The Truth About Homosexuality
1/11/05
 

            Recently, the US Supreme Court chose not to review a case challenging Florida 's ban on adoption by homosexual couples. In doing so, they missed a chance to correct an egregious wrong and so helped to prolong the misunderstanding and bigotry against gays that is so pervasive in our society.
        In the face of so much biased rhetoric about the “homosexual agenda” and so much manufactured homophobia and bigotry masquerading as “family values”, it makes sense to honestly examine the nature and history of human sexuality and the role that homosexuality has always played in it. Contrary to what religious fundamentalists will tell you, homosexuality is not immoral, unnatural, or evil.
            As long as history of human behavior has been recorded there have been homosexuals. They have existed in consistent numbers even in societies that were much more draconian about their persecution than ours is. This is because homosexuals do not have a choice. They are born that way similarly to and in about the same numbers as people who are born left-handed. Like left-handedness, sexual orientation is hard-wired into each of us at birth. This has been scientifically proven time and time again and it is only ignorance and outright bigotry that keeps it from becoming generally accepted.
        Human beings are unique in one important way. While other animals procreate in one way and form bonds and express affection in others, humans use the same physical functionality to do both. Physical intimacy in loving relationships is as important to feeding the emotional self as food is to feeding the physical self. Physical/emotional intimacy strengthens the health and longevity of loving relationships. Humans fill this vital need for emotional intimacy, arguably an even more important need than procreation, with sex, both heterosexual and homosexual.
            Since emotional intimacy is a primary function of sex in human beings, sex is equally as valid and necessary to homosexual relationships as it is to heterosexual ones. But because sex is such a sensitive, personal experience, it is very difficult for those of one orientation to identify with and accept without prejudice the behavior of those of different orientations. Homosexuals are a minority and as such, are experiencing the same kind of misunderstanding, discrimination, and persecution as other minorities have in our history. As with past minority discrimination, it is the religious fundamentalists that spearhead the ignorance and bigotry that perpetuates homophobia, and as it has in the past, it will eventually end as the public becomes enlightened and informed.
            There are good relationships and bad relationships, good parents and bad parents. This is true of heterosexual couples as well as homosexual couples. To indiscriminately ban one group from partaking in marriage or adoption based solely on their sexual orientation, is not only shortsighted and shallow-minded, it is illegal and immoral. It is time for our society to open its collective eyes and hearts and to educate itself so that the unfair treatment of homosexuals will forever be relegated to the annals of history.
 
Robert Mickelsen

This article was published in Florida Today newspaper as a guest editorial on 1/25/05