“Unless it causes homosexuality, then, this is not a harm to your baby… but a benefit” ~ Leftist positions followed to their logical conclusions. Lowering of IQ, and autism is a net “negative” affect… but I wonder if the left’s political correctness would allow them to say that increase in the possibility of being born gay (or at least a higher proclivity to be) is a net “negative.” I think I know the answer.
A similar issue with special rights (vs. equal rights) comes to light in a similar way with this idea, and shows that liberals paint themselves into a corner:
“If homosexuality is really genetic, we may soon be able to tell if a fetus is predisposed to homosexuality, in which case many parents might choose to abort it. Will gay rights activists continue to support abortion rights if this occurs?”
Dale A. Berryhill, The Liberal Contradiction: How Contemporary Liberalism Violates Its Own Principles and Endangers Its Own Goals (1994), 172.
Will there be warning labels with a very effeminate guy on it saying, “warning, smoking while pregnant may increase possibility of having a gay-child”??
Via The Telegraph:
Women who smoke or lead a stressful life during their pregnancy can influence their child’s sexuality and IQ, a neuroscientist has claimed.
A pregnant woman’s lifestyle is believed to have an impact on the development of their babies – with drinking, taking drugs and even living in an area with a lot of pollution affecting children in later life.
Dick Swaab, professor of neurobiology at Amsterdam University, suggests drinking and taking drugs can lower a child’s IQ while taking synthetic hormones and smoking can increase the likelihood of girls being lesbians or bisexual.
Having more older brothers is also thought to increase the chance that boys will be gay, possibly because of the development of the mother’s immune system to have stronger responses to male hormones with each son born.
“Pre-birth exposure to both nicotine and amphetamines increases the chance of lesbian daughters,” Swaab told the Sunday Times.
“Pregnant women suffering from stress are also more likely to have homosexual children of both genders because their raised level of the stress hormone cortisol affects the production of foetal sex hormones.”
He said the brain in foetuses begins to develop at two weeks, with anything that introduces toxins into the body having an impact on this development. Studies show women who took synthetic oestrogen between 1939 and 1960 to reduce the chance of miscarriage had a greater chance of bisexuality and lesbianism in their daughters.
Swaab added: “In women who drink a lot, cells that were meant to migrate across the foetal brain can end up leaving the brain altogether.”
Living in an area of high pollution is linked to an increased risk of autism.
Swaab said lifestyle factors are just one influence, with genetics playing the most important role, but said the research proves that the development of the brain during pregnancy is directly linked to adult lifestyles.
I wanted to add some honest, open, challenges to the idea behind the study. And a friend is thinking that I posted this with the idea in mind that THIS ALONE is the determinative factor, and choice is removed. So I explain myself a bit more. I do not believe in “determinism” — wholly. You will see that I truly believe people have choice, but people who have the Spirit working in their deepest “being.” Here are some ideas my friend was thinking I was saying, and if I was saying this, my friendly [friend] detractor would be correct:
- “Infidelity – It May Be In Our Genes” ~ Time, August 15, 1994;
- “20th Century Blues” – Stress, anxiety, depression: the new science of evolutionary psychology finds the roots of modern maladies in our genes ~ Time, August 28, 1995;
- “Born Happy (Or Not)” – Happiness is more than just a state of mind… It is in the genes too;
- “Born To Be Gay?” ~ New Zealand Herald, August 8, 1996;
- “What Makes Them Do It?” – People who crave thrills, new evidence indicates, may be prompted at least partly by their genes ~ New Scientist, September 28, 1996, p. 32;
- “Your Genes May Be Forcing You To Eat Too Much” ~ Time, January 15, 1996.
- “Infanticide/neonaticide is caused by an evolutionary imperative” ~ New York Times, November 2, 1997
Here is more on both free-will in worldviews, and, a working definition of “determinism… and then the discussion on FaceBook. Here, Stephen Hawkings talks about two separate worldviews and their weighing in on freedom:
One of the most intriguing aspects mentioned by Ravi Zacharias of a lecture he attended entitled “Determinism – Is Man a Slave or the Master of His Fate,” given by Stephen Hawking, who is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, Isaac Newton’s chair, was this admission by Dr. Hawking’s, was Hawking’s admission that if “we are the random products of chance, and hence, not free, or whether God had designed these laws within which we are free.”[1] In other words, do we have the ability to make choices, or do we simply follow a chemical reaction induced by millions of mutational collisions of free atoms? Michael Polyni mentions that this “reduction of the world to its atomic elements acting blindly in terms of equilibrations of forces,” a belief that has prevailed “since the birth of modern science, has made any sort of teleological view of the cosmos seem unscientific…. [to] the contemporary mind.”[2]
[1] Ravi Zacharias, The Real Face of Atheism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2004), 118, 119.
[2] Michael Polanti and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago, IL: Chicago university Press, 1977), 162.
