GCN Radio - January 19, 2007
Transcribed by MyckeyD

To listen to this episode, visit http://www.gaychristian.net/gcnradio

BRIAN: Here we are in mid-January for another GCN Radio, and we are coming off a very exciting GCN 2007 conference!

JUSTIN: Yay!

BRIAN: I'm still processing it and taking it in! But those of you who weren't able to make it you missed a special weekend, and I hope you consider attending the 2008 conference.

JUSTIN: Yeah!

BRIAN: But it was amazing!

JUSTIN: Oh, the best conference we've ever put on! I was just absolutely overwhelmed by it, and all the people that were there!

BRIAN: Did you sleep? [Laughs]

JUSTIN: Hardly! [Laughs] I hardly slept. I had to catch up on my sleep, after getting back from the conference, these last few days.

BRIAN: But it was amazing. It was really something!

JUSTIN: Yeah. It was. It WAS! And, you know what, we could talk the whole show about how fantastic the conference was. Of course, anyone who is registered on the website over at gaychristian.net can go to the "Conference Forum" and read some of the many stories that have already been posted there from attendees about how their lives were affected by the conference. So, if you're not registered, I encourage you to register an account over at GCN and go check that out. See the amazing stories there.

BRIAN: Did you hear him? He said, "LIVES AFFECTED." I mean, the conference can change your life, literally; I'm not joking! It's not a commercial. It's a truth! Truly!

JUSTIN: Of course, we had a surprise musical, which was-- [Laughs]
--Which was fun!

BRIAN: [Laugh] Wow! I'm speechless! It was, basically, a parody of several show-tunes and it was about a gay Christian kid who's just coming out and he's being courted by the ex-gay community and also by a "flaming" gay guy named Seth, played by YOU.

JUSTIN: Yes. [Laugh] I get to play against type.

BRIAN: In body glitter--

JUSTIN: [Laughs]

BRIAN: --and multicolored fingernails.

JUSTIN: Yeah. And that was--let me say right now--that was such an experience, because--

BRIAN: [Squeals with laughter]

JUSTIN: --um, I love to do drama, and I had a really fun time playing the character. I wrote the character as well.

BRIAN: Right.

JUSTIN: I wrote the show. The character of Seth is so different from me, because he's really immersed in all of the--

BRIAN: Only slightly different.

JUSTIN: [Chuckles] Yeah--all of the worst stereotypes of gay male culture, and he's certainly not a Christian at all. And people who know me know that's not at all like me. So I decided for this character, he would probably wear make-up. Because I know a lot of gay guys who do wear make up, especially in, sort of, the gay club culture. So I decided to take it over the top with this character. So for the character I did a little make-up and body glitter and fingernail polish. And I would never wear fingernail polish. I've never had fingernail polish on my fingernails in my entire life, and so it was my first experience with fingernail polish. [Laughs]

BRIAN: Wow.

JUSTIN: It was really interesting. What was really interesting, though, was one of the women at the conference painted my nails for me, for the character.

BRIAN: Hmm.

JUSTIN: Because, you know, I was starting to do it, she was like, "Do you want me to do that?" Which I think meant, "You don't know what you're doing." And so she did that.

BRIAN: [Chuckles] Did she do your lipstick, too?

JUSTIN: NO! Well, it was lip-gloss. I did that myself.

BRIAN: Because, I was going to say, then she'd be a lipstick lesbian.

JUSTIN: Oh. [Laughs]

BRIAN: Nah, sorry. Pa-dum-pum-ching! [Makes punch-line drum sound] But it was amazing, and it was probably one of the best productions I've seen in my life. The message, of course, behind that is, ultimately, you have to be for God!

JUSTIN: Right!

BRIAN: As gay Christians, we have to choose Christ. Not chose the ultra-club scene, or the ex-gay scene, certainly not. We can't live a lie. We have to live authentically for God. And that was the main point of the musical.

JUSTIN: Yeah. That was it. It's about living an honest life for Christ. We didn't try to--it wasn't a Side A or Side B show. If you notice at the end of the show, Cory's character doesn't come to a conclusion about Side A or Side B. But he does come to a conclusion about what NOT to do. And you know, it's a process, I think for all of us, kind of coming to terms with, how does God want us to live our lives? And so that's really what the show is about. We had so much fun writing it and performing it. I keep hoping we'll get another chance to perform it. The thing is, because the show has a lot of parodies of musicals, and the music is the same, because of copyright reasons, we can't go out and perform it "professionally" and make money off of it, BUT there is room in copyright law, for, what's called "fair use" when you're doing parody.

