Blurred Biology

Imagine you're wandering through a shopping mall, searching for a restroom. Suddenly you come across three doors: The first is marked "men," the second is labeled "women"--and the third door is marked "intersexual." If the homosexual lobby has its way, this may become more than a bizarre fantasy. Gay activists and their allies in academia are promoting the idea that human sexuality is not divided into distinct categories. They say that sexuality is a continuum, with people falling all along a spectrum. Support for this claim is supposedly found in a medical condition called hermaphroditism. Hermaphrodites are people born with both male and female sexual characteristics. Babies afflicted with this deformity usually undergo plastic surgery and hormone therapy, which enables them to function as either a male or a female. But today a vocal lobby is contending that hermaphroditism is perfectly normal--that it's our attitude that needs fixing. For example, in a journal called The Sciences, Anna Fausto-Sterling, a developmental geneticist at Brown University, says that hermaphroditism is proof that nature intended gender to be, in her words, "a vast, infinitely malleable continuum." In fact, she claims that humans come in at least five sexes, "including three types of intersexuals with varying degrees of male or female characteristics." Morgan Holmes, a hermaphrodite who has never been surgically treated, supports this view. In a journal called Queer Frontiers, Holmes says that the traditional belief that people come in just two sexes, is merely a "social construct." Holmes is campaigning for a new gender category: "intersexual" or "transgender." The idea that sexuality is a continuum has been standard dogma among sexologists since the work of Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s. The difference today is that the unfortunate victims of sexual deformities are being dragged in as biological proof of Kinsey's theory--ultimately for ideological purposes. For example, Congress recently passed the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA. The law was passed to forestall the possibility that Hawaii might force all 50 states to recognize same-sex marriage. DOMA limits marriage to unions between people of the opposite sex. But if sexologists are right, then there isn't an opposite sex--only a vast continuum from male to female, and everything in between. DOMA could not be sustained. This illustrates the problem of taking biology as the baseline for behavior. The Bible teaches that the Fall into sin affected biology itself--that nature is now marred and distorted from its original perfection. This truth gives us a basis for fighting evil, for working to alleviate disease and deformity--including helping those unfortunate children born with genital deformities. The non-Christian biologist has no standard but nature as it exists today. But for the Christian, nature is not our basis for determining normality. Scripture tells us how God created us before the Fall, and how He intended us to live: as males and females, reflecting His own image. We take our standards and identity from His revelation of our original nature. The division of the sexes is not a "social construct." It's a divine creation. And that means all we'll ever need is two kinds of restrooms: one for men and one for women.  

10/16/96