A new study suggests that the brains of gay men resemble those of straight women and the brains of gay women resemble those of straight men.  For the last decade or two, science has stepped in to suggest that homosexuality is not a lifestyle choice, but a biological fate - and how can you judge someone for having biology?  But this study suggests that the differences between gay humans and straight humans can’t be explained by looking at DNA.

Are the differences genetic? Not likely. “As to the genetic factors, the current view is that they may play a role in male homosexuality, but they seem to be insignificant for female homosexuality,” the authors conclude. “Genetic factors, therefore, appear less probable as the major common denominator for all group differences observed here.”

The study also suggests that the link is not environmental, either, where, say, being around lots of sports and short haircuts doesn’t make a woman gay.  The differences between hetero and homo, it seems, may be hormonal.  Which is to say, getting the right kind, or the wrong kind, of hormones in utero may alter change the sexual orientation of a human being.  Now, this is still no argument for the unequivocal acceptance of homosexuality as good, because a certain hormone patter (just like a certain genetic predisposition or environmental factors) may also make one more violent, more inclined to like music, or more inclined to do all number of good and bad things.  For example, I am much more tempted to curse than my wife.  I am sure this has something to do with my genes, my raising, and my hormones.  But that doesn’t mean it’s okay to curse.  It just means it’s harder for me not to. 

But the wicked problem with this hormonal study is that, if you found out your child, in utero, had the hormone indicators for homosexuality, would you attempt to have them altered with new hormones?

One of the most-read essays in the archives at Touchstone is “Bodies of Evidence,” an article about sex and marriage from a couple of years ago by Frederica Mathewes-Green.  It’s a fine article, with no surprises in its thesis, but I did come across this refreshing mini-essay-slash-sidebar at the bottom of the article, and I thought I’d share it with you.  In it, Mathewes-Green explains the problems of using the word “natural” in arguments to defend, among other things, homosexuality.  As in, other mammals show homosexual behaviors, so it must be a natural - i.e., permissible - thing, right?

Let’s differentiate between two meanings of the word natural. The first, and the one I’m using, is “what we can infer from the design of Creation.” The second is “anything that occurs in Nature.” For example, it’s obvious that a person’s teeth are designed to bite and chew food. But, sure, they’ve been used in other ways: There was a time when a boy could impress his pals by using his to pull the cap off a soft-drink bottle.

When we consider other body parts, it’s likewise obvious that penis and vagina are designed to fit together, but they undeniably get used in other ways. Whatever people do with these body parts can be termed “natural” in that second definition, a label that appears to hallow whatever it touches.

But there’s a problem. If “natural” means “anything that happens,” there are absolutely no limits. Anything that anyone can think of doing with his sex organs has to be called natural—not just homosexuality, but pedophilia, necrophilia, rape, or any other thing humans do. A definition that permits the first type of activity but excludes the others can’t do so without acquiring more clauses.

There’s a whole other, and related, usage of the term natural, and that’s the theological usage, as in nature versus grace, in the way Paul uses the term.  In this sense, natural means fallen, or corrupt.  Quite a different, albeit ironic, denotation of the term in today’s society.  But it’s a valuable exercise to consider the word and how it’s used in an argument.  Saying, “It’s natural” is license for just about anything these days. 

Doublethink reminds us that the transfiguration of words in public life is a bad thing. This week, a few judges in California made up a new definition for the word marriage. And all over America, people are redefining the words man and woman.

I feel an intense amount of pity for folks who consider themselves transgender, but wanting to be a member of the opposite sex doesn’t make you one, and no amount of cosmetic mutilation to your genitals will cause you to become one. Remember when there was all that hubbub a few weeks back about the “man” who was pregnant? Yeah, that wasn’t a man. She was a woman-one who has taken hormone therapy and had radical surgery to look more like a man, but a woman nonetheless. I’m something of a pedant when it comes to words-they have definitions for a reason.

Definition is a powerful rhetorical concept, and it was one of Adam’s first jobs, to name the animals, which is to say, to define them. Definition is everybody’s job, and getting the definition as close as possible to reality.