BRIAN: Right.

JUSTIN: And so within a small group like that, although not that small, we had like 160 to 170 people there, which was wonderful!

BRIAN: [Laughs] Yeah!

JUSTIN: The conference has grown by a factor of two every year! We had about forty people, I think, the first conference and then like eighty to ninety people last year and then like 160 to 170 this year, so it's been amazing! I keep hoping we'll get another chance to do it. So we'll see what happens.

BRIAN: I hope so. It was worth doing, it would be worth doing again.

JUSTIN: I think so.

BRIAN: It not only made us all laugh 'til we cried, it was a ministry unto itself! And I think it made a point in a humorous and entertaining way. You done good my friend!

JUSTIN: [Laughs] Well, thanks!

BRIAN: You're a very talented guy, in many, many ways.

JUSTIN: Well, thank you. Well you know, we've got in a little while on the show, we're going to be asking a really interesting question. This is a question we've touched on before, but it's a question we're REALLY getting into big time today on the show. And it's the question of, WHY are we gay? Those of us who are gay, WHAT does the science say about why we're gay and whether we can change and all that good stuff. So we're going to talk about that. We've got a special guest who's going to come on the show to talk with us about that. And I really think it's going to be a really interesting show.

BRIAN: Righty, right!

JUSTIN: So, we'll get to that in a little bit. I just wanted to put the plug, because I'm really excited about it.

BRIAN: I know he's good.

JUSTIN: Even though we're not ready for the guest yet. So, you know, he's sitting in the sound proof booth somewhere.

BRIAN: Because we don't want him to hear all of this! [Laughs]

JUSTIN: Right, the "Cone of Silence"! [Laughs]

BRIAN: [Laughs]

JUSTIN: Remember that? You remember Get Smart? Did you ever see Get Smart?

BRIAN: Yeah!

JUSTIN: They had the Cone of Silence that would come down on their heads they could have private conversations? Never mind, anyways, I remember it.

BRIAN: I remember that part. I just remember that who played Maxwell Smart was the same guy that played Tennessee Tuxedo.

JUSTIN: It was, uh, Don Adams? Was that his name, the guy who played Maxell Smart, and he was also Inspector Gadget?
BRIAN: Okay, you're going to make me Google it now. I'm going to Google it real quick.

JUSTIN: So if any of our listeners remember the Cone of Silence, give us a call, and say, "YES! I, too, remember the Cone of Silence!" Um, and that really, impacts the show, not at all! But hey, we sometimes diverge a bit from our Gay Christian topics here on GCN Radio! [Laughs]

BRIAN: [Laughs]

JUSTIN: You're Googling?

BRIAN: I'm actually Googling it to see who plays Max Smart, because I forget.

JUSTIN: I've pulled it up here.

BRIAN: Did you?

JUSTIN: On the Internet Movie Data Base.

BRIAN: Okay.

JUSTIN: IMDB.com, by the way, for any of our loyal listeners who are looking for a good place to look up movie and TV stuff.

BRIAN: Okay.

JUSTIN: And according to IMDB.com the name of the actor who played both Inspector Gadget and Maxwell Smart, is in fact, Don Adams. Ding!

BRIAN: DING! DING! Right!

JUSTIN: [Laughs]

BRIAN: And he played Tennessee Tuxedo!

JUSTIN: I don't really remember Tennessee Tuxedo.

BRIAN: OH! See. Okay, so now we finally get one thing that you don't remember that I do!

JUSTIN: [Laughs]

BRIAN: Tennessee Tuxedo and the moose* Chumley. [In goofy voice] "Duh, gee Tennessee."

JUSTIN: [Chuckles] Oh yeah, I see it here on IMDB.

BRIAN: See, and Phineas J. Whoopee and his Three-Dimensional Blackboard. It was on in the afternoon with Underdog.

