Adelle Banks’ story about Al Mohler’s suggestion that gay fetuses should be turned straight has attracted quite a bit of chatter over at the Dallas Morning News blog …
If you’re joining the conversation a little late, Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptists’ flagship seminary in Louisville, Ky., floated the idea that if a method was developed to turn gay babies straight, Christian parents should use it “unapologetically”:
8. 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.
9. We must stop confusing the issues of moral responsibility and moral
choice. We are all responsible for our sexual orientation, but that does not
mean that we freely and consciously choose that orientation. We sin against
homosexuals by insisting that sexual temptation and attraction are predominately
chosen. We do not always (or even generally) choose our temptations.
Nevertheless, we are absolutely responsible for what we do with sinful
temptations, whatever our so-called sexual orientation.
The suggestion is astounding on several levels-one, Mohler seems to now think that being gay is based on genes, which is completely different from what most evangelicals have said in the past. Two, it would suggest that if a baby is born gay, then God must have made him or her that way, which raises all sorts of questions of whether parents should try to “change” something created by God.
Perhaps most importantly, it raises the question of which genetic traits are worth changing-skin color, temperment, you name it …