Intersex, too?!

It’s interesting for me to look back on some of my old writing. Although I was already blogging before that on another subject, back in 2005, I started this blog, in which I reflected mainly on the subject of being a Christian who wanted to be a critical thinker and philosopher.

One of the things that is interesting to see was the way my thoughts about gender and sex have evolved. As I mentioned in previous posts, I used to think that same-sex intercourse was a sin, a position that I no longer hold. Something that apparently has remained steadfast however is my belief that there is nothing wrong in any way with being transgender. While I knew transgender people existed since the 1990s, they weren’t really on my radar until around ten years ago, when Republicans decided that they needed a new scapegoat for all the ills of the world since same-sex marriage became legal and fire and brimstone didn’t rain down on the United States.

Back in 2017 in particular, evangelical Christians in America came together to write what was known as “The Nashville Statement”, a transphobic attack on the LGBTQIA community. At that time, while I probably still held conservative views on homosexuality, I came out strong against TNS, because as far as could see it was a nonsensical attack on not just trans people, but intersex people as well. Since that time, the relentless Republican attack on transgender rights has sent me online to interact with a variety of transgender and intersex people. I’ve learned a lot.

In the last ten years I have met:

• A woman with CAIS who is a former Mrs. America
• A woman with a Y chromosome who had given birth to two children
• A person who is biologically neither male nor female
• A transgender woman who is biologically female.
• Multiple transgender people who also have a recognized intersex condition

The thing that seems to tie all of these people together is interesting to me. I have heard numerous people claiming that intersex people don’t want to have anything to do with the “transgender movement,” so leave them out of the discussion. None of the people who have said this were intersex themselves, however. Every intersex person I have met seems to clearly understand not only that transgender people deserve equal rights, but that the rights of transgender and intersex people are interconnected.

It’s useful to define the term “intersex” when it comes up in the discussion. There is a concept in biology of 3G sex: genes, gonads, and genitals. (Some have suggested the fourth G is gender, and transgender people should be classified as a form of intersex condition.) With over 90% of the population falling into the norms of female sex being XX genotype, ovaries, and a vagina, and male sex being XY genotype, testicles, and a penis, at least 2% of all people fall outside of those norms, and such people are intersex. One study that I read years ago was done in one of the Nordic countries where they did extensive genetic testing on the population and found that there are a lot of people who have genetic anomalies and don’t know it, meaning that the number of intersex people may be as much as twice what was believed. There are a lot of intersex people who don’t even know they are intersex.

What sense does it make to tell a person who was assigned female at birth and has lived their whole life as a woman that in fact they are not a woman, just because they have a chromosomal anomaly? We can’t even see each other’s chromosomes, and outside of reproductive function, they really play no role in our lives. Yet back in 2017, when fervor to attack transgender people was being stirred up by Republicans, conservative evangelical Christians decided to attack intersex people along with them, and they have not withdrawn the attack. What are we to make of their seriousness in this matter?

In my opinion, the whole house of cards that the right-wing nutjobs have built around the subject of sex and gender is completely pointless outrage. Humans simply don’t fit into two neat and tidy little boxes where everyone is cisgender, heterosexual, and biologically “normal.” It just doesn’t work that way, so why are people trying to police it all? These people need to get a real hobby.

The Nashville Statement: Sexual Heresy

For the sake of clarity, let me preface my argument by stating that I am a cisgendered evangelical Christian male married to a cisgendered evangelical Christian female. I have no need to oppose the Nashville Statement for any personal gain, but only oppose it for the cause of supporting right doctrine within Christianity.

This is my final argument concerning the Nashville Statement, I believe, because I feel confident it will prove there exists an inevitable logical choice between two options: (A) The Nashville Statement is logically inconsistent, or (B) Christianity is morally inconsistent. I will of course choose option (A).