JUSTIN: Underdog! Okay, see, I'm remembering this now and I just found it on here, yeah. Tennessee Tuxedo. I remember Underdog. I used to watch reruns of Underdog when I was a kid. He would say something like [in nerdy voice], "The secret compartment on my ring I filled with this super Underdog energy pill." Wasn't it that?

BRIAN: [Echoes Underdog with Justin] And, "When Polly is in trouble, I am not slow. It's hip, hip, hip and AWAAAAY I go!"

JUSTIN: Oh! You remember more than I do!

BRIAN: At the end it would go, "It's a bird. It's a plane. IT'S A FROG!" And he would say, "Not bird, nor plane, nor even frog, it's just little old me..." then he'd have some kind of like crash or whatever, [in timid voice] "Underdog."

JUSTIN: [Chuckles] Okay.

BRIAN: Okay, we've really taken a turn here! Let's get this car back on the road!

JUSTIN: Let's get back to GCN Radio. Yes! Okay, so well, you know Brian, your last few shows with us, we've got to have a little bit of fun.

BRIAN: Yeah.

JUSTIN: So, well how about we talk about Question of the Week stuff? Okay.

BRIAN: Good! We've got a couple of phone calls and text responses.

JUSTIN: We have, so let's hit the texts first. We asked a few weeks ago, for our listeners to share with us some of their most and least favorite things about Christmas and the holiday celebration. People said all kinds of things. People said they loved family, lights, decorations, the whole significance of the true meaning of Christmas, all that. Some of the least favorite things people mentioned were consumerism, the sort of the pagan origins of some of our Christmas rituals, the selfishness that some people display when it comes to gift giving and money spent and all that kind of stuff. But so I'm just going to hit a few highlights here of some of the things that people said.
JASON actually shared one of my favorites. Jason said, "Looking at a lit Christmas Tree in a dark room." I love that, too!

BRIAN: Awe.

JUSTIN: I love to do that, because my parents every year, will always have a big tree and it's always beautifully decorated with all these ornaments that the family has collected over the years, and lights, and it's just so beautiful and it's probably my favorite thing to do at Christmas, is to go over to my parents house. My parent's don't live terribly far from me. So I go to my parents' house and I love to just turn off all the lights and just see the Christmas tree lit up, I think it's gorgeous. So Jason, I'm with you on that!

BRIAN: Is that about the time you said, "I might be gay!" [Chuckles]

JUSTIN: [Laughs] I think a lot of non-gay people love that, too, Brian.

BRIAN: Because I'm the same way! I spend hours just staring at the Christmas tree. I mean, because I loved it so much. I felt very "Christmas-y."

JUSTIN: It's beautiful.

So FRANK takes another, tact. Frank says that he does not like all the gaudiness and the lights and stacks of presents and secular music and all the things that we think about representing Christmas. But what he does say is, he says, "I like the simplicity of family fellowship, small gifts of love for the season, a family dinner at home and church on Christmas Eve service with traditional hymns as the centerpiece of it all; with all its true meaning and understanding a reminder of the REAL meaning of Christmas." That's Frank's take on it.

SHIRLEY writes, "I dislike Christmas season with its emphasis on money, gifts, turkeys, Santa Claus, etc. I'm seventy-two years old and it's gotten really old! I refuse to indulge. I'm a fourth generation Christian, but having found no church that exhibits the unconditional love that Christ displays for gays, women, poor folks and other marginalized beings, my church is my Bible and my sanctuary is my home. I listened to your December 8th radio show for the first time, this morning, and loved it! Thanks for being there for 'stay-at-home' Christians! Love you guys!"

BRIAN: Awe! That's really kind.

JUSTIN: And one more: WENDY writes about least-favorite things about Christmas. She says, "My least favorite thing about Christmas was going to my parents' house this year for Christmas Eve with my long-time partner, and being given the book "Chicken Soup for the Single's Soul" by my father.

BRIAN: Oh, man! Ouch!

JUSTIN: Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure that there are other listeners that can relate to that. They've been with one person for many years and still non-gay-affirming friends and family members refer to them as single or treat them as single. That is, uh, not a fun thing at all. So, that's really a shame.

BRIAN: Yeah, it is.

JUSTIN: Okay, so moving on to a different question. On our last show, I think it was our last show. Yeah, it was our last show. We did a New Year's show and we talked about, "What's going to be different about this year for you in 2007?"

