my first thoughts:
I have to say I’m pleased to see a running dialogue in the Daily Universe about homosexuality and the Church. In the aftermath of Prop 8, we’ve heard a number of Church authorities speak on the subject. Last week, a “Circling of the Wagons” brought together local Church leaders and members of the gay community to talk openly about homosexuality within LDS faith and culture. Mitch Mayne, an openly gay church member living in San Francisco, was given a calling in his ward’s bishopric. The Church’s “I’m a Mormon” website featured Norbert, a gay member of the church living in California, who shares his testimony and his thoughts on growing up, serving a mission, and remaining a faithful member of the Church.
My point is that it’s high time for an honest and intelligent discussion about how Church members are supposed to reconcile what the scriptures and prophets have said about homosexuality and the unavoidable fact that boys and girls are growing up gay, even when they’ve been raised by loving parents in gospel-centered homes. No doubt homosexuals in the church have been the subject of thought, prayer and conversation for general authorities, but I think most lay members lack the tools and vocabulary to discuss it thoughtfully, respectfully, and honestly.
And so here’s my trying to start a more interesting and productive discussion than what we’ve seen unfolding this week in the Universe. I hope to see more perspectives like this one posted to the facebook page. If you know me well at all, you know I’m more than open—happy, even—to being corrected. Please add your thoughts and reactions in the comment section of the Facebook page. This dialogue needs to happen somewhere, if not in our school’s newspaper.
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The Science of “Gay”
The Church has generally positioned itself on the right side of science. When it came to evolution, Church leaders affirmed long-held teachings about Adam and Eve, while giving due deference to honest laboratory inquiry and discovery. Accordingly, Joseph F Smith issued this statement on behalf of the First Presidency of in 1910:
"Diversity of opinion does not necessitate intolerance of spirit, nor should it embitter or set rational beings against each other. ... Our religion is not hostile to real science. That which is demonstrated, we accept with joy; but vain philosophy, human theory and mere speculations of men, we do not accept nor do we adopt anything contrary to divine revelation or to good common sense."
Church leaders have been far more divided in recent years as to the origins of homosexuality and what academics have to say about it. An extensive interview was recently posted on the Church’s newsroom featuring Dallin H Oaks of the Twelve and Lance Wickman of the Seventy discussing some surprisingly hard-hitting questions on same-gender attraction. In my opinion, their answers are appropriately articulated, thoughtful and sensitive. But in my experience—evidenced by the letters we saw published this week in the Universe—a vast number of members of the Church view homosexuality, simply put, as a morally deviant sexual practice, rather than a reflection of a person’s inborn bio-physiological makeup. Over the last seventy or so years, biologists, chemists, psychiatrists, and plenty more “–ists” seem to be suggesting otherwise: that homosexual desire is rooted deeply in biology and environment, not just choice or preference. Below I have provided a scattered, unordered set of excerpts and quotations from peer-reviewed scholarship I find interesting. It gives us another point of reference for these sorts of discussions. My only goal is to pique your interest and underline the fact that pulling statistics out of the ether, as we have seen over and over in Universe letters, will not fly.
“It is still all too common to see early experience, social learning, or choice pitted against biology, but these are false dichotomies. This is because the brain has been shown or is assumed to be the underlying mechanism in these processes. Several decades of empirical work have shown that the brain is a product of early experience, socila environment, and genetic instructions."
THOMAS A. SCHOENFELD
Frances L. Hiatt School of Psychology Clark University
On treatment for reversing homosexual preference:
“In recent years, there has been a marked change about both the desirability and feasibility of attempts to alter a homosexual sexual orientation. In the past, such change was generally considered both desirable and possible. An increasing number of clinicians believe that such change rarely, if ever, occurs and that psychotherapy with this goal often is harmful by increasing self-loathing, lowered self-esteem, hopelessness, and depression. Several authors have argued that clinicians who attempt to help their clients change their homosexual orientation are violating professional ethical codes by providing a “treatment” that is ineffective, often harmful, and reinforces in their clients the false belief that homosexuality is a disorder and needs treatment.”
“The Surgeon General,” the American Academy of Pediatrics, and all of the major mental health associations in the United States, representing psychiatry, psychology, social work, and counseling, have each issued position statements warning of possible harm from such therapy and asserting that there is no evidence that such therapy can change one’s sexual orientation.”
Robert L. Spitzer, M.D.