The Nashville Statement (hereafter "NS") makes a number of statements I take issue with, but here I address only four:
1. Same-sex marriage is a sin. (NS Article 1)
2. Transgenderism (i.e. choosing a gender identity that does not match your biological gender) is a sin. (NS Article 13)
3. People who do not have an easy-to-identify biological gender must conform with the binary gender paradigm, and act as though they are the gender their genotype would suggest or they are in sin. (NS Article 6 and quote below)
4. Disagreeing with any of the above (or any other part of the NS) causes one to be in a state of sin. (NS Article 10)

As evidence, I put to readers that there exists a medical condition known as Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (hereafter "AIS"). People with AIS are genetically male, having the sexual genotype "XY", but without genetic testing are almost impossible to differentiate from a sterile female. In fact, while I cannot prove it to be so, I suggest it to be laughable to deny that at various times in the past (and even present) men have married and had sex with (although society has always considered them "women", Denny Burk, one of the main authors and #1 signer of the NS would tell us they are "men"*; remember that according to NS Article 10, you cannot disagree with this assessment) who have AIS. This includes couples in which both partners were professing Christians.

Here is the logical/moral dilemma. If these are men with AIS, then these were/are same-sex marriages. The NS tells us that this is sin, and therefore...what?

If engaging in a same-sex marriage is an unpardonable sin no matter what, this implies that God had to send these people to Hell for committing a sin without knowing they were doing it. Result: God is not just.

If the fact that they did not know they were doing it excuses them, that implies the sinful nature of same-sex marriage is a subjective matter and same-sex marriage is not a sin if you don't believe it is. Result: The NS is wrong about same-sex marriage.

If this was not same-sex marriage because the man with AIS identified as a woman, then either transgenderism is acceptable, or intersex people do not have to conform to the gender suggested by their genotype; possibly both. Result: The NS is wrong about transgenderism, intersex, or both.

If there is a fourth possibility that saves both the just nature of God and the integrity of the NS, I cannot imagine what it is, but I am open to discussion. Note that I am not denying the truth of statements 1, 2, or 3, but since they cannot all be true at once, I suggest that one or more of them must be rejected, and one must certainly by all means reject statement 4. Good Christians can and indeed should disagree with the Nashville Statement.

*"Try to determine as soon as possible the chromosomal makeup of the child. If there is a Y chromosome present, that would strongly militate against raising the child as a female, regardless of the apperance of the genitals or other secondary sex characteristics." Denny Burk, What is the Meaning of Sex?, page 81,

Little things mean a lot

A lot of my ideas for things to write about come to me when I'm in the shower for some reason. Most of the time it's random, but occasionally, it actually has to do with the act of showering. There I was scrubbing away at my stomach and chest and thinking about something I read in an article somewhere about how essentially our bodies are a horrid mess of bacteria from our navel to our knees because that's where our intestines are, and they are the storehouse for some of the most powerful bacteria we have.

Actually, I think about this a lot, but suddenly I made a connection to another article I had read. You see, while it's true that there's a lot of bacteria in our intestines, we really have a lot of bacteria overall, and in fact I had read that scientists are now saying that the human body contains more bacteria cells than human cells. That's something to think about. Really, historically we've thought of bacteria as some sort of invader of the human body when in reality, we're living in a symbiotic relationship, for the most part.

And they are really a part of us. One researcher came to the conclusion that some people suffering from obesity are really having a hard time dealing with what are profoundly hungry bacteria that keep sending out hormonal messages to the brain, saying "FEED ME!" How else do you suppose our lives are affected by these microscopic life forms?

Then the thought took off, and I made the connection with another article I'd recently read, which is saying that biologists are starting to rethink the validity of Lamarckism. Lamarckism is the idea that things that an organism does in its lifetime has an effect on its offspring in a way that carries on through generations, sort of like a variety of fables about how a particular animal did some action, and that's why hippos have wrinkly skin, or rats have smooth tails. For some time, biologists had pooh-poohed the concept of Lamarckism, saying that it was our genes that define us. What if they're only "sort of" right?

Think of those hungry bacteria causing obesity. Maybe scientists are looking at the genes of obese people looking for a genetic marker for obesity, and they just can't find it...but it turns out they were looking in the wrong place? Perhaps it's not the genes of the humans that causes obesity, but the genes of the bacteria they carry.

If this were so, could there be more to it than that? No article this time (not that it matters, as I'm giving no references), but I have noticed, like several people, that married couples seem to sometimes look very much alike. As they grow together in marriage, sometimes they look more and more like each other over time. Could this be the result of bacteria affecting other physiological changes? When you sleep together in the same bed, when you're sharing bodily fluids, when you eat together, you're sharing your bacteria. Could that be molding us? Or on the other hand, when people talk about having "chemistry", could they sometimes mean that they sense that they have compatible bacteria?

