I am not speaking here about a biblical approach to the issues raised by the LGBTQ movement. I think my readers know that my basic stand is that God sets sexual direction for human beings as part of his creation order and intent. However, the issue of sexual orientation has a long history in psychology and psychiatry. There has been a progression in the history of the arguments concerning how to understand and approach gay and LGBTQ orientations.
Historic psychiatry and behavioral psychology (two opposing approaches) both saw gay and lesbian orientations as from environmental influences. It was considered a behavior problem to be corrected, healed or straightened out. Psychiatry would look into the family dynamics and the wrong relationship between the parents and the child growing up. They pointed to unhealthy patterns that could produce gay orientations. The analysis would enable understanding and overcoming. Behavioral theory interpreted all behavior as rooted in the conditioning of the subject. The reward/ punishment system produces a right or wrong orientation. This tends to be more deterministic than psychiatry. Generally, people are determined to be how they are due to the conditioning in their growing up years. As one practitioner said, sexual orientation is very flexible, and one can be conditioned to get sexually excited by a lamp post. Of course, there is in behaviorism a biological basis for attraction to the opposite sex, but sufficient conditioning can stifle this and create the aberrant orientation. The answer is to place the person who is wrongly oriented into a course of re-conditioning. The basic biological realities would give the behaviorist the view that heterosexuality was normative. Due to much political pressure associations of both Psychologists and Psychiatrists in counseling gave up these views and voted to accept gay orientations as normal variations to be accepted. Counseling should be to enable one to adjust and live a good life within a gay lifestyle. This is now the consensus of counseling.
Following this previous dominant history, the argument was put forth that gays and lesbians were determined to be according to their orientations by their physical makeup. It is a genetic matter or a brain issue. After many studies failed to prove any such basis for the orientations, many gay writers gave up on this. Within their own counsels they admitted that, though physical determination is a good argument to get straights to accept their gay orientation, it really is a proclivity they could not explain, is partly chosen and should be accepted never the less.
Post-modernism, based in existentialism has a totally different approach. Going back to some in the Frankfurt Germany school of Philosophy, a doctrine of radical freedom and self-definition is taught. There is a rejection of any essence of a person as given by God (since His existence is denied) or given by nature or biology. Once the conscious ego arises, radical freedom to choose becomes understood. One can, therefore, choose any orientation sexually. The one value maintained is that sexual involvement has to be with consenting adults. The one absolute is that one must not do violence to others. So not only can one be gay or lesbian, but one can be transsexual or consider themselves a man in a woman’s body or a woman in a man’s body. One can be bi-sexual or polyamorous (multiple partners). It is of the highest ethical stand in such a philosophy that sexual self-definition is an absolute right of human freedom. Any assertion of traditional morality as incumbent upon human beings is a rejection of the right of self-definition and therefore is hate speech. This yields such new orientations as a pregnant man (woman’s body) or a man in a woman’s body marrying a woman in a man’s body and having normal intercourse while thinking they are the opposite sex. It also opens up the choice of surgery to make the body on the outside more like what one thinks of oneself on the inside. The woman in a man’s body will cut off the male sexual organs and create a woman like vagina, or the women will cut off breasts and as much as possible create male organs. Such surgery is terribly partial since the surgically changed male to a woman can never bear a baby, nurse a baby, or have the kind of sexual pleasure that a woman would have. The women who changes to a male can never have a real male erection or experience of male orgasm (there is no prostate gland). In addition, every cell of the body will still be xx for a biologically born woman and xy for a man. Hormonal therapy can cause a male to develop breasts and can give a woman a deeper male voice. The evidence is that surgery and hormonal therapy can be very damaging physically. It contradicts the body’s total cellular being. The recent leader from Johns Hopkins University and chief of the Psychiatry department and expert on sexual dysfunctions, Dr. Paul McHugh, argued and still argues that hormonal and surgical re-assignment are health-threatening. But the LGBTQ movement is a full-blown world view ideology. The right to choose must override health concerns. However, some argue that to practice these things with children who have not the maturity to choose and before puberty have no certainty on an orientation, is child abuse.
The new ideology is based on the idea of radical freedom, not as much on determined proclivities. It is also said that people may change and choose differently in the future. Surgical and hormonal treatment might preclude later choices. One can assert a personal preference for a traditional sexual orientation in marriage but any assertion of right and wrong in orientation is hate speech since it contradicts the absolute radical freedom of each person to choose. It should be noted that post-modern ethics is not rooted in anything. The ethic itself is actually an anti-ethic since its foundation is a raw choice of what will count as their foundational ethical ideas. It is not a norm outside of ourselves to which we are to conform since there are no objective norms outside ourselves. Hence it is an anti-ethic ethic.