It wouldn’t be handled any differently if this were another minority and we were talking about the causes for their existence.

I agree. At present, I am tired of all the misrepresentations that both sides make. I’m kind of embarrassed on both sides since I’ve been on both sides (if you will – you know what I mean.)

I read the same thing – daily – each group claims a small percentage as the representation of an entire population. And research is skewed. We will never get to the truth about sexual development so long as we knock heads. And I for one am very interested to know how sexuality develops.

Can we start a counsel of people who overlook such things. Can there ever be a moderate voice or one that finds the true facts?? Amazing.

Did you read about the woman who went to the hearing on gays in the military and spouted off ideas??? Did she not do her research about all the sexual misconduct in the military now? It has nothing to do with gay or straight but everything to do with the military’s long history of systematically allowing sexual “freeness” to go unchecked.

On behalf of Christians with reason – I apologize for that gross display of ignorance.

But anyhow – you and I are both frustrated. I’d like to see the polarity ended.

I’ve honestly been thinking about this. And while I will agree that the gay media also has misrepresentation and a desire to only present gay folks in a positive light, I truly believe that the levels of misrepresentation are not the same.

For example, there are quite a few Christian websites that will blatantly state “facts” and “studies” about gay folks that are truly demonstrably false. And we can thank Warren and his integrity that quite a few have remove these bogus claims.

But I truly can’t think of any offhand (though they may exist) that produce bogus statistics about conservative Christians. Yes, some are downright hateful, and some spew bile, but I don’t see made up studies.

In short, I very freqently (I’d say almost daily) read something that a conservative Christian has said about gay folk that is an outright lie. And it is not often that I read something that a gay person has said about conservative Christians that is a lie.

One would think that we would work together. It seems we need to all soften up a bit.

Tim: If I heard something negative about gay people in general, I would likely ask one of my gay friends about it. Although we may not agree on the wrongness of homosexual intercourse, I respect the many good and positive qualities of the persons I know who self-identify as “gay.” I would not make any final evaluation of the information without further research, but I do prefer to “think positive.”

I’m encouraged that you would not rush to repeat accusations. Though, to be honest, that is how your defense of Paul Cameron felt to me.

I would just caution that your gay friends may be no more informed about research than any average person off the street. And there is no uniformity within the collective of gay people, though similar people tend to find each other.

So it is entirely possible that your gay friends share with you a desire to believe ill of gay people in general. I’ve met such gay folks. And considering the perspective you have shared here, I find it HIGHLY likely that the gay people that are your friends are either ex-gays or other gay people that share with you an antipathy for “the gay lifestyle” and a willingness to believe ill of others.

What I’m trying to say (though may be doing so poorly) is that confirmation from someone who agrees with you is not an indication of proof.

If, for example, someone said, “All gay men are promiscuous” and then you went and asked a man who is ex-gay and had lived a life of promiscuity, he would probably confirm the claim. That is his experience.

But if you asked a gay couple that had been together for 25 years, they probably would laugh at you and say that they don’t know anyone at all who is promiscuous. Their friends are not, you see.

The truth would lie with neither of these witnesses. Because neither group is representative of the whole. In order to confirm or deny the claim, you’d have to look to representative samples.

The trick is to avoid going to bogus research, on either side. If one wants to be an advocate for a position, it’s very tempting to find something that backs up your claim. If one wants to be hateful, one looks to the hatemongers who twist facts and extrapolate the bizarre and make up stories.

But if one really and truly cares about honest conversation, you either find a credible source or you don’t make the claim.

If you look at most of my debating with you, you’ll find that I don’t claim that the opposite of what you claim is true.

I don’t, for example, make the claim that there is no difference in mortality between gays and straights. Because, I honestly don’t know. I’ve read speculation that gays who are not infected with HIV live longer than their straight counterparts. I’ve read the opposite. And while some arguments are interesting, there is no credible evidence.

But I also know with absolute certainty that the anti-gay claims are not based in fact. Because I bothered to check.

All I ask is that you do the same. That you bother to check. And that you not rely on anti-gay activists to tell you your facts without confirming them. And I ask that you avoid the trap of thinking, “If the Bible condemns gays, then anything negative said about gays must be in accordance with Biblical Truth”.

I ask that you not repeat accusations without knowing – for yourself based on real hard studies – that what you are repeating is in fact true.