This is all quite theoretical, of course, and I'm combining thoughts from a number of disciplines about which I only know the slightest surface ideas. Yet think of the implications if this is true, and it may very well be. In the debate between nature and nurture, between behavior patterns being learned and inborn, what if there is a sort of third option? I've said before that I don't believe that sexual orientation is in a person's genetic makeup, yet I wouldn't suggest that it is a chosen path, either. Could it be possible that sexual orientation is acquired as one acquires a cold? Certainly not so simply, and not something that I even think one would "cure" through antibiotics, as I do think it has been shown to have something to do with the structure of the brain, but it certainly the brain structures could be caused by physiological influences that we as yet know nothing about.

What makes us act and look the way we do? Our science fiction authors tell fantastical stories about people being controlled by alien beings, but what if we're already under the control of non-human life forms? If so, should we be creeped out by something that after all is completely natural?

Warning: Mature Content

I remember a time many years back, I think it was before I was a Christian (seems likely, I don't remember many of the details except the dialogue), when I was with a group of guys who were talking about sex. In particular, the topic under discussion was the morality and legality of sex with an underage partner. "Who would be stupid enough to have sex with a fifteen-year-old?" somebody asked. I quickly piped up, "I had sex with a fifteen-year-old." Every eye turned to me, wide and shocked. I smiled. "I was sixteen at the time."

Okay, confession time over. Yeah, I did some things in my teen years that I look back on as being very foolish, but that's not the point. Whether sexual or not, we all do foolish stuff when we're teenagers. It seems to be a time in life when we start to think we're as smart as adults, but few of us really are. Results may vary.

Now if you happen to be a teenager who's famous, your foolish mistakes will likely be broadcast on national television. In 2008, there were two famous teens who made what were considered to be foolish mistakes that to my mind, while foolish, say more about us as a culture than about those specific teenagers.

Miley Cyrus, sometimes known as the Disney star "Hannah Montana", was in the news this last year for posing for nude photographs. I don't really know how old she is, although I am aware she's under 18. Posing for nude photographs while under age 18 is considered a serious thing by our government, generally. I don't know how many people know this story, but back in the early days of Playboy, they had a centerfold that was 16 years old. Now, of course the idea behind limiting such ventures to those of legal age is to avoid exploitation of children, and as the story goes, this young woman came to the offices of the magazine escorted by her mother. Hugh Hefner no doubt figured that if he had parental permission, everything was fine. The feds said no, and there were consequences. Really, that made sense. If you make the assumption that anything goes so long as a minor's parents allow it, then one flings the door wide open to all sorts of exploitation. Think about it: do you think it would be alright for a child to become a prostitute just because her parents were her pimps? I hope your answer is "No!" As it happened, Cyrus' dad Billy Ray was not only present for much of the photo shoot, but was even in some of the pictures (not the nude one). Rather than making people think that made it okay, as far as I can tell, it made people rather angry at Mr. Cyrus for consenting to what they considered unconscionable.

How unconscionable was it, though? I saw the picture, and it made me think (not in a sexual manner, I didn't find the photo at all titillating). This is the thing: I think around the same time this picture was in the news, the movie Iron Man was released in the theaters. In that movie, the leading lady (Gwyneth Paltrow? I'm having a hard time with names this morning.) has a scene in which she shows off more skin than Miley; she was wearing an evening gown. Iron Man wasn't rated G, but I feel pretty confident that the rating had nothing to do with Paltrow's exposed back. In Cyrus' "nude" picture, it was only her back that was visible as well, but for her, it was scandalous.

Why is it that an adult (or even a child, actually) can appear in a movie or television program dressed in, let's say, a skimpy bikini, and it's alright, pieces of art such as Venus de Milo or Michelangelo's David can show pretty much complete nudity, but a teenage girl can't pose draped in a sheet? Note that I'm not saying I completely disagree with the critics on this matter, I only question it as a philosophical matter: what is considered by society to be unacceptable sexuality is vague at best.

