathhouses, many of which closed amid fears that they were a fertile breeding ground for the Aids virus, are back in business. The only difference from the promiscuous days of the 1970s is that men are now strict about using condoms.

The AIDS crisis threatens the entire world health community. It is therefore now naive to sayas some have said in the pastthat "What consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedrooms is no ones business but their own." That is now clearly now wrong.

The AIDS epidemic strains our health care system. A brutal fact of life is that we already ration health caresome people will not get care because there will be no health care dollars for them. It is not rational to allow unrestricted sexual practices which endanger the entire society. Thirty years ago we required a person infected with gonorrhea to name his sex partners so health workers could contact and warn them to get medical help. Today it is against the law to identify people infected with one of the most deadly viruses known to man. We once quarantined people who had communicable diseases.

Am I suggesting that we should quarantine AIDS victims? No, I am not. I am simply saying that we have gone to the ludicrous extreme of valuing a homosexuals right to unrestricted sexual conduct over the health of society.

Am I suggesting that we should have no concern for the lives of men and women who find themselves trapped in a psychological condition which puts them at odds with society and causes them, in many cases, terrible anguish? Of course not. As in everything, Christians have the most profound call to compassion, to charity, and to patience. Nevertheless, the fact remains that most homosexuals believe they are homosexual by naturethey do not believe they chose homosexuality.

Again, I am ready to believe that many homosexuals did not choose their condition. Their homosexuality most likely results from their childhood environment. Certainly our society has not done a good job of producing emotionally healthy people. A sick society may have damaged the homosexuals ability to relate to the opposite sex in the way God intended. We all bear a responsibility for his or her condition.

The Bible speaks of corporate guiltthere is sin in the camp. Homosexuals are as much victims of sin as they are perpetrators. Society has produced social ill health. Sickness swells at every levelchildren hate parents, parents abandon children. I have no problem believing we have created the homosexual crisis as well.

However, our compassion cannot allow us to encourage a practice which endangers our social fabric. The social contract exists to protect society. We strive to restrain practices we deem harmful. In a saner age, it outlawed abortion and frivolous divorce.

The essential question is not why people want to engage in certain acts, but what the consequence of their conduct is. When we put restrictions on divorce, we did so because we believed easy divorce led to broken homes and a shattered society. Today, unfortunately, we have lost our way. We esteem the individuals freedom to do anything he wants, at any time he wants, to any one he wants. We no longer protect hearth and home. We have devalued the sanctity of marriage and family, which has produced welfare moms, deadbeat dads, latchkey kids, teen-age thugs, and babies having babies.

We cannot afford to organize our social contracts around what people feel like doing. We have to make deadbeat dads pay child support even though they dont feel like doing it. We must decide monogamy and fidelity are essential to a healthy society, and we must use our civic will to eradicate sexual promiscuity.

At the same time, we must respect the condition of those trapped in homosexuality. We do not desire to eradicate homosexuals, we desire to heal them. It is urgent that we do so immediately.

Societies which lose their way in these social areas are in "clear and present danger." A very interesting article appeared in a recent issue of Christianity Today. The author, Philip Yancey, reminded us that God has spoken to us about sex. If we choose to ignore Him we will suffer as a nation:

If we make a god of sexuality, that god will fail in ways that affect the whole person and perhaps the whole society.

&Im still thinking about a book, "Sex and Culture," published in 1934. I discovered it in the windowless warrens of a large university library, and I felt like an archaeologist must feel unearthing an artifact from the catacombs.

Seeking to test the Freudian notion that civilization is a byproduct of repressed sexuality, the scholar J. D. Unwin studied 86 different societies. His findings startled many scholarsabove all, Unwin himselfbecause all 86 demonstrated a direct tie between monogamy and the "expansive energy" of civilization.

Unwin had no Christian convictions and applied no moral judgment: "I offer no opinion about rightness or wrongness." Nevertheless, he had to conclude, "In human records there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist on pre-nuptial and post-nuptial continence."

For Roman, Greek, Sumerian, Moorish, Babylonian, and Anglo-Saxon civilizations, Unwin had several hundred years of history to draw on. He found with no exceptions that these societies flourished during eras that valued sexual fidelity. Inevitably, sexual mores would loosen and the societies would subsequently decline, only to rise again when they returned to more rigid sexual standards.

