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This website is being renovated throughout 2008. Pages and the content of pages will continue to change until the end of the year and there may be some inconsistencies and missing links. Please do not quote from or link to specific pages (apart from the home page) without contacting the webmaster first. Nice theory, pity about the facts The Family Research Institute's obsession with homosexuality By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 793 words Publication date: July 16, 2006 I am fascinated by America’s preoccupation with same-sex marriage and the fact that so much time, money and energy is spent opposing the right of some couples to legalize their commitment to each other. The Family Research Institute is a case in point. FRI’s obsession with homosexuality is not unique. Nor is it the most extreme example of the many individuals and organizations that seek to deprive fellow Americans of their rights to liberty and happiness. But in a society where, as the Fox “News” Channel proves, the media value stridency more than accuracy, FRI is up there with the worst of them. The organization's principal allegation is that the “traditional” family is under attack. That claim has a superficial legitimacy but a quick analysis demonstrates that it has feet of clay. “Traditional” is a word whose meaning varies widely. When used to refer to the family, it could refer to half a dozen scenarios. Many adult Americans are unwilling to house their elderly parents. This would have been considered a serious attack on traditional family values a hundred years ago. Yet I hear no protest from FRI that the old are being abandoned in retirement homes. The frequency with which couples separate is a further assault on those same values, but FRI has not called for a constitutional ban on divorce. Polygamy, legitimised by marriage or not, is a long-standing tradition in many cultures, including America (think Mormon and Muslim) Does FRI rush to defend it? How about the centuries-old tradition of slave-owners housing and feeding all his children, irrespective of who bore them? FRI remains silent on the issue. But let us be generous and accept FRI’s definition. American society should support the ideal family of one husband and one wife living with their children, free of grandparents but holding fast to the option of divorce when times get rough. Exactly how is this concept undermined by extending the right to marry to homosexual couples? The desire of gay men and lesbians to wed is an indication that the institution of marriage is one which they respect and honor, not attack. We’ve been here before. The rush to ban same-sex marriage is an echo of slave owners denying the same institution to the men and women they “owned”. Many arguments that appeared reasonable at the time were used to support such a stance. They were of course hogwash. Marriage was denied for the single reason that it was a symbol of freedom and equality that slave owners could not accept. FRI is in a similar position today. While much of America and the rest of the world moves towards recognition of gay men and lesbians as equal citizens, FRI and its partners in nostalgia cling to the notion that homosexuals are inferior beings. We shouldn’t be surprised. Society never ceases to evolve, but many people find it difficult to accept change. When we encounter a phenomenon that we dislike our first reaction is to find someone or something to blame. Our second reaction is to rationalize our response. We do so by looking for evidence to corroborate the conclusions that we have already formed. FRI excels at the art of rationalization. The papers on its website “proving” that homosexuals are the product of incest, prone to early death, congenital molesters etc etc are tendentious to the point of absurdity. Of course not all homosexual men and women are paragons of virtue or health. But the fact that most gay men and women enjoy mundane lives is much less interesting to Paul Cameron (the leading light at FRI) than the dysfunctional individuals who are the focus of his studies and whom he insists are the norm. Back in the real world… Far more interesting than FRI’s pseudo-science is the ongoing research into the origins of sexuality. Evidence is growing that sexual orientation in males – and probably also in females, although there have been very few studies – is determined in the womb. In men it relates to the extent to which mother’s body reacts to levels of testosterone associated with the male foetus. That’s only part of the story. There is much still to discover. We do not understand many aspects of sexuality, including such basic issues as how and why visual and other signals stimulate sexual arousal. And concepts of hetero-, bi- and homosexuality may yet give way to different descriptions of the human experience. That’s not good enough for FRI. Their bigotry stands in the proud tradition (that word again…) of the Catholic Church’s opposition to Galileo’s evidence that the earth revolves round the sun, and of fifteenth century sailors’ fear that Columbus’ ships would fall off the edge of the earth. Why ruin a perfectly good theory with inconvenient facts?
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If God existed, he would... admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create recognize that eternity is meaningless deny both heaven and hell disown all men and women who speak in his name denounce the harm caused by religious "morality" help the human race to thrive without him If God existed, he would be an atheist. |