Your Big Gay Baby

Have you ever fired a shotgun at a hobo? The traditional method involves removing the lead 'shot' from the ammunition and replacing it with chunks of rock salt.
This is slightly less fatal than buckshot but guaranteed to hurt like hell in any wounds it causes- but most hobos will jump from a moving boxcar at the sight of a shotgun, rock salt or not- a hobo trapped in the narrow confines of a railway freight car is an easy target.

But there are easier targets.

Fundamentalist Christian Homophobes, for example. Attacking them and their ludicrous 'beliefs' is easier than drowning slugs in a barrel of pickle brine.

These Christians, who hate Science when it teaches evolution or uses stem-cells to fight diseases, have opened up Pandora's Closet with this almost unthinkable uproar about Gay Babies- in theory, these Christians hope, science will allow them to determine their unborn child's sexual orientation , giving them the chance to 'cure' unborn queer babies of their homosexuality, which no serious modern scientist would call a disease anyway...

A Fundie Christian wrote this:

If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.

My idea would be to guillotine the writer's penis in order to help him avoid the "inevitable effects of sin" - but why stop there? Let's remove his fingers before he pens more poison words - heck, lose the whole hand.
Dude.
Save yourself from the Sin of Onan.

This dogmatic freak is using religious insanity as an excuse for practical applications of eugenics theory.
Even the Nazis were not this crass- the Germans conducted their atrocities in the name of science and Nation and left God out of their vocabulary of horror- but this man implies that God would be OK with Man tinkering with the unborn if it kept them from being gay...hmm, what's next? Does Thalidomide prevent self-abuse? Does being born with a flipper instead of an arm keep you pure?

They could test for other 'degenerate' traits...what if you were a Christian Couple and the doctors told you that due to some miscegenation during the Third Crusade, there was a slight chance you might have a Muslim baby- or a Jewish baby...what if your child was destined to be an alcoholic or a vegetarian? A serial killer or the next Gandhi?

What if you made a drastic, irreversible decision about your baby based on a faulty screening test- what if your mistake turned your straight fetus into a gay one- or into a liberal- or made them creative- or atheist-or intellectually curious- or any other item off of the seemingly endless list of things that Fundie Christians cannot tolerate... I reject this idea of aesthetic fetal modification for ethical and practical reasons- if, for example, Oscar Wilde had been "de-faggotted" before birth, would he still have been an excellent author? What else gets destroyed, changed or lost when you start modifying the minds of the unborn? I trust science a lot more then Faith, but I'm not gonna let anyone- Labcoat or Frock- tell me I shouldn't love my child simply because they are gay.

I would have a gay child.
I would love them.
So what?

They'd be loved because they would be my child.

Even atheists love their children, although, in my case, not enough to force mutation on them in the womb.
I might reconsider if they were to be seriously deformed, but probably not.
What if some 'curative' treatment was applied to an unborn Stephen Hawking- perhaps he'd walk, but what would have become of his mind? Would he have been the same?
Aren't people like Mr. Hawking part of God's Plan? Some of us are strong, some are smart...together we are supposed to work it out and take care of each other.

Isn't that the idea? Not according to Fundie Freeks.

If Stephen Hawking was my kid, I'd be proud. Very, very proud.


Fundie Freak makes a great point here:

The discovery of a biological basis for homosexuality would be of great pastoral significance, allowing for a greater understanding of why certain persons struggle with these particular sexual temptations.

What he really means is that this will allow guilt-wracked Fundie parents to stop agonizing over why their kids turned out gay- it's not because of the painfully sado-masochistic homo-erotic imagery of the Crucifixion, it's not because their role-model Pastor likes giving head to the gay hotel hookers who supply his amphetamine habit; it's not because they were never shown the love and attention that they needed at home and wound up getting buggered by the priests- now they can blame it on the DNA. Simple and cleansing.

Fundie insists God created DNA and His "pernicious" handiwork can be seen in the DNA helix, Original Sin being just another genetic marker, but the Bible tends to contradict this Fundie statement:

Given the consequences of the Fall and the effects of human sin, we should not be surprised that such a causation or link is found. After all, the human genetic structure, along with every other aspect of creation, shows the pernicious effects of the Fall and of God's judgment.

Ummm...riiiiighhhtt...

Personally, I think God a is pretty poor consultant when it comes to matters of conception, breeding , DNA and whatnot- at least one precedent comes to mind:

Once upon a time , this Old Guy named Zelophehad died , and he owned lots of land but he didn't have any sons, just daughters- and Jehovah was pretty sexist towards unmarried women and property (women were property, they did not typically own or inherit it), so there was some dispute as how to keep the father's wealth in the hands of his unmarried daughters - and, of course, in the tribe.

Moses was pretty much the spiritual go-to guy back then , so he was dispatched to go ask God about how to settle this dilemma.

This is what God told Moses:

"This is the word that Jehovah has commanded for the daughters of Zelophehad, saying, ‘To whom it is good in their eyes they may become wives. Only it is to the family of the tribe of their fathers that they should become wives."

What God was saying is : "Marry your father's brother's sons- marry your cousins and keep the money in the family."

This concept explains a lot about American Evangelicalism but it shows an alarming ignorance of genetics, especially from the Being who allegedly Created DNA.

Marry your cousin?

God should know better.

It amazes me that anyone could attribute 'Intelligent Design' to a God that is so intellectually dense that He doesn't even understand the basic chromosomal principles at work in His own creations.

Didn't God invent Mendel and those famous beans? Can't He read?

However, the agnostic idea that there may very well be a God, and that God is as thick as the proverbial brick, seems to gather steam every time I hear about these close-minded and dangerous lunatics; in fact , the idea of God being really powerful but a bit clumsy, a trifle stupid and dangerously incompetent seems quite logical.

After all, it's His image.