Month: January 2009

Gay children: Is it the parent's fault?

Crosswalk.com today published an article I wrote regarding the issue of causes of same-sex attraction. In it, I describe several problems with reparative drive theory as a general explanation for same-sex attraction. You can go there to read the entire article, but I want to post an email from a couple regarding their experience with the failure-to-bond idea. This segment is also in the Crosswalk article.

As parents of a same-sex-attracted son, there was no mountain too high for us to connect our son and our family to the “best help” for our issues. We found a counselor for him, and then joined him in many sessions and spent a good deal of time examining our parent – child relationships; classifying them as “close” or “distant” and figuring out why. With our broken hearts on the table each week, we looked for the magic thread, the exact moment we disabled our son’s sexuality so as to examine it, repent of it, be forgiven and put this nightmare away. Our counselor finally admitted that we were “unique” and that our son was “unique,” not fitting into the usual (how does the term “usual” apply to sexually fallen humans?) categories and that he basically did not know what else to say to help to untangle these conflicts for our son. We went on to read many books, we attended a famous conference 1000’s of miles away from our home, only to meet one of the most famous authors whose flippant response to us upon introducing ourselves to him was “Yes – I can see it, the mother who did all the research and coordination to get here, the dad who has no idea why he is here and the son who is miserable being here.” The three of us were after words of life, not words of sarcasm.
I can accurately say now that naval gazing your potential contribution to a child’s same-sex attraction is nothing short of anguish. Our son would tell you that his father and mother did not contribute to his same-sex attraction. We actually wish some days that it were that easy to put into an equation like “Dad ignored you for some formative years, mom made up for it, you identify with mom not dad – therein lies the reason!” Alas, this is not true in our family. We never ignored our children, our family has been busy bearing one another up, and our son takes responsibility for his same-sex attraction. If we were responsible, we would have accepted the blame gladly. Instead, now, we find ourselves relying on the truths of Scripture such as Romans 8 and II Corinthians 1:3-4. My husband and I come from a promiscuous past, we were products of the sexual revolution and legalized abortion. We are the right parents for this son of ours because we know restoration of sexual brokenness through a relationship with the living Lord Jesus. That is the relationship we pray that our son examines and gazes upon. In the meantime, we adore him and he us and we celebrate God’s goodness and sovereignty.

UPDATE: 2/2/09 – The Christian Post published a version of this article today.

Oprah Winfrey discusses sexual identity with Ted & Gayle Haggard

Today’s Oprah Winfrey Show gave Mr. Haggard a lot of time to describe his sexuality. Haggard’s wife joins him in this segment where they discuss ambiguities of sexual identity.

It is notable that he says he was not cured because he doesn’t view his same-sex attraction as a sickness. Also, he believes his SSA is a part of him and not due to demons. It is clear he continues to believe homosexual behavior violates his faith but he is quite open now about his experience. I liked his statement that he cannot put himself into a category. Doing so would be untrue to his experience now.

Divided Memories: Genesis Associates and Detachment

I have posted before about Genesis Associates and am now posting more of the documentary about their controversial techniques. This time detachment is the focus of the clip. I believe this documentary is so important as a cautionary tale regarding expressive therapies – such as recommended by Richard Cohen and the Mankind Project.
It is a long (over 8 minutes) but an important clip demonstrating that unfounded ideas can lead to harmful effects.

Oprah scores the Haggard interview

Today, Oprah and Mr. & Mrs. Ted Haggard on Oprah. If you can’t watch, check out the pics and narration on the Oprah website.
Not sure I’ll see it. Let’s make this an open forum on the program and all things Haggard…

Fetal Testosterone Predicts Sexually Differentiated Childhood Behavior in Girls and in Boys

This is an important study from the Psychological Science journal’s early view:

