For years we have been told that homosexuality is something people are born with — like the color of one’s skin — and that it can’t be changed. Gay-rights activists insist this is so, because, they say, if people don’t choose to be gay, it would be wrong to discriminate against them in things like marriage, adoption, and legal benefits.
And heaven help those who disagree. Just ask actress Cynthia Nixon, who in a recent New York Times Magazine article had the gall to admit that she chose to be gay.
Nixon, who played one of the characters on the old “Sex and the City” television series, was involved in 15-year relationship with a man that produced two children. Now, however, Nixon has moved on to a so-called “gay” relationship with woman. In the article, Nixon is quoted about her sexual life, “For me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me.”
Curiously, gay activists, who in almost any other instance would celebrate a “woman’s choice,” are really upset. “Cynthia did not put adequate thought into the ramifications of her words,” said Wayne Besen, founder of Truth Wins Out, which opposes programs that seek to cure people of homosexuality. “When people say it’s a choice,” Besen added, “they are green-lighting an enormous amount of abuse.”
No, what Nixon is green-lighting is the dangerous idea that people make choices about their sexual lifestyle. And that’s a clear and present danger to the agenda of the gay-rights movement. That agenda seeks to prove that the gay lifestyle is natural and inevitable. But friends, there is absolutely no proof, and there'll probably never be any proof, that people are “born gay.”
University of California-Davis psychologist Gregory Herek, an “expert on anti-gay prejudice,” admits, “The nature vs. nurture debate really is passé. The debate,” he said, “is not really an either/or debate in the vast majority of cases, but how much of each. We don’t know how big a role biology plays and how big a role culture plays.”
Wheaton College’s Stan Jones, who has written extensively on the subject, says the best research reveals that homosexual attraction is the result of a complex and mysterious interaction of biological, psychological, and environmental factors that produce different results for different people. Jones, and anyone else who has looked at the evidence in an unbiased way, says that there is no “gay gene.”
Thus, the project to — in the words of one pro-gay writer, “make homophobia as inexcusable as racism” — has failed. For some people, homosexuality is a choice, and to whatever extent that is true, the fact is we all have a choice about how we will respond to our various sexual inclinations and express our sexual brokenness.
And, contrary to what we hear, the different sexual choices people make are not all equal. Only one conforms to nature and nature’s God.
No, God’s Word does not give us a definitive word about the cause of homosexuality, but it is crystal-clear that we need to reject homosexual behavior as sinful, to embrace sex only in the context of marriage between a man and a woman, and to treat everyone we meet — homosexual or not — with love and respect.
Chuck Colson's daily BreakPoint commentary airs each weekday on more than one thousand outlets with an estimated listening audience of one million people. BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends via radio, interactive and print.
Publication date: February 9, 2012