And a working definition to make what is read below more understandable:
DETERMINISM: The view that all natural events, including human choices and actions, are the product of past states of affairs in accordance with causal necessity. Thus the determinist holds that, given the state of the universe at any particular time, plus the causal laws that govern events in the natural world, the state of the universe at every future time is fixed. Various kinds of determinism are possible depending on the nature of the causally determining forces. Most determinists today are scientific determinists who believe the laws of nature are the determining factors…
C.Stephen Evans, Pocket Dictionary of Apologetics & Philosophy of Religion (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), p. 34.
Here is the conversation:
J.P.
Bull mine smoked and I am straight as all get out.
RPT [Me]
Not every ~ J.P. ~ but increases the possibility of… is what is being said.
J.P.
But it is a choice people make, not how we are born. Just another libtard lie.
R. Jason B.
Perhaps it increases your chances toward homosexual attraction, but, you’re right Johnny, you still have the choice of how you’re going to respond to said propensity.
RPT
Sometimes, life, and all the variabilit’ies that it [life] can bring into play can weigh on a person (environment). In fact, I have always viewed it this way:
When you are unregenerate, you are predetermined to follow your nature. You are merely an animal — not human:
“Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people…” (1 Peter 2:10); “For the mind-set of the flesh is hostile to God because it does not submit itself to God’s law, for it is unable to do so” (Romans 8:7); “For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 8:22-25a)
So the unregenerate man is determined to act, almost like an animal follows instinct, its nature. But when Christ comes into our lives, we… for the first time… WITH GOD’S “HELP” OF COURSE (via the Holy Spirit residing and indwelling our deepest marrow; and “help” is anything we do to grow in the Lord was 99.5% His doing, guidance, and ability), can rise up above our nature… see this battle, and make a moral choice to follow God’s will [not ours] for the first time.
Again, we cannot even fathom this choice at all without God’s input, otherwise, we are given over to our desires — as Romans 1 tells us. So, read this guys quick story, and you will see just how much a man’s life weighed in on him… UNTIL, that is (like us all who are believers), “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 8:25a):
ONE LAST EXAMPLE
This last example has all the elements: misdiagnosis, suicide attempts and early childhood experiences that twisted this poor boy’s perception of his gender identity into a knot.
The young boy was normal from all accounts until some events begin to alter and reshape his view of who he was. Sometimes when Grandma babysat him alone, she would dress him in female clothing that she made especially for him. His uncle, a troubled teenager, had a favorite sport: making fun of the little boy and yanking down his pants. The uncle turned more aggressive and fondled the boy far too many times over several years, especially while intoxicated.
The young boy started to fantasize about becoming a girl. After years of obsessing, along came Christine Jorgensen in 1955 and the first media reports of a gender change. Then the young boy started to think it was true and he, too, could change genders. The boy in his silence adopted a female name, Cristal West, but only he would know this name and the battleground that was inside him: this silent struggle lasted for years.
Trying to battle against the female trapped inside his body, the boy excelled at all that was male: football, track. cars and yes, girls. All looked normal from the outside, but inside there was pain and confusion about his gender.
As a young teen. the boy attended Eagle Rock Episcopal Church on Chickasaw Avenue. In his teens. the boy sought guidance for his struggle with the internal female from the pastor, Father Carol Barber. At their second meeting, to his shock, Father Barber moved out from behind his desk, unzipped his long black robe to reveal his naked body, and tempted the boy to have homosexual sex. The boy. appalled by the overture, quickly departed and never met with Father Barber again.
In his early twenties, the young man got married, had children and developed skills for high achievement in the business world, first as an aerospace associate design engineer, then by his forties, achieving a national operations position for a major corporation. But his internal struggle with his gender identity never went away and he used alcohol to numb the pain. Alcohol became the pathway to drugs which would bring, his impressive career to an abrupt and tragic end.
In his forties, his marriage failed. His two teenage children suffered a great betrayal when their father turned to hormone therapy in San Francisco. A skinny old doctor named Garfield who asked no questions and took no names provided the hormone injections. Over the course of time, Dr. Paul Walker approved him for surgery and Dr. Biber performed the surgical gender change.
In 1983, the man became Laura with a new birth record that specified gender as female. She had success after a few years —good looks and good jobs, recovery from drugs and alcohol—but living as a female just did not resolve the internal struggles. It was during the time Laura was studying to be a counselor at U.C. Santa Cruz in the late 1980s that she came to understand that as a transgender, she was living a self-imposed exile from her true identity.
As Laura’s intellect and thought processing ability reemerged from the alcohol- and drug-induced fog, a sober Laura could see that being a transgender was not real, but a fantasy forged out of very powerful obsessive thoughts and feelings that took over her life. As a young boy, the expression he had used to express his feelings of hurt and pain was “girl trapped in a male body.” Hiding in a transgender persona was her elaborate way to escape the deep hurt. Acting out was very important to Laura in expressing how she felt, but letting feelings define identity is never a good idea. She later commented that transgender life was like living in a temporary zip code not located near reality. She learned that the transgender feelings would be overwhelming at times, but no matter how strong the feelings are, they can never define her real identity.