BRIAN: Right!

JUSTIN: So here are some of the responses we've got.

BRIAN: Okay.

JUSTIN: JEREMIAH writes in: "Two months ago God finally got through to me by way of GCN, and I began to listen and follow his will. This meant some changes for my life in 2007. The biggest change for me was putting the Side A/B issue in God's hands. I was not living a Christ-centered life in my past and have since committed myself to be abstinent. I've basically asked God for His help that I would wait for Him to reveal to me what His plan was, whether Side A or B. In the mean time I've chosen not to date, but to focus on school, working off some debt, and most importantly, growing closer to God. Another change is I've now found a great group of guys whom I feel comfortable with sharing my struggles and fellowshipping with. What an answer to prayer! I think my overall outlook on life and the joy and peace I now have will make this year different and better from any I've experienced yet!"

BRIAN: Awesome!

JUSTIN: PATRICK writes in, "This year I will heal by the Grace of God and start accomplishing my goals."
DUDLEY writes that, "This year, I am hoping to meet that special someone in my life."
STEVEN says, "This year, I've decided to follow my impulses. No, not THOSE kinds of impulses! Get your mind out of the gutter!" He says. Then he says, "But when I feel like just dancing along with my iPod, I'm going to. And when I feel like telling a stranger that a dress is pretty, I'm going to do so! I've decided not to be ashamed of the joy that's within me, and when the excitement I have for life just wells up within me, I am going to share it with others!"
And ANDREA writes, "This year, I'm really going to work on my relationship with God. I've been on the fence about if I can be gay and a Christian. And now that I know that the answer is yes, I want to build a loving trusting relationship with Him. He's already blessed me in so many ways, and for that, I'm eternally grateful. P.S. Your site and show is amazing! Keep up the good work!"

BRIAN: Thank you!

JUSTIN: Thanks, Andrea!

BRIAN: And we have a call!

CALLER: Hi, Brian! Hi Justin! My name is JAMES. I'm 23 years old from New Mexico. I'm also Latino, you asked for minorities, so here I am. I want to thank you guys for your show, you do a great job and good luck on 2007. I know there are a lot of changes in store for you. So, good luck with that. This is in response to your question about what is going to be different for me in 2007, or what I'm hoping for, for 2007. Personally, I have no idea! [Chuckles] 2006 was so incredible! I mean I found this great church, called Metropolitan Community Church out here in New Mexico. That has touched my life in so many ways! I started getting involved in the music ministry, and I'm now their music director. You know, none of this I've planned for. So, 2007, I have no idea! I can only hope for the best, and I can only continue doing what I feel like God is calling me to do, which is to continue in this ministry, to continue in this church. Also, I feel as if God is calling to work on a, sort of, youth Bible study. My church has a lot of young people and I know there a lot of gay teens out there that are disillusioned with Christianity, as well as many of my straight friends who I've grown up with that are just kind of put off by it all. And I want to bring them back to the basics of the gospel, the simple truths of it all. So, I could use your prayers. I pray for you guys! You guys are awesome! Good luck on 2007 yourselves, and thanks a lot! Bye-bye!

JUSTIN: Thanks, James.

BRIAN: And we will pray for you, James. I will. Thank you very much, we will!

JUSTIN: Absolutely. Let's definitely keep James in our prayers on that. Yeah! God can do so much great stuff in peoples' lives this year. I'm really excited about it! There's so much good stuff going on at GCN. You know while we're making New Year's resolutions and all that stuff, I should point out that over on the website at gaychristian.net, we have a Bible reading thing, that every year, we've been doing this for the last two years, and this is the third year. Where if you read the highlighted Bible passage every day, then we go through the entire Bible in a year. So, if you've always wanted to read through the Bible in a year and you've never been able to do it, it's only been going on for since the second. So it's going on for a couple weeks now. You can get caught up and then if you keep reading those passages on the website everyday, you'll make it through the whole Bible in a year. So that's really exciting. So you can read more about that on gaychristian.net.

BRIAN: Awesome! It's a cool program. Well, we heard from an old friend, Justin.

JUSTIN: I bet I know who this is!

BRIAN: And we're going to play this now, and um, well I'll just play the call.