Think about it: I'm pretty sure I have nude photos of my own daughters, but we're talking about photos of them under age two. I assume that nobody but the vilest of perverts would find them sexually enticing. The movie The Cider House Rules has a momentary shot of the female lead completely nude, but from the back, allowing what I thought was a movie of very mature content to garner a PG-13. I'm sure there are quite a few people who found that scene very sexually enticing--yet socially acceptable. There is a vague gray area somewhere between the ages of two and eighteen where the thought of sexuality is considered dangerous.

I find something about it ironically amusing. The other teenager who made the news last year was Jamie Lynn Spears. You probably heard about it, but she got pregnant. People were shocked, and I don't understand why. Back in the early days of her career, her older sister Britney had publicly stated that she was a virgin, and planned to remain so for some time. While of course there were those who admired this personal conviction, (however well it may have turned out for her) I seem to recall numerous people in the media who ridiculed the idea. Whether personally addressing Britney's choice in particular, or talking about issues of teen sexuality and scoffing the idea of any teenager being able to be abstinent, the idea seemed to many to be a joke. To many people, it's simply a given that teenagers have sex. News flash: the media may not be aware of it, but teen sex is the leading cause of teen pregnancy.

Our modern society expects teens to be sexually mature and active, and yet at the same time, keep any outward sign of it to themselves. Dress slutty, but don't take your clothes completely off; have sex, but make sure you somehow magically suffer no long-term effects; talk to anyone in the world about your sexuality except for your parents because--despite the fact they had you, and therefore must have had sex at least once--they're surely the least likely people in the world to have anything useful to say about the subject. I wonder what sorts of discussions Miley Cyrus has had with her dad about sex. It seemed like the buzz I picked up is that either he was irresponsible for passively allowing it to happen, or that he was immoral for actively encouraging it. Isn't it possible that they had an intelligent discussion about what's acceptable and what's not? If Miley Cyrus is old enough to have a career, one might think she's old enough to make her own decisions, and not be judged for it. Maybe, I don't know; this is a complicated issue.

I think what most people tend to worry about is the fact that we have a strong tendency to look to celebrities as some sort of role models. Average people like famous people, for some reason it's human nature. My own daughters will tell you if you ask them that they are big fans of "Hannah Montana", although to be honest, I don't think they know who she is; they certainly have never seen an episode of the Disney TV show. Do I want them emulating this behavior? No, but then again, I also recognize the validity and value of artistic expression. One of my daughters wants to be an artist, and if she pursues that interest, no doubt she'll end up doing nude figure drawing, simply because it's an integral part of an art education. She may even pose for other artists, and if she's being smart about it, then good for her I say, and age doesn't really matter.

The truth is, if we're worried about the effect that celebrities have on our children, then maybe something is wrong. Wrong with us. I don't know firsthand, but I get the impression that Cyrus is considered to be a very talented young lady, and that's something to be admired. At the same time, I would urge my own children not to set up any other person, famous or not, to be a role model for their lives carte blanche, but rather to make decisions for themselves as to what's moral behavior, and emulate their own consciences instead. Whatever Cyrus' intentions were in doing the things she did, she's not going to be a perfect model of moral uprightness. Nobody can be guaranteed to be that. I know I'm not.

Mating Habits of Highly Defective People

For those still keeping count (which is probably just me), we are now at 246 out of 292 hits on this blog being people looking for pictures of sexy penguins. (The unlikely phrase "bashemath's husband" has now been used twice to find this blog.) That's about 84% of my traffic.

But that's not the reason for this post. The reason for this post is that I was jokingly looking up info on the mating habits of penguins on Wikipedia, thinking that I'd do a post about it. I found some disturbing stuff.

Not about penguins. Their mating habits are fairly bland, even the homosexual ones. They mate, the female lays an egg and passes it to the male, who sits on it for about two months. The egg hatches, and the female returns and raises the chick. Penguins do not mate for life, but will stay with a single mate for each season, sometimes choosing the same mate several years in a row. No, the shocking stuff had to do with ducks. I quote here:

"While he was sitting in his office at the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, [Dutch researcher Kees] Moeliker heard the distinctive thud of a bird hitting the glass facade of the building. Upon inspection, he discovered a drake mallard lying dead about two meters from the building. Next to the downed bird there was a second drake mallard standing close by. As he observed the odd couple, the living drake picked at the corpse of the dead one for a few minutes and then, without provocation, it mounted the corpse and began copulating with it. The act of necrophilia lasted for about 75 minutes, in which time, according to Moeliker, the living drake took two short breaks before resuming with copulating behavior."