"Previous studies have suggested that there is a genetic component in male sexual orientation. These include controlled family studies that have shown an increased frequency of homosexual brothers of homosexual index subjects as compared to heterosexual index subjects and twin studies, which have shown increased concordance for homosexual orientation in monozygotic as compared to dizygotic twins. On the other hand, the similar rates of male homosexuality in biological and adoptive siblings of male homosexual index subjects, coupled with methodological uncertainties in family and twin studies of homosexuality, suggest caution in accepting a genetic-epidemiological basis for homosexuality."
"The strongest support for a genetic component in male sexual orientation came from the studies of Hamer et al., who posited the involvement of an X-linked gene at position Xq28, based on family recurrence patterns and molecular analysis of the X chromosome in sibships in which there were multiple brothers with homosexual orientation. Specifically, Hamer and colleagues obtained family history information from 76 gay male index subjects and 40 gay brother pairs about the sexual orientation of the first-, second-, and third-degree relatives, with follow-up interviews of a smaller proportion of relatives. They reported increased rates of homosexual orientation in the maternal uncles and male cousins through maternal aunts, which was suggestive of X-linked inheritance. Molecular analysis of the X chromosome revealed an excess of allele sharing in the region of Xq28 in 40 homosexual brother pairs ( 6) and, to a lesser extent, in a follow-up study of 33 additional pairs."
Dr. George Rice
Department of Clinical Neurological Sciences, University of Western Ontario, 339
One of many anatomical differences between gay and straight men:
Despite his words of caution, Swaab says he is glad to hear of LeVay's finding, because it builds on his own group's discovery, reported last year in Brain Research, of the first known structural difference between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men. Swaab's team found that the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a part of the brain that governs daily rhythms, is twice as large in homosexual men as it is in the typical heterosexual brain. But the suprachiasmatic nucleus is not known to play a role in sexual behavior, LeVay points out. So while it might be influenced by the same factors that cause homosexuality, it is less likely than the anterior hypothalamus to be part of the cause. Gorski postdoc Allen agrees that the anterior hypothalamus is "exactly where we would expect some ' nucleus that may control [sexual orientation] to be located."
“In contrast to heterosexual men, and in congruence with heterosexual women, homosexual men displayed hypothalamic activation in response to AND. Maximal activation was observed in the medial preoptic area/anterior hypothalamus, which, according to animal studies, is highly involved in sexual behavior. As opposed to putative pheromones, common odors were processed similarly in all three groups of subjects and engaged only the olfactory brain (amygdala, piriform, orbitofrontal, and insular cortex). These findings show that our brain reacts differently to the two putative pheromones compared with common odors, and suggest a link between sexual orientation and hypothalamic neuronal processes.”
Ivanka Savic, Hans Berglund, and Per Lindström
“The pattern of cognitive skills of homosexual men was different from that of heterosexual men: homosexual men had lower spatial ability relative to fluency. The cognitive pattern of homosexual men was not significantly different from that of heterosexual women. In addition, the results suggest that homosexual men classified on the basis of hand preference may form two subgroups that differ in cognitive pattern. These findings are compatible with the hypothesis that there is a neurobiological factor related to sexual differentiation in the etiology of homosexuality.”
Cheryl M. McCormick, Sandra F. Witelson
“Females recalled significantly more objects than males, although there were no group differences in object recognition. Decomposition of significant interactions between sex and sexual orientation on spatial location memory (controlling for differences in object recall, age and IQ) revealed that heterosexual females and homosexual males scored better than heterosexual males, and no different from each other. There were no differences between homosexual and heterosexual females. The findings suggest that homosexual males and heterosexual females encode, store and retrieve positional and relational information about spatial layouts similarly, pointing to within-sex variations in the neural architecture underlying spatial memory.”
QAZI RAHMAN, GLENN D. WILSON and SHARON ABRAHAMS
Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, UK
final thoughts:
Although the letters published in the Universe treat homosexuality with varying degrees of sensitivity, they all approach it with one assumption: same-gender attraction is unnatural and susceptible to reversal. Not only is this line of thinking hotly contested by academics, it subtly subverts any sort of fruitful discussion on these matters by leading us to think of gays as moral delinquents. In that line of thought, the tension that needs resolving is within the gay person, rather than a Church whose membership is hemorrhaging, due in part to its historic inability to resolve its own tensions with the gay community.
