Do you believe…
- Homosexuality is fixed like the color of your eyes=Essentialism=Born that way?
- The only counseling for a Homosexual is acceptance of their Homosexuality?
Do you believe both of the above statements and if so why?
I believe I’ve answered both questions before on several occasions, but I’m happy to humour you again.
I don’t know how sexuality becomes fixed in a person. It could be genetic. It could be hormonal or chemical influences in the womb. It could be events that took place at critical points during the formative years of the child.
I can tell you that I do NOT believe that sexuality - that is to say the sexual desires or lack thereof one experiences when viewing another person - is a chosen act. I don’t believe that any person has any moral culpability for the desires that they experience, because they don’t
bid them to take place. That is my belief and it is also the settled belief of the Catholic Church.
Moving on from that, I don’t believe that, for the majority of cases, that it is possible for a person to modify themselves to such an extent that they experience sexual desires that are opposite to the ones they experienced previously. A homosexual person experiences sexual desires that are the mirror image of those experienced by a heterosexual person. I do not believe those desires to be sinful any more than the Church believes them to be sinful.
However they are caused, I believe that sexual desires are, for most people, immutable by the time these people realise they have these desires. If they were at any stage mutable before, then it is unlikely that anyone would have tried deliberately to ‘mutate’ them at that point since they were not apparent. If these desires were mutable and they were actually mutated, then I believe that nobody would have realised that that process was actually happening.
So, in a nutshell, I believe that for
most adults, orientation is sufficiently fixed that for all practical purposes it’s as innate as ‘the colour of one’s eyes’ insomuch as it’s not changeable by a conscious act of will of the individual or anyone else.
I don’t include those that identify as ‘bisexual’ in this, since they have a luxury of what you might call a ‘choice’ that is natural to them, nor do I include anyone who deliberately acts contrary to their instincts (i.e. doing things that don’t come naturally to them) nor do I include those who have only experienced attractions to one gender but have an innate bisexuality that they have not yet recognised. For these people they have the choice to act in a heterosexual fashion and achieve spiritual happiness, but I do not believe that they would necessarily lose any homosexual desires by doing so: they would just not be answering those desires.
- For those persons experiencing problems and ‘psychological difficulty’ stemming from their experience of same-gender sexual attraction, including how to order their lives in a way that fits within the Church’s teachings, I recommend counselling so that they can understand the moral neutrality of their desires and to help them encounter the love of God and build a fulfilling and chaste life, free from the worry and pain that bigots of religious persuasion would foist upon them by insisting that their desires are in and of themselves sinful or that it is their moral responsibility to try to change themselves. I would counsel them towards an end of worry, self-loathing, fear, guilt and towards a life of chastity and what the Church calls for - i.e. ‘disinterested friendship’ with others (i.e. where the ‘interest’ is not sexually based).
). He obviously prefers marriage and a family to a celibate life, which would be his only other moral option. Just from the article, he appears to be a good husband and father. If both parties are ok with it, and it’s not immoral (he’s not lying to himself or his wife, and being married to and sleeping with a member of the opposite is how God designed it), what’s the problem? 