CALLER: Hi, this is Jenny calling from Korea!

JUSTIN: JENNY!

BRIAN: JENNY!

JENNY: Just listening to your New Year's show, I thought I'd respond to your call for women to represent, unfortunately, no drastic changes happening in my life. And I loved too many shows to start listing my favorites. But I thought I'd respond to a question you asked a while back about what our favorite Bible story is. I thought I'd actually just read something I wrote a while ago. My favorite Bible story is from the Gospel of John 20:10-18. That's when the disciples go to the tomb and Jesus' body is gone. The disciples leave but Mary stays behind and she's weeping. Jesus appears to her but she doesn't recognize Him until He says her name. I'll just pick up from the scripture here: "She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, "Rabboni!" (Which means Teacher). Jesus said, "Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, 'I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.' " Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: "I have seen the Lord!" And she told them that he had said these things to her.
This to me is one of the sweetest stories in the entire Bible. The disciples go to the tomb, and Jesus' body is gone, so they go home, but Mary is so heart broken, she can't leave. Angels appear to her, but she doesn't care. She only cares that Jesus is gone. Jesus, of course, was in the middle of the most important work in the history of mankind. Human history pivots on this point. Because of the resurrection, we can be saved and redeemed. He conquered death and made a way for us to go to Heaven. In short, Jesus was busy! But Mary was grieving, and Jesus, in the middle of the incomprehensibly important work that He was doing, not only took notice of her grief. But stopped what He was doing to see her and comfort her. It's not like He couldn't have come and seen her after He was done, after He had returned to the Father. But He could see how she needed Him right then. So He came. This says so much to me about whom Jesus is and His heart and His love for us, and it's my favorite story. So, Happy New Year, guys! And I hope one of these years to be in the country for the GCN Conference so I can meet you!
JUSTIN: Well, she just said it all.
BRIAN: Yeah.
JUSTIN: Let's just end the show now.
BRIAN: Yeah. Okay, all right. Well, we'll see you next week! For this week, I'm Brian--ahem. No seriously, that was amazing, just amazing. One of my favorite memories of this show was when you and I actually read that very passage on last year's Easter show.
JUSTIN: Yeah, we did!
BRIAN: From the Gospel of John. Thanks Jenny for reminding us of what our faith is all about!
JUSTIN: Yes, indeed! Well, what do you say we get to our special guest this week?
BRIAN: That would be great! I know some GCN-ers who told me at the conference, "Boy, I really hope that you have this gentleman on the show sometime!" I said, "Well maybe you ought to just keep on listening. You never know when he might pop up on a Pod cast."
JUSTIN: Yes! Now this is, as I mentioned earlier, we're going to explore the question of sexual orientation from a scientific perspective. We touched on this briefly on another show. But we really want to get into this. Let's dig in deep and see what does the science have to say about sexual orientation. Because so many people ask us, "Is this something that people can choose to be or not to be? What causes it? Is it your childhood? Is it your biology? What is it?" We want to know from a Christian perspective, what does the science have to say. So who better to have than Dr. David Myers? He is a Professor of Psychology at Hope College, which is a Christian college, and he has written, quite a bit, on this topic. As a psychologist, he's also co-authored a book called, "The Christian Case for Gay Marriage". We'll talk about that as well. But this man, let me tell you to give you a little background, he is very well respected in the psychological community. He is the author of a very widely used introductory Psychology textbook. In fact, because I was a Psychology major, and taking Psychology, I had this book. I used this book and learned from it. So, this is not just some random guy that we've pulled out of nowhere. With that said, let's bring him on the show!

BRIAN: Right! Excellent!

JUSTIN: Dr. Myers, welcome to the show!

DR. MYERS: Thank you for having me, Justin.

JUSTIN: Well I'm excited because I've had a chance to hear you speak a couple of times, and you're a terrific speaker and you have a lot of great stuff to say. So we want to kind of get out of the way and let you talk. But, you know we had a show a few months back that we did where we talked a little bit about sexual orientation and what CAUSES people to be gay. And this is something that you've written a bit about. And I should probably go and say you're not gay, you're a happily married man.

DR. MYERS: Um-hmm.