As I said in a comment I left on this blog elsewhere yesterday, I don't care if that's natural or not, that's just sick. And that's the issue I want to address here. All of those people who, regardless of what socio-political position they are taking, try to make a point for something being the "correct", "natural" or even just "acceptable" way of doing things by pointing to a parallel in the animal kingdom need to consider what sort of things they may be flinging the door wide open to.

I made this rant years ago in a discussion forum in the middle of an argument on whether or not homosexuality is natural. Both sides were trying to argue from the behavior of animals for their side, and I had to butt in and point out some of the things I will point out here.

Let's talk about animal sexual behavior, shall we? One very common strategy among animals is to reproduce with as many different partners as possible. While typically most people think of this as a male strategy, many studies have shown that females also choose this behavior. Some birds have been shown to pick a primary mate and then, when her primary mate is out fetching food, she invites in other males behind his back so to speak to fertilize an egg or two. So, cheating on your spouse that you've pledged monogamy to? Totally natural!

Of course, how are you going to get away with this sort of "cheating"? I recently saw a documentary on cuttlefish, who turn out to be very intelligent and adaptive creatures. During mating season, some species of cuttlefish, who have the ability to change the color of their skin, will change their behavior over from using their chameleon-like abilities to hide from predators to putting on shows of bright, flashy skin to show off to females. Often the dominant male will put himself between the local female that everyone is vying for and all the other males, blocking them off from access. Smaller males, who have no chance of fighting off the alpha male (or whatever cuttlefish biologists would call him) will use their ability to change their appearance to instead pretend to be a female, and thus gain access to the guarded female. Let's call that cross-dressing to get undetected access to the girls' locker room, eh? Let's also call it natural and acceptable.

Among many species (including humans to some extent), it's common for the females to be unable and/or unwilling to mate while still raising children. Suppose you're a lion who sees an attractive female who would otherwise be available if not for the fact that she's got a couple cubs with her. What are you going to do about it? Correct! You kill the cubs and then invite her back to your place for a lovely evening of candlelight, wine and fresh gazelle carcass. Killing your mate's children by a previous partner? Must be the right thing to do, as it occurs in nature. (Not to mention several species in which males will attack pregnant females in order to induce them to miscarry.)

But why stop at killing your mate's offspring? How many times have you found yourself in the mood for a little snack after some hanky-panky? You might wish that your mate would go and fetch you a snack, but then... Well, some spiders (although apparently not as many as is commonly believed) and other insects, particularly the mantises have an interesting solution to this dilemma: let your mate be your snack! Really, after you've got what you want from them for the purposes of pleasure/reproduction, aren't they just a meal waiting to happen? I mean, in nature, every living thing is eventually eaten, so why not be eaten by your own kind? What's more natural than that?

The thing is, you could find an example of just about any behavior (sexual or otherwise) somewhere in nature. A female ("queen") bee will typically mate with about a dozen males during a single day when it comes time for her to mate, and in the process, she castrates each of them, causing their death. Some species of wasps lay their eggs in live spiders, which then hatch out and eat the spiders. I was not aware of it until I researched some of this on Wikipedia, but apparently some dolphins participate in behaviors that among humans would be called "gang rape".

My point in all of this? Simple. We are human beings, and not any other type of animal, so there is simply no sense in comparing ourselves to any other type of animal. In nature, anything that can happen does, and there's no point in calling it justification for anything.

The myth of homosexuality

Love that title? I thought it would be an attention-getter. Don't judge too harshly before you read, but do know that this may get a PG-13 rating if not worse. I started to write this entry on Monday, and as so often seems to happen, I get a fair way into a bit of clever writing and somehow manage to do something to screw it up and lose it. In this case, I shifted in my seat and kicked the computer's plug out, losing not only my writing, but other documents that had actual importance. Still, I had this clever bit about how I should rename my blog "Theologian Rants Always on Something Homosexual" since it seems to be a far too prominent topic for what I had intended this blog to be; oh, well. On the positive side, I've decided to take a different approach to the topic here which I think will cover a broader topic than my initial attempt. But I ought to get to where I'm going.

