Monday, March 12, 2007

Gay genes?

From the Albert Mohler blog:

What if you could know that your unborn baby boy is likely to be sexually attracted to other boys? Beyond that, what if hormonal treatments could change the baby's orientation to heterosexual? Would you do it? Some scientists believe that such developments are just around the corner.

More to the point, in Radar magazine, Tyler Gray understands that such a development would reshape the abortion and gay-rights debates in America:

Conservatives opposed to both abortion and homosexuality will have to ask themselves whether the public shame of having a gay child outweighs the private sin of terminating a pregnancy...

In Keith Hartman's book, The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse, we see a future where the "gay gene" has, in fact, been isolated, and a fetus can be tested to see whether or not it carries the gene.

In this future, many stains of Christianity, such as the Southern Baptist church, decided it was better to abort gay children. The Catholic Church decided that when it declared abortion evil, it meant it.

As a result, after about 2015, Southern Baptist children were guaranteed to be heterosexual, but Catholic children had the usual chance of being gay.

One side effect was that gay culture adopted Catholic crucifixes and insignia as a way of announcing their gay status. Another side effect was that teenagers would adopt the same insignia, and would engage in same-sex hugging and kissing, as a way of rebelling against their parents. (Johnny's not gay, why's he doing that?)

Christians must be very careful not to claim that science can never prove a biological basis for sexual orientation. We can and must insist that no scientific finding can change the basic sinfulness of all homosexual behavior. The general trend of the research points to at least some biological factors behind sexual attraction, gender identity, and sexual orientation. This does not alter God's moral verdict on homosexual sin (or heterosexual sin, for that matter), but it does hold some promise that a deeper knowledge of homosexuality and its cause will allow for more effective ministries to those who struggle with this particular pattern of temptation. If such knowledge should ever be discovered, we should embrace it and use it for the greater good of humanity and for the greater glory of God.

The same thing can be said with regard to evolution.

Christians (and Muslims) need to be careful about any sort of claim that science can never account for the existence and development of life on this planet.

Mohler could as easily have written: "We can and must insist that no scientific finding can change the basic fact that God is the author of whatever rules and mechanisms are discovered."

If your faith demands you reject a finding of science, then ultimately it's your faith that loses.

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