JUSTIN: But you've, as a psychologist, you've written a bit about this subject and you know sort of what causes people to be gay, and I know we hear all kinds of theories from all the sides, but can you tell us a little bit about the research that's been done, what kind of conclusions that you would draw from it?

DR MYERS: Sure! First, let me say that the research actually doesn't pertain specifically to gay folks. It's really about sexual orientation. So it's just as much about straight folks as it is about gay folks. Just as there's no research, really, that asks what causes people to be left-handed. Rather, there's research that explores influences on the handedness and compares left and right-handed people. So, this research is about all of us. What it shows, pretty convincingly, is that sexual orientation is a naturally disposed biologically influenced disposition. That comes from three kinds of studies, and we can go back and unpack these if you want: First, some studies that compares the brains of gay and straight folks and find some interesting differences between them; second, some studies of genetic influences on sexual orientation; third, there are studies of pre-natal hormonal influences on later sexual orientation.

These brain-gene and pre-natal hormonal differences together, all predispose a number of other interesting biological traits that are related to sexual orientation: such as the organization of the hearing system, the nature of the fingerprints, rates of left-handedness, the relative length of the second and fourth digits, and most strikingly, probably, what we call spatial ability. That is, the ability, for example, to mentally rotate objects in order to match a target figure, which is something that men tend to be, on average, better at than women--one of the few things men are better at--for which gay and lesbian folks tend to fall in their abilities intermediate between those of straight men and straight women. But these would be just some examples of the CATEGORIES of research that we could go back and talk about any one of these in some more depth if you would like.

BRIAN: Hmm...That's the first time I'd heard being gay-versus-straight being compared to left-handed or right-handedness.

DR MYERS: Well it isn't--

BRIAN: It can't be quite that simple.

DR MYERS: No, it's not that simple. But the point is, is that there's no research that asks what causes people to be left-handed. There's only research that studies handedness by comparing left and right-handed people. Likewise, we don't have research that asks what causes people to be gay; we have research that compares gay and straight folks, and ask, "What's the difference?" What that research reveals is as revealing about heterosexuality as it is about homosexuality.

JUSTIN: It makes such sense to say that, too, because we do, we ask a lot of questions about what causes us to be gay. But it's very rare that somebody asks, what causes somebody else to be straight.

DR. MYERS: Right.

BRIAN: Yeah.

JUSTIN: And it only stands to reason, what ever mechanism would cause one person to be attracted to the same sex, should be the same kind of mechanism that causes another person to be attracted to the opposite sex.

DR. MYERS: Exactly! Look, for example, there's a neural cluster, in what's called the Interstitial Nucleus of the Anterior Hypothalamus, deep in the center of the brain, that is reliably larger in straight men than it is in women and in gay men. And the same brain differences exist also in sheep. Many people don't know that about 8% of male sheep rams, display same-sex orientation by seeking to mount other rams, rather than seeking to mount ewes, and it turns out that they display the same brain difference when compared with rams that seek to mount females as one finds in the human population when comparing gay and straight men. So, you could say, "Well here's a little brain difference that causes people to be homosexual, that causes people to be gay." But, no, what we're really doing is we're comparing gay and straight people. So, it's about ALL of us.

BRIAN: Wow.

JUSTIN: Dr. Myers, I know that, I grew up listening to Dr. James Dobson on Focus on the Family, and they certainly have their own "take" on the whole "gay dilemma" as they see it. And one of the things that they like to say is that gay men--they like to focus a lot on gay men--that gay men are gay because of poor relationship with their parents.

BRIAN: "Distant father and overbearing mother," is usually what we hear.

JUSTIN: Right, yeah. I know certainly, in my experience that was not the case. I don't have that family dynamic. But we sometimes at GCN hear from people who say, "Well, I did have that family dynamic. Maybe that's what caused me to be gay." What would you say to someone like that?

