Hi sw85, I also think that homosexuality has more than one factor accounting for it. In another thread, I mentioned (and took some heat for it) that out of the admittedly small sample of homosexual males I’ve encountered or heard about in my life, it struck me that in a vast majority they had either a very strained or nonexistent relationship with their father . Not a well-established scientifc fact nor a decisive factor (perhaps a contributing factor) but merely a personal observation. But what startled me in your post is what you said about the evidence suggesting it’s a genetic mutation. I know many people among homosexuals are looking high and low for a scientic basis to legitimize their sexual orientation and if there was a well-conducted study/research showing a genetic origin to homosexuality, we’d know about it within seconds of it being published. So I was wondering if you could provide some kind of source(s) for this (again, personally I don’t rule out the genetic component). Thank you.
There have been studies demonstrating that homosexual men have significantly larger families, but on the maternal side only, than heterosexual men. There is hypothesized (but has not yet been firmly discovered, hence why I simply said “the evidence suggests”) to exist a gene sequence responsible for higher sex drives in women, which makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, given that women’s low sex drives would naturally be an impediment to procreation. In other words, some women are genetically wired to really, really want to have sex with men. It’s hypothesized homosexual men (improperly) receive this trait from their mothers, hence, they really, really want to have sex with men (possibly explaining, too, why homosexual men have vastly different sexual behaviors than heterosexual ones, for instance, tending to have more partners).
There is also evidence that younger sons are more likely to be gay than older ones. On average, each successive biological son has a 33% greater risk of homosexuality than the first one; the third son, for instance, is twice as likely to be gay as the first. It’s hypothesized that the mother’s immune response to developing testosterone in the womb (which is, after all, an invasive foreign substance in the mother’s body) interferes with sexual differentiation, and this immune response gets stronger with each successive male pregnancy. Because all fetuses start out essentially feminine, the immune response prevents male fetuses from developing their maleness fully, with the result that not only do they develop attraction to males but they also acquire certain features more common to women, i.e., they tend to have feminine digit-length ratios (women tend to have more even lengths of their index and ring fingers, while men tend to have longer ring fingers than index fingers; homosexual men tend to have finger lengths more like women).
These are just probabilistic factors though. We don’t know the determinants of homosexuality. Then again, we don’t have to. As you say, some family environments are likely to be more conducive to homosexuality than others, and this is consistent with what’s called the “diathesis-stress model,” according to which predispositions for certain conditions are actualized by subsequent life events (alcoholism being a good example). In this case, it’s reasonable that a young boy, disposed to be effeminate by virtue of his birth, may develop a strained relationship with his father (who, after all, likely wants his boy to act more like a boy) and thereby identify more strongly with girls.
It’s all interesting stuff. I don’t have sources handy; I was a psych major in college so I read all of these studies back then. There was, however, a pretty interesting documentary on the etiology of homosexuality recently, though I can’t recall the name of it, that hit on all these points. I’m sure I’ve given you enough ammunition to go on in terms of Google searching.
In any event, none of this is really relevant to the question of homosexuality’s moral liceity. Homosexuals want to prove that their desires are naturally occurring because they misapprehend our objection when we say it’s “unnatural”; what we mean is not that homosexuality is not naturally occurring but that it is inconsistent with human nature, which is naturally sexualized and so ordered toward intersex procreation. If today it was discovered that there is a single gene the presence of which accounts totally for homosexuality, that would not change the Catholic Church’s position at all.
The position of the church on the subject really needs to be looked at and re-evaluated. I have a real hard time, for example, with the Church’s position on gay couples adopting.
Careful here. You are duty bound to give full assent of faith to the Church’s magisterium on matters of faith and morals, as it is protected from error by the Holy Spirit in these areas. If you have doubts, there are plenty of books and such written on the topic of the ethics of human sexuality explaining the Church’s position in fuller detail (though I recommend Edward Feser’s
The Last Superstition, which rather offers an understanding of natural law theology), but you should avoid attacking the Church’s teaching.
