Robert Gagnon: Why sexual orientation is not akin to race or sex

You may have heard about the case of Ms. Crystal Dixon, the African American Associate Vice President of Human Resources at the University of Toledo, who was suspended for rejecting a comparison between homosexuality on the one hand and being black or handicapped on the other. Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon, Associate Professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary as written a remarkable "Open Letter" to the University President challenging his administration's suspension of Ms. Dixon. It begins like this:

May 6, 2008

President Lloyd Jacobs
University of Toledo

Dear President Jacobs,

Your suspension of Ms. Crystal Dixon, Associate Vice President of Human Resources at the University of Toledo, for rejecting a comparison between homosexuality on the one hand and being black or handicapped on the other hand constitutes, in my view, a gross injustice and an expression of the very intolerance that you claim to abhor. The disciplinary action is also predicated on a lack of knowledge and thus prejudice. I have read of your action first at worldnetdaily.com, then the full exchange at www.toledofreepress.com (the editor’s editorial, Ms. Dixon’s response, your response, and finally the news of the suspension).

Ms. Dixon is absolutely right that sexual orientation is not akin to race or sex. Unlike a homosexual orientation, race and sex are 100% congenitally predetermined, cannot be fundamentally changed in their essence by cultural influences, and are not a primary or direct desire for behavior that is incompatible with embodied structures.

Of course, generally people don't wake up one morning and say, "I think I'll be a homosexual." Yet that is different from arguing that homosexual development is always and only something "given" like race and sex. Even the Kinsey Institute has acknowledged that nine out of ten persons with same-sex attractions will experience at least one shift on the Kinsey spectrum from 0 to 6 during their life; six out of ten will experience two or more shifts. The intensity of impulses, and sometimes even their direction, can and often do change over time. Like various forms of sexual impulses, the degree to which a homosexual "orientation" becomes fixed in an individual's brain and the intensity with which it is experienced, at least in part and for some, can be affected by choices regarding fantasy life, responses to social and environmental factors in childhood and adolescence, the degree to which one acts on impulses, and the degree of self-motivation for change.

Even Edward Stein, a scholar of law and philosophy who is strongly supportive of homosexual unions, has challenged deterministic models of homosexual development. He posits instead a nondeterministic model that incorporates a significant role for choice—often blind, incremental, and indirect but choice nonetheless (The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory, and Ethics of Sexual Orientation [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999]). This is what the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review had to say about Stein's book: "A landmark book…. It so pulls the rug out from under biological arguments for lesbian and gay rights that anyone from now on who appeals to such arguments will have to answer to Edward Stein's objections" (from back cover).

Read the rest of this thoroughgoing indictment, not only of the suspension of Ms. Dixon, but the smoke-and-mirrors chicanery of contemporary pro-gay "scholarship." If ever the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force had reason to fear complete exposure of this sort of "scholarship," it is from Professor Gagnon. The man is brilliant.

Book recommendation: Professor Gagnon book below is one I am familiar with and is probably the best analysis of the biblical data concerning homosexuality you will find in print:

Robert Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Abingdon, 2001).