Be Nice To Homosexuals
...mes even the Adventist church leadership appears to mistreat the people--homosexuals--who have no choice. Members should be aware of this and not follow their example. Aubyn Fulton, a teacher of psychology here at PUC, agrees. He believes: It is depressing to be reminded that the Church can also be simplistic and dogmatic, ignoring both biblical and human complexity to reaffirm standard moral clichés that ring hollow (about homosexuality) [ . . .] One can be disappointed that, at the last Annual Council in the second millennium of our Lord, the Church did not find courage to draw a circle large enough to include heterosexual and homosexual members in redemptive conversation and community. He, as an Adventist, is also against the prejudicial rejection of homosexuals. Sometimes it is hard to believe that an imperfect organization sometimes will not include people who are themselves imperfect. We cannot condemn people or look down on them for being gay when they have no choice. There are influential studies showing why a person may be gay. The reasons include the physiology of one's body, a person's choice, or the prenatal effect of stress (combination of physiological and environmental effects). The strongest evidence, however, comes from three cases: two that show physiological causes, and one that shows an environmental-physiological cause. Psychologist Gunter Dorner conducted an experiment that suggests the stress a mother undergoes during childbearing may be a cause of homosexuality. In one of his tests on rats, he tested the amounts of hormones flowing through the baby's body when in the womb of a stressed mother, and concluded that the hormones in the stressed rats were abnormally unbalanced, and, if this occurred in humans, may end up in gay behavior. He did a follow-up survey of a group of gay and heterosexual men born during WWII and three-quarters of the homosexuals born during that period had mothers who had experienced significant amounts of stress, like the loss of a son or husband (qtd. in LeVay 175). A study conducted by Richard Pillard and Michael Bailey shows us that at least 52 percent of homosexual orientation is physiological. They found homosexual monozygotic twins--identical twins, that share the exact same genes at birth--and found a 52 percent correlation that if one twin is gay that the other will also be gay. Then they compared it to dizygotic twins--fraternal twins, sharing only the genes of siblings--and came up with a correlation of 22 percent (qtd. in LeVay 175). Dean Hamer, a leading molecular geneticist at the National Cancer Institute, conducted a study where he plotted out the family trees of homosexual men and found out that the gays in the families all came through a similar connection. The females were the ones who passed on the gay genes. Hamer's conclusions were that "A gay man in the first generation has a gay nephew through his sister, and this man in turn has a gay nephew through his sister" (qtd. in LeVay 180). His reasoning was that there is a gene for homosexuality, and it is passed on in the X chromosome, which the male does not pass on to a son. Therefore it must be the female who passes on the homosexuality gene ...