Homosexuality is a Disorder

Homosexual tendencies seem to have been inherited by many of those who identify with the behavioral patterns of the opposite gender in childhood. I won't try to prove this, it just seems to be true, and it's difficult to argue against this position when debating about homosexuality in casual conversations. Some humans seem to be born homosexuals. However, it's also understood by most people on an intuitive level that homosexuality is a form of confusion. The reproductive drive of homosexuals is directed towards an object with which they cannot reproduce: a member of their own gender. This means that inherited homosexuality is a disorder similar to those belonging to people born with tendencies towards anxiety or depression disorders, addiction disorders, and foot fetishes. Homosexuality was listed as a psychological disorder for many decades by doctors who easily recognized it as a confused form of the reproductive instinct.

When Christians object to homosexuality, most of us are objecting to the celebration and encouragement of what we perceive as a cognitive health disorder (a sinful element of the fallen world). In the same way, we also object to society celebrating anxiety, depression, and foot fetishes. The social affirmation of disorders can have deeply destructive consequences. For a thousand years, Chinese girls and women were forced to bind their feet and cripple themselves because China decided to celebrate and encourage small foot fetishes. It led to the painful mutilation of over a billion young women. Imagine society celebrating a "depression history month" and experiencing a wave of suicides. Imagine society celebrating homosexuality and experiencing a deadly wave of male-to-male sexually transmitted diseases… well, that already happened. What we accept, celebrate, and encourage has consequences. 

Smoking is unhealthy. Personally, I don't support the banning of cigarettes, but I do support the widespread knowledge that they're dangerous. In the same way, I don't support homosexuality being criminalized, but I do support the widespread dissemination of knowledge about it being a disorder. Why are we celebrating a disorder? Would we celebrate weird fetishes or anxiety attacks? Would we celebrate cleft lips and other birth defects? These are disorders, and we should be attempting to cure them rather than spreading them. Are we loving our neighbors by encouraging them to develop disorders or act upon disordered instincts? Would we encourage someone born with depressive tendencies to act out their depression and become more depressed? Of course not, that would be a form of hatred.

The deeper problem in this phenomenon of celebrating disorders is our disordered philosophy of the human being. What is a human? Is a human a random collection of atoms with no preordained purpose or meaning? If so, then there can be no such thing as a "disorder." If there's nothing that the human-atoms should be doing, then all possible movements of human-atoms are acceptable (including what we'd call confusion and insanity). However, if a human being is something with purpose and meaning, then there's a way that humans should think and act, and there's also a way that humans should not think and act. Disorders are, by definition, that which is not acceptable to human purpose and meaning. 

It should be said that all humans are disordered, we're fallen from the perfect order represented by the Kingdom of God. Our goal should be to get back to that Kingdom, and we can't get back to the Kingdom by disordering ourselves; that would take us in the opposite direction. Homosexuality is merely one way in which humans are disordered, and it shouldn't be regarded as exceptionally abominable. We're all abominable in different ways.