“It’s Behavior, Not Orientation” by Frederica Mathewes- Green, World, October 29, 1994.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
World is a slick, full-color, Right-wing newsmagazine published in North Carolina. Its aim is “To help Christians apply the Bible to their understanding of and response to everyday current events”, including, of course, a favorite target: homosexuals and gay/lesbian civil rights. Unfortunately, this is largely attempted with what Dorothy L. Sayers called “the insistent identification of Christian morality with everything that Christ most fervently abhorred”.
Some background. Over the years, World has inflamed readers with distortions such as these: “None of the risks of homosexuality are revealed in the media”, “homosexuality and promiscuity go together”, “drug abuse is exceedingly common among homosexuals”, “one kind of sex [homosexual] brings unwanted death”, the government is “spending taxpayer dollars to promote homosexuality”, “a child in a homosexual household is a child at risk”, “hundreds of bare-breasted lesbians walked the parade route”. In spite of C. Everett Koop’s concern that AIDS “will affect the lives of all of us sufficiently to make us grasp the enormity of the tragedy that is upon us,” World regularly downplays the growing AIDS crisis, complaining that attention to AIDS is a ploy of the gay agenda. World claims that gay/lesbian lobbies are among the “best-financed lobbies in the country”, and though it notes elsewhere that just one Mississippi-based antigay lobby has a budget of $11 million, World warns that in 1993 “the top six gay groups raised more than $12.5 million”. This overlooks the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the antigay lobbies of James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, Lou Sheldon, Beverly LaHaye, etc. World claims that “homosexuals are among the most economically successful groups in the United States” but annual Yankelovich Monitor survey data show a statistically insignificant $100 difference between the mean annual household incomes of homosexuals and heterosexuals. Notwithstanding the utter failure of the “ex-gay” movement to change homosexual orientation or even behavior, World claims “the ex-gay movement is an extremely important one as the nation grapples with homosexuals”. World has never reported the fact that most “ex-gay” agencies are now defunct or are led by replacements – often by so-called “ever-straights” who have never been gay – following the all-too-obvious continuing homosexuality of now ex-“ex-gay” leaders.
Even conservative readers criticize World’s “smug self-righteousness”. Editor-publisher Joel Belz admits with a yes/but apology that “World is occasionally criticized for being too editorially harsh and mean-spirited” and goes on to add that “Sometimes, we’ve probably earned that criticism. … Still ….” Still – World remains mean-spirited. Belz ridicules what he calls the “predictable … reminders from the Richard Mouws and the Tony Campolos of evangelicalism, that we ought to develop a kinder and gentler spirit toward homosexuals”. He judges such a call a mere “diversion”. Belz predicts that these on the “evangelical left … will trundle off on trendy and more politically correct detours that will find them all but forfeiting biblical standards. The issue of homosexuality”, he warns, “is a litmus test in this respect”. Meanwhile, World runs display ads boasting “politically incorrect” postcards for “Fundamental – Heterosexual – Homophobic BIGOTS”.
As we turn now to the commentary by contributing editor Mathewes-Green, World’s track record prepares us for her beginning with four paragraphs foisting pedophilia and NAMBLA (a fringe group of self-styled “man/boy lovers”) into what she dubs the “Gaystream” or gay mainstream. But when she launches into the “question of whether people are ‘born with their sexual orientation’, [calling that] the defining issue of homosexual rights …a red herring”, she makes an acknowledgement heretofore resisted by other fundamentalist Christians. In the past, World has been in lock step with the rest of the Religious Right in being pro-choice, i.e., it’s always held out for nurture over nature in the etiology debate. But Mathewes-Green writes: “we should admit that if homosexuality isn’t inborn, it’s often rooted so deep that it may as well be. Heterosexuals know just as well that our own preferences … are formed somewhere early in life, before conscious choice. It’s a matter of taste for which, as the saying goes, there’s no accounting. We can’t account for it ourselves.” She gets close to the right idea, even though she thinks in terms of the superficialities of hair color and height. “All through dating years”, she says, “I could have used all the ‘Gaystream’ lines: I’ve been like this ever since I can remember. It’s not something I chose. Maybe I was born this way. I can’t imagine what it would take to change.” But she then speculates on “a genetic predisposition to philandering”, incest, necrophilia, and the pedophilia to which she returns for a fifth long paragraph. No. It won’t do.
So, she ends by promising that “persistence and prayer will lead to reorientation” for homosexuals, even though, for herself, she had said “I can’t imagine what it would take to change”. Failing change, she writes, “there will be the difficult lifelong discipline of celibacy”. But not for her. She’s listed as “Mrs.”.