Marco Rubio recently told the "Face The Nation" audience that he thought people were born gay. Science, however, says otherwise.
The Christian Examiner Reported:- Despite nearly 25 years of research attempting to prove a biological origin for homosexual behavior, none has been found. Homosexual neuroscientist Siman LeVay made international headlines in 1991 when he purported to to find that the hypothalamus in the brains of straight men were bigger than those of gay men, whom he said were more similar to women in this grey matter region. However, LeVay later admitted that all 19 of his homosexual subjects died of AIDS and the difference in their brains could have been caused by chemical changes due to AIDS. Similarly, there were critical anomalies in his sample: Three homosexuals had larger clusters of neurons than the mean size for the heterosexuals, and three heterosexuals had clusters smaller than the mean size for the homosexuals.
- Dean Hamer, a homosexual activist and researcher for the National Institutes of Health, claimed in a 1993 study of brothers to have found a region on the male X chromosome, Xq28, where a "gay gene" supposedly resided. But Hamer did not find a common genetic sequence among all the men as was reported. What he discovered was a unique commonality between brothers who were both homosexual. However, that commonality was individualized for each family and not across genetic makeups.
- In later years, both LeVay and Hamer backtracked on their discoveries, admitting that genetics had a limited role in determining homosexuality and that environment was an important factor.
Christian Examiner communicated with Peter Sprigg, who is the senior fellow for family policy studies with the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., and Bob Stith, who previously served as the Southern Baptist Convention's national strategist for gender issues and currently directs the Family and Gender Issues Ministry in Southlake, Texas, about the issues of homosexual origins and change. Sprigg said that "sexual orientation" continues to be problematic because of definitions. "It can be used to describe a person's sexual attractions, behavior, self-identification, or some combination of the three," he explained.
- Sexual conduct and self-identification "are clearly choices (acts of 'will'), for which we can be held morally accountable," he said. Clarifying that sexual attraction may not be a choice, he said it could be a "result from experiences of developmental forces in childhood" – meaning that it is "neither innate (i.e. genetic or biological) nor 'chosen.'"
- Stith stressed that—in his experience—same-sex attractions occur because of environmental factors. "The majority of testimonies I've heard, they acknowledge some type of sexual abuse." But he cautioned that sexual abuse does not automatically lead to
same-sex attractions, depending on the emotional makeup—or
predisposition—of the person. For others, he said—such as a "sensitive
child"—experiencing hard physical or verbal abuse, not sexual in nature,
could trigger a response that develops into same-sex attractions. "That
goes back to the nature, the disposition, and what that child's
tendencies may be, and again, though, that does not excuse choice," he
said.
"People can clearly change," according to Sprigg.
