I recently got an email from a student at the University of Illinois who’s helping put together a panel discussion called “Religion and the LGBT Community.” The plan is to have representatives from different faiths answer questions about homosexuality in front of LGBT students (and allies).

His committee invited all the faith communities on campus to be a part of this. Sounds like a relevant, important issue that anyone would want to be a part of… but one group rejected the offer:

… the Catholic affiliated church near campus declined and also sent our office a five page declaration of all the arguments they have against homosexuality… I found it very unsettling that the church has a “ready to go” sheet of rebuttals for the topic of homosexuality…

Here’s a glimpse from that document:

Homosexual activists often justify homosexuality by claiming that ten percent of the population is homosexual, meaning that it is a common and thus acceptable behavior. But not all common behaviors are acceptable, and even if ten percent of the population were born homosexual, this would prove nothing. One hundred percent of the population is born with original sin and the desires flowing from it. If those desires manifest themselves in a homosexual fashion in ten percent of the population, all that does is give us information about the demographics of original sin. But the fact is that the ten percent figure is false. It stems from the 1948 report by Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. The study was profoundly flawed, as later psychologists studying sexual behavior have agreed. Kinsey’s subjects were drawn heavily from convicted criminals; 1,400 of his 5,300 final subjects (twenty-six percent) were convicted sex offenders—a group that by definition is not representative of normal sexual practices. Furthermore, the ten percent figure includes people who are not exclusively homosexual but who only engaged in some homosexual behavior for a period of time and then stopped—people who had gone through a fully or partially homosexual “phase” but who were not long-term homosexuals. (For a critique of Kinsey’s research methods, see Kinsey, Sex, and Fraud, by Dr. Judith Reisman and Edward Eichel [Lafayette, Louisiana: Lochinvar & Huntington House, 1990].) Recent and more scientifically accurate studies have shown that only around one to two percent of the population is homosexual.

Feel free to respond to that drivel…

Meanwhile, I’m disappointed the Catholic group has no desire to explain or defend their stance to the students’ faces. It’s a cowardly move. Instead, they’ll stand at a distance, parading their ignorance, handing out sheets with arguments that would be laughable if they weren’t so damn infuriating.