DR MYERS: Let me put it this way, if some parents of a newborn child were to ask me, "Dr. Myers, you've been reading about this research for a long time, tell me, what can I do to influence the sexual orientation of my child?" My honest answer would be, "I don't have a clue of a thing you could do." There are certainly a lot of dramatic cases of people who were just normal parents whose children may turn out to be straight and may turn out to be gay. Look at Vice President Cheney and his wife who are about to become grandparents as a result of their lesbian daughter's relationship with her partner, and they want to become parents. Moreover, there is one familial correlation that we know of with sexual orientation; and that is, for men, the number of older brothers that they have, men who have several older brothers are more likely to be gay than men who have no older brothers. Might this be something to do with the family dynamic? Well the people that investigated this think it DOESN'T have to do with family dynamic, it has do instead with, something to do with the maternal immune system response to the repeated presence of the male fetus, and that idea, that conclusion got confirmation this summer with evidence that, what's called the "older brother effect" and it's influence on sexual orientation, only occurs with biological older brothers. If you have several adopted older brothers, that has no predictive power for your sexual orientation. Last comment on the parental idea that Focus on the Family and others that tried to advocate, this is, also, comes out of what's called "reparative therapy," which is, suggests what gay men, for example, need to do is repair the relationships, the broken relationships, they have with their fathers. And this is really, at heart, a Freudian idea. I mean, it lays back to early childhood and the dynamics that the child has with the parents; everything is attributed to that relationship. First of all, it's kind of ironic that conservative Christians would want to baptize a Freudian idea, when normally they haven't had much affection for Freud and his ideas. Secondly, it's an idea that really troubles me because I so often see it implied that if you have a gay man, you by definition, have a bad dad. So if you're a parent of a gay child, and you don't like the sexual orientation of your child, by this message, "Buddy, you've got nobody but yourself to blame! You blew it! It was all your fault!" I think that is for multiple reasons, a terrible message to send out, as well as a false message!

BRIAN: Wow.

JUSTIN: I so appreciate that you said that, because, when I was first--before I--you know, now of course I run a gay-positive organization, but long ago I did get involved with the ex-gay movement. And at that time, I remember being at an ex-gay conference and sitting in on a session where they were saying that all of us have had, essentially, have had bad parents or bad relationships with our parents, that our parents had done something wrong, especially the fathers. It upset me a great deal, because I've always had a wonderful relationship with my father, and it bothers me so much to hear them blame parents who often are in agony over their children's sexual orientation anyway.

DR. MYERS: Absolutely! And your experience really mirrors that of so many, seriously, thousands and maybe millions of people who have attempted to change their sexual orientation, or so I assume from your participation in an ex-gay ministry does seeking to help you bring that about, and yet, your experience, like that of so many others is that sexual orientation is resilient. You are who you are, and you will be who you are. Of course, we've seen many dramatic examples of this in the media recently with even evangelical pastors who would have espoused the ex-gay line turn out to be persistently enduringly having same-sex attractions that they try to fight and try to suppress.

BRIAN: Ex-gay therapy just doesn't work, I mean, you see it time and time again!

DR. MYERS: Yeah, I was just visiting the website of The Courage Trust in the United Kingdom, and I used the "Way-back machine" to visit their website in 1999.

JUSTIN: [Chuckles]

DR. MYERS: Then, they were an agency that tried to help people realize that if they were going to be evangelical Christians and homosexual, they had to do something about their sexuality. And so it was trying to support them in changing their, or controlling, their sexuality. Now today, they've given it up. They realized nobody ever changed. Now they are a support group for gay Christians.

BRIAN: Wow. Well, I've got a question. It sounds to me like you're saying that someone being gay is really rooted in biological causes. But people talk about other influences as well. Would you say that it's rooted in biology, and where do some of the other psychological or sociological factors come into play?

DR. MYERS: Well, I don't think, I wouldn't say that there are no other non-biological influences on sexual orientation, but I would say that if there are such, we don't know what they are. And so, it's very easy to say, as many people do, "Well, sexual orientation is determined by many things, by biology, and up-bringing, and environment and culture and so forth." We don't really know that it's determined by many things. As a matter of fact, the evidence, more and more is pointing to the fact that it's a biologically influenced natural disposition. And thus one new book that reviews this research by a couple of British psychological scientists is entitled simply, "Born Gay".

JUSTIN: To me, some of the most interesting studies that have been done are the ones that deal with differences, gender differences. You were talking about things like finger length and spatial skills and those kinds of things. I wonder if you could elaborate on those a little bit more, just because I find those studies so fascinating.