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) wins this week’s WOW Award for Cognitive Dissonance: “A San Rafael minister who presided over several same-sex ceremonies didn’t violate Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) rules, because same-sex marriages don’t exist in the church, a church court ruled Tuesday.”  In related news, the same church court ruled that a man who committed intellectual suicide in a local church sanctuary isn’t actually dead, because intellectually sound behavior doesn’t exist in many PCUSA churches, either.  Read the story here, and be sad.  Be very, very sad.  Not only will conservatives be unhappy with this ruling.  So will liberals.

The Times Sunday magazine has a tremendous story, both tragic and comic, on transmales, or girls who call themselves boys.  The story focuses on Rey, who had the wicked problem of being a girl, who wanted to be a boy, but who also happened to attend Barnard College, a school for girls.  I call the story tragic because, well, it is.  And I call it comic because, well, the gods must be crazy in a world like this.  Rey’s problems began in the dorm.

In the first week of September, he found out that his roommates had complained to the college’s freshman housing director about being asked to share their rooms with a man. They wanted Rey to find somewhere else to live. According to Dorothy Denburg, the dean who spoke to Rey about the situation, these young women were disturbed when Rey told them on the first day “that he was a transboy and wanted to be referred to by male pronouns.” Rey’s roommates had, after all, chosen to attend a women’s college in order to live and be educated in the company of other women.

But Rey is a conservative next to Jordan Akerley, who rejects the use of pronouns.

“I find pronouns cumbersome and self-limiting,” Akerley told me, which is why friends use the name Jordan, a name that Akerley says she intends to make official this year.

Facts have a way of being cumbersome, I suppose.

Who said it? Pat Robertson? Fred Phelps? No, it was Matt Foreman, outgoing director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, in a ”State of the Movement” address he delivered on Feb. 8.

Today, right now, more than 45 percent of African-American gay and bi men in key urban areas are infected with HIV, with a 33 percent increase in new diagnoses among our brothers under age 30 over the past six years. Today, right now, African Americans are nearly 10 times more likely than white people to be diagnosed with AIDS.

The response - internal to our community and external - is appallingly racist. Internally, when these numbers come out, the “established” gay community seems to have a collective shrug as if this isn’t our problem. Folks, with 70 percent of the people in this country living with HIV being gay or bi, we cannot deny that HIV is a gay disease. We have to own that and face up to that.

Foreman is not the first gay activist to buck the politics of AIDS in order to focus attention on the highest number of victims.  A little over a year ago, the Los Angeles-based Gay and Lesbian Center launched a provocative AIDS awareness campaign with the slogan, “HIV is a Gay Disease.  Own it.  End it.”

The campaign drew cat-calls with many critics saying such frank talk would ratchet up anti-gay bigotry. Others were more measured, such as one columnist who wrote, “Time will tell whether the in-your-face approach to shaking everyone out of complacency translates to a resurgence of bigotry and stigmatism - and whether the number of lives of young L.A. men saved outweighs that.”

With Foreman’s statement, it appears some gay activists are now ready to admit that suppressing the epidemiological facts about AIDS is no longer worth the high cost in lives.

Blogger Make It Man pointed out this essay - “A Requiem for Friendship” - from one of my favorite magazines, Touchstone.  The thesis, in brief, is that the sexual revolution and the cultural parade of homosexuality have sullied the possibility of friendships between men.

On three great bonds of love do all cultures depend: the love between man and woman in marriage; the love between a mother and her child; and the camaraderie among men, a bond that used to be strong enough to move mountains. The first two have suffered greatly; the third has almost ceased to exist.

The bottom rail is on top again.

Last week, we blogged about J.K. Rowling’s outing of the wizard Dumbledore as gay (the blog posting was turned into a short piece for WORLD).  This isn’t really news anymore, but I did want to point out the Times story that seemed to echo WORLD’s own idea:

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A few weeks ago the Barna Group conducted a survey of 16- to 29-year-olds (Christians and non-Christians) to assess their impressions of Christianity. The findings, especially as Christians once again find ourselves poised to descend into the muck of national politics, ought to be troubling.