Publishing in Atlantic and Out magazine really aren’t the greatest references

I don’t mean Cochran’s hypothesis on SSA. I respect him a lot but he hasn’t produced anything.

I mean in the last population based study from Sweden the author directly stated that homosexuality might be the byproduct of childhood illness.

unique environment includes, for example, circumstances during pregnancy and childbirth, physical and psychological trauma (e.g., accidents, violence, and disease), peer groups, and sexual experiences.

Something tells me that any college professor (biology, psychology or queer studies) who touches that with a 10 foot pole is in for a world of hurt.

Drowssap explained the idea a lot more straightforwardly than me. Scientists cannot predict orientation in one individual unless they have a whole distribution of differences and know beforehand that it goes from masculine patterns to more feminine patterns (and that they actually do have both gay and straight brains in the sample and not a distribution of more or less typical straight brains). Then they use the same patterns that were found in other studies on male and female brains to conclude that the less masculine/more feminine brain patterns are more likely to be gay than not.

But if they grab one guy from the street, give him a couple of dollars and scan his brain without having any other brains to compare with, they couldn’t tell what sex he would be primarily attracted to based on one particular measurement of the corpus callosum area. They need to compare one measurement with others of the same sex, age bracket, handedness, health condition, to be sure that they don’t have their one-case result confounded by other variables (like age or traumatic events).

What is more, the issue of whether hemispheric symmetry or asymmetry is inborn or to what degree is the result of prenatal or postnatal factors is an unsettled debate that has great relevance for the corpus callosum measurements.

I’m not trying to dismiss what can be a valuable predictor for orientation. Everyone wants to find a good predictor. But if someone mentioned the interesting amygdala patterns found in a number of studies, I’d say that must have something to do with orientation, much more than how much communication is between hemispheres. Those results are very promissing, because that part of the brain is involved in a lot of emotional evaluations and behaviours involved in sexuality, it has shown marked dimorphism in many aspects and it fits theoretical explanations for homosexual orientation development (see Bem’s EBE references to lower levels of aggressiveness and sissy boys’ apprehension in front of typical boys).

I would wait to see another study focusing on the amygdala and the hypothalamus, because those areas are already documented to be sexually dimorphic and involved in sex and aggression. Maybe Bailey gets a few hours on University of Illinois’ newly acquired 9.4 Tesla monster MRI machine to zero in on those areas in a new cohort of gay and straight brains. That would be more than threefold imaging power than his last brainscanning study and more than sixfold than Savic’s study. Then we’d have a molecular-level image that cannot miss much processing of attractions and arousal in the brain. When the results from Sanders’ genetic study hit the market we’ll be able to see how specific genes are expressed in brain areas and how they match the fMRI studies. Now that’d be a good decade’s work in this field.

Tim: If I heard something negative about gay people in general, I would likely ask one of my gay friends about it. Although we may not agree on the wrongness of homosexual intercourse, I respect the many good and positive qualities of the persons I know who self-identify as “gay.” I would not make any final evaluation of the information without further research, but I do prefer to “think positive.”

However, don’t forget that I’m NOT judging people, I’m evaluating behavior on the basis of its ultimate consequences –because I CARE about the people. To put it in Biblical terms, sins can be forgiven, but Jesus says, “Go, and sin no more.”

To be honest you are right. I don’t know of any example where a university professor used mainstream research to teach a class that homosexuality might be due to a common childhood or prenatal illness.

Well to be pedantic here is this mainstream research. Publishing in Atlantic and Out magazine really aren’t the greatest references. But I do get what you saying. Many would take the ‘gay germ’ theory as offensive.

And as for this not being “a predictive test that can be applied to any randomly chosen individual”, I don’t know whether it could or couldn’t. Nor do you.

I think your study link suggests that SSA is largely (or completely) biological but I don’t think it shows that any particular part of the brain creates orientation.

Le Vay found differences, your study link found differences, the latest Swedish study found differences. But even so, gay and straight brains are probably really close. They probably can’t tell us apart unless they look at a lot of data points and spot an overall trend. Gay men tend to have a smaller than average nucleus in the hypothalamus but so do some straight men. However if they measure ten seperate parts and compare them against straight/gay averages they probably have us pegged most of the time.