Ted Haggard. You've probably heard of the guy. If you didn't, here's what you need to know: Ted Haggard was (and perhaps still is) the leader of a prominent evangelical organization that had a lot of the standard fundamentalist views on homosexuality and drug abuse; in any case, those views were expressed in Haggard's sermons, that much is for sure. Then not so long ago (about a month or so) the story broke that Haggard had had an affair with a male prostitute from whom he had also bought drugs. Haggard claimed that he had only gone to this guy for a massage, and while he had indeed bought the drugs, he had not used them.

Whether or not Haggard had indeed had a same-sex affair or been a user of illicit drugs is not the issue. He and the other leaders of his organization agreed that he had done something wrong, and needed a time to himself for repentance and healing. The public had largely cast its judgment as well, and many of them had decided that clearly, Haggard was a closeted homosexual. It's this judgment that I really wish to focus on here.

Some have said, and I don't think that the view is so very alien and uncommon, that the root of the problem was Christianity's decision to treat the "sin" of homosexuality so harshly, or even to consider it a sin at all. No doubt, Haggard was gay, had always been gay, and had simply spent most of his life burying his true desires under a persona of religious zealotry. If only he had been allowed to live freely, he would have had a simple, happy life as an openly gay man.

I don't buy it. The guy has children, and has been married for a long time--to a woman, natch. A guy spends most of his life having a woman as his sexual outlet, and then has a single same-sex affair, and that means he's gay? I can think of a number of other possibilities that seem more likely, at least to me. Sure, he might be gay, but then, he might be bisexual. Or he may even be a straight man who somehow got tempted to try something that didn't immediately seem pleasing. Sure, the latter seems at face value to be very far-fetched, but I don't think it's out of the question; smoking tobacco is not a pleasant experience for people who try it at first, but many people do it anyway.

In thinking about this topic, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about the word "pervert". Generally, the word is used to refer to someone who has an unnatural sexual desire, but since there is a great deal of debate as to what is "natural", this generally gets used to mean: "Someone who has a sexual desire that *I* don't like/approve of." It's far too arbitrary in that sense, but I think there's something telling in what the word means in a more technical sense. Stripping away the moral implications of the word (which is hard to do, since it's a big part of what the word is about), the idea is that perverting something is to redirect it away from its intended use in an unexpected way. (Now, if you're certain that God intended sex to only be between a man and a woman, then any homosexual is a "pervert" in that sense, but I'm not trying to simplify this issue; I'm intending to hugely complicate it!)

Morality aside, if indeed Haggard is gay, and indeed being homosexual is a characteristic that you are naturally born with, then the perverted thing that Haggard did was to get married to a woman! Someone who is truly homosexual should not try to pervert those natural desires by pretending and/or attempting to act in a manner consistent with heterosexuals. But then, if they find they are easily able to do so, perhaps they are not homosexual? They must be bisexual; but then, if we as a society only accept monogamy, how does a bisexual stay true to their sexuality?

Now I've ventured back to the arena of morality again, and I do want to view this issue both from within that arena and without. There is a tendency I feel I have seen in society as of late, and I don't know how prevalent it is. I don't exactly hear about this sort of thing happening very often, but then, it probably doesn't happen so often anyway. The scenario is presented of a man who has been in a long-lasting marriage that to all outsiders seems to be a happy and successful marriage, but then one day, he admits that he has spent his life as a closeted homosexual. Essentially, he says, "I have realized that I need to be honest and true to myself. My wife is a good woman, but I have a desire to have sex with men, and as such, I am leaving my wife to be with a man." A large portion of society seems to applaud this decision. The man is liberated, he's being true to himself, and casting off the chains of an outmoded societal standard that was keeping him from the pursuit of happiness.