Laura was determined to recover on every level, including her male birth gender. She learned in her counseling studies that recovery requires an unwavering persistence with good people supporting her. Recovery was a bit rocky and the path twisted and difficult, but now with 25 years in the rear view mirror, he is restored and has been married to a wonderful lady for 14 years. He made it back.
I know this story all too well, because that was me, the little kid from Glendale. Most of my life I thought I had been born in the wrong body but my traumatic experiences occurred after birth, not in the womb. Regrettably, I learned to dislike the boy who was fondled by an uncle, cross-dressed by a grandmother and propositioned by a homosexual clergyman. I was never a homosexual or felt the desire for men. My rejection of my birth gender was the result of abuse I suffered from several adults.
I learned after surgery that my primary issue was called dissociative identity disorder, which in turn either caused the gender disorder or displayed symptoms that looked like it. The treatment was strenuous psychotherapy to address the primary disorder, not undergoing irreversible surgery to treat a symptom. Comorbidity, the presence of more than one disorder in an individual, is common in transgenders.
So, what made me so different from other transgenders? That is simple—I wanted to recover. Like any recovery, it started with the desire to recover. Without desire, no change is even possible. I did not want to live my life in a masquerade, but in truth. I discovered there was no real medical necessity for the surgery. It was a lie.
Even the doctors who were advocating for me to change genders did not have a clue what it was all about. Psychologist Paul Walker said adaptability is the key to success in changing genders. Surgeon Stanley Biber said success is defined by the ability to physically engage in sex. Psychologist John Money at Johns Hopkins said hormones make the new gender work. Not one, however, said surgery was medical necessary, so it must not be. Dr. Paul McHugh reflects views that more closely align with my personal experience when he said, “It’s a disaster.” Sadly, a gender wreck is not one you bounce back from easily.
In my view the history of psychosurgery demonstrates a lack of accountability and oversight in the medical community that continues today. Activist lawyers and doctors join together to lobby for, and effectively get, more and more laws passed that provide even more protection for reckless, medically unnecessary surgeries. The evidence suggests a need exists for a broader base of nonsurgical therapies, such as psychological interventions, in an effort to improve care.
Now the children have caught the eye of the activist surgeons. Soon young kids will go under the knife and we’ll see television shows like “Twelve Year Old Transgenders in Tiaras.” Who should hold accountable the doctors who are playing with children’s hormones? A 2007 Dutch study says, “Fifty-two percent of the children diagnosed with GID [gender identity disorder] had one or more diagnoses other than GID…Clinicians working with children with GID should be aware of the risk for co-occurring psychiatric problems.'” Treating GID with irreversible surgery, while ignoring co-existing conditions, is a recipe for patient regret and suicide.
Transgenders want more freedom when perhaps they actually need more boundaries. The real life-threatening harm to transgenders is not a consequence of bullying; it results from the transgenders’ own high-risk sexual behaviors, illicit drug use, and alcohol abuse. Transgenders have been shown to be prone to harming themselves. Unfortunately, the activist agenda is directed toward more laws to protect transgenders instead of finding better treatments to reduce the number of suicides and regretters.
The evidence is clear—the surgery is not medically necessary and many problems occur as a result of changing genders. The personal testimonies are further confirmation that changing genders can result in very painful regret. In the next chapter we conclude with an explanation of how effective treatment got derailed by the activists and we explore some possible solutions for reducing the number of transgender regretters and deaths by suicide.
Walt Heyer, Paper Genders: Pulling the Mask Off the Transgender Phenomenon (Make Waves Publishing, 2011), 87-91.
RPT… “I” Continue:
His choices, were limited, he could have had a mom with out of whack hormones during pregnancy (smoked? drank? both? more?), he had a very abusive childhood life, he tried to get help and was further taken advantage of. JESUS came into his life and breathed a “new man” into him, and for the first time in Walt’s life, he was able to look through God’s eyes and say: “I ‘ought’ to stop ‘a,’ Father, give me strength to do this thing that I see needs being done for the first time in my life.” He [we] started working — through the guidance and strength of the HS to work on areas he never would have fathomed working on.
Amen?
We divide Scripture up for the reprobate so often that we forget to apply it to ourselves and we miss opportunities to talk to a person who needs to hear the truth, right then… but needs to hear it in a sugar coated way — a pill of truth with the grace of God.
I didn’t post the story to say that “a” causes “b.” First, we are fallen, and many act a certain way because of “a” – “b” – “f” – “s” – and “z.” That isn’t saying that WE are determined ~ WE [believers] are not determined because of the “new man” we are clothed in… and then, and only then, do we have free-will.
As a side-note, a very powerful point Zacharias makes here is that we need to apply Romans 1 to ourselves to know this is how we would be if not for the intervention of our savior… it caused me to pause and self-reflect:
The above is a lecture given at the Utah Mormon Tabernacle by Ravi Zacharias – the first Evangelical to do so since D. L. Mood – he explains well the fallen nature of man, well.