Fetal Testosterone Predicts Sexually Differentiated Childhood
Behavior in Girls and in Boys
Bonnie Auyeung, Simon Baron-Cohen, Emma Ashwin, Rebecca Knickmeyer, Kevin Taylor, Gerald Hackett, and Melissa Hines
ABSTRACT—Mammals, including humans, show sex differences in juvenile play behavior. In rodents and nonhuman primates, these behavioral sex differences result, in part, from sex differences in androgens during early development. Girls exposed to high levels of androgen prenatally, because of the genetic disorder congenital adrenal hyperplasia, show increased male-typical play, suggesting similar hormonal influences on human development, at least in females. Here, we report that fetal testosterone measured from amniotic fluid relates positively to male-typical scores on a standardized questionnaire measure of sextypical play in both boys and girls. These results show, for the first time, a link between fetal testosterone and the development of sex-typical play in children from the general population, and are the first data linking high levels of prenatal testosterone to increased male-typical play behavior in boys.

Here’s the money quote:

Thus, our data are the first documentation that androgen exposure prenatally relates to sexually differentiated play behavior in boys and in girls. In addition, the current results support an organizational, as opposed to current, activational role of testosterone, because play behavior is measured in childhood, when concurrent testosterone levels are low.

Gender non-conformity is the strongest predictor of same-sex attraction in adulthood. This study links prenatal testosterone with later gender typical behavior. The brains of children are organized in ways that react to their environment in socially typical or atypical ways. How such behavior shapes the family environment is unclear, however, it does not appear that the behavior is exclusively a response to parental bonding or modeling.

More on the Dr. Phil Show Little Boy Lost – Sparks fly among guests

This clip features some give and take between panelists on the Dr. Phil Show episode on gender identity issues. In this segment, Dr. Siegel defends moms by saying there is no evidence that being too close to a boy will make him want to be a girl. Dr. Nicolosi says Siegel is oversimplifying his reparative theory. What do you think?
Lights, camera, action!

What do women want?

This New York Times Magazine article defies summary in a blog post but I wanted to provide the link because it quotes extensively many of the major researchers on female sexuality.
Here are some excerpts:

Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. She is a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen’s University in the small city of Kingston, Ontario, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of the world’s leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior. The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she has carried out over the past several years. She found footage of bonobos, a species of ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds were dull — “bonobos don’t seem to make much noise in sex,” she told me, “though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds” — she dubbed in some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching. She showed the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects, she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.

What she found was that women were aroused by all of the videos, whereas men reacted based on sexual preference. The conscious ratings more closely tracked sexual preference but their bodies and minds were often out of sync.

When she peers into the giant forest, Chivers told me, she considers the possibility that along with what she called a “rudderless” system of reflexive physiological arousal, women’s system of desire, the cognitive domain of lust, is more receptive than aggressive. “One of the things I think about,” she said, “is the dyad formed by men and women. Certainly women are very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than men, but one possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it’s more of a reactive process. If you have this dyad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk taking, is probably more aggressive, you’ve got a very strong motivational force. It wouldn’t make sense to have another similar force. You need something complementary. And I’ve often thought that there is something really powerful for women’s sexuality about being desired. That receptivity element. At some point I’d love to do a study that would look at that.”

This sounds like it could come from a Focus on the Family brochure. There are differences between men and women which Evangelicals believe come from a differential origin and function. For Chivers, the data lead her to think that the biological differences prompt men and women to bring complementary drives to the connection.
The article concludes with lengthy descriptions of how women are different than men. The theorists seem to converge on the notion that women want to be wanted. This concept has some perhaps unsettling implications for ex-gay marriages as well as for marriage where the spark seems to have gone out.

Exodus International to take over Day of Truth

Exodus International will take over the “Day of Truth” in 2009. This news release was jointly provided by Alliance Defense Fund and Exodus.