Homosexuals say they have no control over their sexual orientation. They say homosexual men are attracted to other men and are sexually alienated from women. However, that does not mean they can be totally free to pursue their sexual gratification without regard for the rest of the community. Society has the responsibility to ask itself what the costs are for total sexual liberty.

Likewise, heterosexuals have no right to expect society to condone their every sexual preference any more than homosexuals do. It is time to come to our senses regarding unbridled sexual permissiveness and return to sanity and fidelity.

No one should be free to satisfy his sexual urges at the expense of his fellow citizens. A sexually promiscuous man should not be allowed to act in any way he chooses. In fact, we still put limits on sexual promiscuity.

A man is not free to seduce any woman he wants to. We attempt to protect women from unwarranted sexual advances. In addition we restrict the age of consent, so that a philanderer is not free to seduce children. We also require that sexual conquests be restricted if the victim is not of sufficient mental capacity to make sexual decisions.

Granted, in a democracy, sexual laws change. As I mentioned, we no longer deem divorce a great social evil. To many people it is relatively unimportant. Marriage to them is not holy; it is not vital to society and it is not vital to the definition of the family. It is a convenience entered into easily and just as easily exited.

In a democracy, it is certainly permissible to make homosexuality legal, but being legal is not the same as being right. The gay lobby is attempting to make homosexuality legalboth homosexual practice and homosexual marriage. Gays are experiencing great success. In 1992, America elected President Clinton with the help of the homosexual lobby. He immediately moved to stop the practice of banning homosexuals from military service.

Homosexuals may win the political battle. They may eventually expand sexual liberties to include legalized prostitution, pornography, and pedophilia. Not all homosexuals want those things legalized, but some do. They may be able to achieve their goals. That doesnt mean their goals are good for society. Immorality has ruined societies in the past and will do so in the future.

The sexual revolution is tied to an anti-Western Civilization mind-set currently bent on revising history. There are many people today who deride the values which drove men to establish the Western democracies. According to them, our Founding Fathers were not noble, but rather selfish and chauvinistic. Western history, they say, is nothing more than the macho ramblings of dead white-European-males. Unfortunately, these ideas are contributing to the overall destruction of our Western values.

Rampant relativism seeks to ensure that every culture, every philosophical idea, every social experiment will be considered as good as any other. It seeks to demonstrate that the classic philosophers were fools to think they could discover "the Good." It wants to prove that nothing is better than anything else, or rather, everything is as good as anything else.

Dr. Allen Bloom, whom I mentioned in chapter one, lamented the curse of the rising tide of modern relativism in his book, The Closing of the American Mind:

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative...The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance...(p 25)

The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism...

What right, they ask, do I or anyone else have to say that one [opinion or culture] is better than the others?

If I pose the routine questions designed to confute them and make them think, such as, "If you had been a British administrator in India, would you have let the natives under your governance burn the widow at the funeral of a man who had died," they either remain silent or reply that the British should never have been there in the first place. It is not that they know very much about other nations, or about their own. The purpose of their education is not to make them scholars, but to provide them with [the one] moral virtueopenness.

As relativism gained ground in American thinking, and as sexual attitudes were liberated, homosexuals began coming out of the closet. Not only did they demand the right to engage in sexual practices which once were illegal, they wanted respect as well.

Homosexuals banded together to raise the national consciousness about homosexuality. Organizations like Act Up! took to the streets to demonstrate for "gay rights." They became increasingly militant, storming television news rooms and churches and conducting public "outings." (A closet homosexual is "outed" when he is identified publicly)

The homosexual lobby is dynamic, well funded, and effective. Homosexuals equate their bid for public acceptance with the Black civil rights struggle (a claim which incenses many Blacks). The gay agenda is so effective that citizens who disapproved of homosexual behavior are labeled intolerant or homophobic.

By the 1992 general election, President Clinton ran on a platform which included a strong gay rights plank. Upon his election he immediately moved to lift the ban on homosexuals in the military and brought homosexuals into high offices throughout his administration.

As the gay movement affected American society, Liberal churchmen soon recognized homosexuals as another persecuted minority and joined homosexuals on the picket lines. The pressure became so great that some Evangelical leaders were seduced.

In the next chapter I address the amazing lengths to which these Christians are willing to stretch scripture and science to account for their liberal views.