Now let's take another man, a man in the same situation before the revelation. He comes to a realization about his true desires, and he decides it's time for him to likewise cast off the chains of outmoded morality and pursue his happiness. "I have realized that I need to be honest and true to myself. My wife is a good woman, but I have a desire to have sex with twenty-year-old blondes, and as such, I am leaving my fifty-year-old brunette wife to be with one." Does society applaud this man? I don't think so. But really, is there such a difference between him and the previous one? If you're in a long-term committed relationship with another person, I think you have a responsibility to stay true to that person. That doesn't mean that separation is never an option, but it's something that shouldn't be taken lightly, regardless of the issues involved. (I'd even go so far as to say that goes for a same-sex couple in which one partner becomes convinced that homosexual relations are immoral; I don't think I'd advise such a person to just "drop their partner like a hot rock," so to speak, but find a way to make the transition out of the relationship as smoothly and respectfully as possible.)

But perhaps you'll claim that in the latter case this is not a matter of a person's orientation, but a matter of a "dirty old man", but that's subjective. The fact is that society as a whole, and various sub-sections of society make up their minds as to what is perversion and what is not, in both a moral and non-moral sense. It's not just Christians that do it, everyone does, and really, I don't think that's wrong per se. We have to judge others because that's how we interact personally; and we have to likewise judge ourselves, because that's how we make moral decisions. What makes choosing a sexual partner based on gender right, and choosing one based on age wrong? Isn't that just another kind of "sexual orientation"?

My big realization (while it may be complete crap, as I'm sure so much of my writing is) is that I was both wrong and right about something I used to think years ago. See, I used to think that people were not born homosexual, but to be fair, they weren't born heterosexual, either. I figured they were born bisexual (although perhaps "asexual" is more to the point) in that what sort of sexual partner one would prefer in adulthood was largely a preference formed by a variety of childhood experiences. Most people ended up going one way or the other, although some people stayed somewhere in the vague middle. I think now that I was right in that potentially each person would be open to a variety of placements on the sexual spectrum based on their early psychosocial development. But I was wrong in a bigger way.

I think I am now convinced that "sexual orientation" is a myth.

Because we as human beings like to judge people and pigeonhole them, we look at a man like Haggard and put him in a box. We say, "He's a homosexual." Really, that's where the word came from, as do many words; there were people that acted in certain ways sexually, and we wanted to put a simple handle on this behavior and build a box where we could contain it. Homosexual. As opposed to heterosexual. But this pigeonholing of people causes the sorts of problems that we have with gays in the military. The people against gays in the military feel that homosexuals will cause morale problems. Why? Because a soldier will always be wondering if there's some guy in his platoon who wants to have sex with him, although he has no interest in that, I guess.

Look, though. Where did the assumption come from? We say, "homosexual males are sexually attracted to other males," and it frankly must sound to some homophobes that there must be thousands of gay men out there somewhere who would like nothing better than to catch you with your pants down, right? But do you assume that every heterosexual woman in the world is looking to sleep with you? Do you want to sleep with every single woman in the world? (Maybe you do, and maybe there are indeed gay men who likewise would be amenable to sleeping with any other man, but it's certainly not the norm.)

The simple labels that we put on sexual orientation make the subject look like it's a simple matter, but it simply is not. The number and scope of the issues are huge enough that several books could be and have been written on the subject. If a person enjoyed masturbation, isn't that sex with a person of the same gender? Is a bisexual really a bisexual if they've never had sex with a member of the same gender? People say that pedophilia has nothing to do with homosexuality, but I wonder; aren't there male pedophiles that only molest young boys? Aren't there others that only molest young girls? Might one say that the former is a homosexual pedophile while the latter is a heterosexual one? Nobody wants to be associated with pedophiles, so if you're in the homosexual "box", you don't want (homosexual) pedophiles in the box with you, surely. Is sexual orientation about finding certain people attractive, desiring to have sex with certain people, or being sexually turned on by certain people? I once knew a woman who was a lesbian, but she was turned on by watching gay men kiss; what does that say about her "orientation"? What about the whole can of worms of the sexual orientation of transsexuals and intersexed individuals?

The fact is, the world does not consist of merely two types of people, homosexuals and heterosexuals. The world consists of six billion individuals each of whom has their own particular sexual desires. This is neither right nor wrong, it is simply a fact. Perhaps each and every one of us is a "pervert" in someone else's view?