Day of Truth to be spearheaded by Exodus International
The Alliance Defense Fund is transitioning its leadership of the Day of Truth initiative to Exodus International.
Day of Truth was launched four years ago in response to GLSEN’s (Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network) “Day of Silence” national initiative. “Day of Silence,” established in 1996 and aggressively placed in public schools throughout the U.S., asks students to take a nine-hour “vow of silence” to protest what they describe as “discrimination and harassment” against student’s engaged in homosexual behavior.
In 2004, when a student in Poway, California openly objected to this overt promotion of a practice that he found morally offensive, he was punished and silenced by the school administration for expressing his views. The school’s actions prompted the Alliance Defense Fund to legally defend this young man’s rights and, in turn, to launch a national response to the GLSEN’S Day of Silence. That response was the Day of Truth.
Designed to give students an opportunity to openly voice their views on (and objections to) the Day of Silence, the Day of Truth has grown from a handful of students to over 13,000 participants in all 50 states standing for the Truth. As the movement has grown, the focus has continued to broaden…providing students not only with legal assistance when their free speech rights are challenged, but also providing them with information on how to minister and witness to individuals struggling with homosexual behavior.
It’s because of growth in this latter area that this transition is occurring. For more than thirty years, Exodus International has provided thoughtful care to individuals wishing to leave homosexuality and offered support for related families, friends and churches. With 230 member organizations, the Exodus network is mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality…perfectly positioning them to lead the Day of Truth into the future.
ADF will continue to serve as the legal support arm for this project and represent any student who is silenced or punished for speaking the Truth.
When is the Day of Truth?
This year’s Day of Truth will be Monday, April 20, 2009. To view a video and participate this year, visit www.DayofTruth.org and register. Even if you have registered with us in the past, please register again this year. This allows us to track the number of participants every year. (It’s free to sign up!) You may also order products and materials, download free resources, and learn more about the project. On the Day of Truth, participating students wear their Day of Truth t-shirt and hand out “Truth cards” which simply explain that it’s time for “an honest discussion about homosexuality.”
Please do not hesitate to contact us with questions, for resources, or to share your ideas. You can reach us at sthomas@telladf.org or 1-800-TELL-ADF.

The Day of Silence is April 17, 2009. I continue to oppose boycotts and confrontations and instead will support the Golden Rule Pledge.
The Day of Truth has in the past focused on change of sexual orientation as being a prime message for schools. I will be interested to see what Exodus changes about this event.

Imagine the potential – Obama's life an anti-abortion tribute

When I saw this ad, I thought of the statements of Hillary Clinton’s former OB-GYN, William Harrison when he told me that a physician conducting an abortion does God’s work because the abortion “cancels a luckless human soul.” Here is his statement:

“Do you ever regret that part of the decision? How do you come to terms with that, or do you not see the fetus as a life or a person? I don’t want to see either one die, and would do my best to save both. But your work on the other hand, seeks the end of one of these lives. How do you justify that decision?”
Here is my answer: Anyone who has delivered as many babies as I have, and has seen hundreds of living and dead embryos and fetuses being spontaneously aborted as have I, knows exactly what we are doing when we provide an elective abortion for our patient. We are ending the life of an embryo or a fetus. Not the life of a person, but certainly a creature that might have become a person under other circumstances. When I am asked this question, I always go back to two of the most insightful and beautiful verses of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khyyam.
Oh, if the world were but to recreate
That we might catch ere closed the Book of Fate
And make the Writer on a fairer leaf
Inscribe our names, or quite obliterate.
Better, oh, better cancel from the Scroll
Of universe one luckless Human Soul,
Than drop by drop enlarge the Flood that roars
Hoarser with Anguish as the ages roll.
When Omar wrote his beautiful and treasured poem over a thousand years ago, mankind had no way of safely canceling “from the scroll of universe one luckless human soul” whose numbers make up that flood of howling anguish; at least, no way of canceling it without risking also the life of the woman carrying it. In this day of medical marvels and, hopefully, ever increasing social justice, we possess such a way.
Embryos and fetuses spontaneously aborted – most, but not all of those “canceled” by “God” – are just such luckless human souls. But a few spontaneous abortions occur in desired pregnancies with no discernable abnormalities. For those girls and women and their families whose circumstances would make their babies “luckless human souls,” I “cancel” them before they become babies.
Physicians who save wanted babies from being spontaneously aborted (and we can save a few now that God once seemed determined to abort), and we who cancel “luckless human souls” are doing God’s work.

This video invokes President Obama’s difficult life as a backdrop for the message, “imagine the potential.”