Researchers offered respondents 20 perceptions of Christians — 10 positive and 10 negative — and asked which apply. While considerable majorities perceive that Christianity has good values and principles, and is friendly, an even greater majority think it teaches the same basic ideas as other religions — and that this is a good thing. Still greater percentages of respondents, meanwhile, perceive Christianity as judgmental and hypocritical.

Lest anyone conclude that this is simply the assessment of heathens, half of the Christians surveyed say that Christianity as practiced today in the U.S. is not only judgmental and hypocritical, but too political. It’s hard to write off the opinions of the non-Christians regardless, because the average non-Christian respondent to the survey has five Christian friends, while four out of five regularly attended church themselves (probably as children) in the past.

Most disturbing is that the perception garnering greatest agreement among respondents is that Christianity means hostility to homosexuals. More than any other image, this best defines what Christianity is to young non-Christian Americans (80 percent of young Christians, meanwhile, confirm that it is an accurate perception of Christianity).

I can sense some commenters to this post already thumbing their way to Leviticus. My goal is not to provoke an argument about what Christ does or doesn’t say regarding gays. My point is that our words and actions shape how others see Christ, and a highly-respected research organization reveals that a great many young people perceive Christians not as a body of grace-filled believers, but as a crowd of angry, hypocritical politicos. It puts me in mind of a vignette in Philip Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew, about a woman whose life has been destroyed by drugs and prostitution. When someone asks her if she’s thought of going to a church for help, she replies: “Church! Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They’d just make me feel worse.”

Regarding the homosexuality finding, when researchers delved deeper, respondents told them that Christians not only hate the sin, but make clear their contempt for the sinner. A majority of young Christians, further, say that their churches have elevated the sin of homosexuality so that it is somehow a greater sin than others, all while failing to offer meaningful guidance about how to interact with gays in a manner reflective of Christ.

All of this — the perceptions of how Christians behave toward homosexuals as well as the general perceptions about Christian hypocrisy and mercilessness — can be summed in what the researchers say was one of the most common unprompted perceptions, that “Christianity in today’s society no longer looks like Jesus.”

We get overwrought, especially in election years, about the state of the country, and the evils of politicians (who almost always come, it seems, from one party and not the other). What if we took four years off from national politics, and devoted them instead to the politics of our own hearts? It seems that — in the eyes of young Americans, at least — many of us Christians are decidedly unchristian in our behavior.

Perhaps the silver lining in this cloud is that non-Christians seem to sense that Christ would not approve. Maybe, despite our sins of anger and hatred, despite our forgetting that we are forgiven as we forgive, and our overlooking that we are saved by grace alone, so that no man may boast — perhaps we may at the very least not sully the name of Christ in our zeal to condemn.

I’m going to try to think less about what Jesus is going to say to other sinners on judgment day, and more about what he will say to me, and to all of us who claim to represent him.

From the AP: “Harry Potter fans, the rumors are true: Albus Dumbledore, master wizard and Headmaster of Hogwarts, is gay. J.K. Rowling, author of the mega-selling fantasy series that ended last summer, outed the beloved character Friday night while appearing before a full house at Carnegie Hall.”

What does this even mean?  I’m not a hateful person, and I think Believers have a lot to learn about engaging this issue, but seriously?  I thought the books were over.  What’s the significance of “outing” someone who doesn’t even exist?  If characters only exist in words, and no words ever indicated (in books, where characters “exist”) that this imaginary wizard was gay, then what’s the point?  Now, I understand that Rowling could have used this in her writing to help guide her writing of the character, but sharing it in such a fashion seems showy, pointed, precious, something.  And stupid.  Like George Lucas coming out and saying, “Well, Darth Vader was against the war in Iraq.”

I think it’s fair to say that homosexuality has been grandstanding in our culture for several decades now, and this is just one more example.  A hundred years ago, Rowling would have been saying - after the books were done - that Harry Potter himself was very much for women’s suffrage.  Ridiculous.