DR. MYERS: Well, there's just a long list of, at least a dozen of gay-straight differences that have been observed in things you never would have been guessed and wouldn't be chosen over not things that would be a moral choice. They range from male body size, with gay men tended to be on average, more slightly built, to rates of left-handedness, which are slightly elevated among gay men. The clearest and most oft-replicated finding is this difference in spatial ability. But in so many of these things, having to do with whether to do with physical aggressiveness or the nature of that eye-blink-startle response the persistent finding is that gay men and lesbian women tend to exhibit these traits intermediate between those of straight men and straight women. It just fits the pattern of other research that we have from brain studies, genetic studies, pre-natal hormonal studies, and the studies of the resilience of sexual orientation and the difficulty of changing it, ALL together it helps us arrive a pretty sure conclusion that our sexual orientation is a natural disposition. And I think that's coming to be more and more widely appreciated and even within the church.
And by the way, as we might expect, same-sex behaviors have been observed in a wide variety of animal species as well, some four hundred and fifty different other species in the animal kingdom, some of whom show long-term same-sex pair bonding. As we've seen in many pairs of penguins and so forth. So it's not just human behavior that we're talking about.

BRIAN: Well I think it's very interesting to hear about these things and because we really, really don't. That leads me to my next question, which is, I could play clips ad nauseam of traditional evangelical people and all religious people who really, really believe in their heart of hearts that gay people can change and should change; how do we start to dispel the myths with these scientific facts that have been discovered?

DR. MYERS: Well, I'd say, people's understanding and attitudes is a function of what they know and of whom they know. To the extent that they knowingly "know" gay people, have gay friends or family members, they're more likely to be understanding and affirming in their attitude. But, I come in more on the side of "what you know" because I'm an educator. And through my introductory psychology text, through this book "What God Has Joined Together: The Christian Case for Gay Marriage" with Letha Scanzoni, and through some articles and a variety of speaking engagements, and even the conversation we're having right now, I'm just trying to do my little part to communicate information. Basically, that's it. I want to commute to offer information to the church to inform the public dialogue and debate that's going on. You may not agree with me where I come out at the end of the day, but at least I think you might want to be aware of this information. Now, as that happens, now in some respects I sympathize with cultural conservatives because our purpose is to help bridge the great divide between traditionalists who feel passionately about the need to support and renew marriage. And on the other side progressives who understand, that for you and for me and for virtually every one, sexual orientation is something we didn't choose, cannot change and therefore at best accept and live out within a satisfying committed relationship. I happen to think both sides are right, I think Focus on the Family is right to care about marriage and to want to see it renewed, and I've spent a lot of my professional life and personal resources supporting that. On balance, this really would be a happier and healthier world, I believe, if for all people love, sex and marriage routinely went together. And it's when you include the words: FOR ALL PEOPLE, that that becomes a little bit controversial, and not just for straight people alone.

JUSTIN: You mention your book, and I want to talk a little about the book before we have to go. How does a heterosexual married psychology professor at a Christian college end up writing this book about gay marriage?

DR. MYERS: I'd say that it's motivated, more than anything else, simply by my being aghast at the misinformation that's out there. I'm reading research in my field, biological psychological science, I'm coming to understand that I think some things about the nature of sexual orientation and I'm thinking, boy, as I listen to what's being said in the church, "Folks, I think we've got this one wrong!" The church has gotten things wrong in the past, it was wrong about Galileo, it was wrong in the past when it talked about the world was only six thousand years old and created that many years ago and we've gotten this one wrong folks, too. Now that doesn't mean we've gotten the important stuff wrong. The important for us as people of faith is the idea that God exists, that God loves us enough to have visited this planet in human form and there's hope for life after death, that the Bible is the source of great wisdom and guidance for our lives, these are the things that we as people of faith share in common. What we're fighting over here in the church right now is an issue that the Bible has almost nothing to say about. Only some seven verses out of more than 31,000 deal with same-sex behaviors, and yet the church is preoccupied about what doesn't appear on Jesus' radar screen.

BRIAN: Dr. Myers, if people want more information to really delve into this on their own, without getting too complicated by jargon or by biology or physiology or what-not, how can people start to do some research and fact-finding on their own to discover what you've discovered?

DR. MYERS: Well, sure. On my website, which is davidmyers.org you can link to some pages I've created that have pertinent information. On the website that relates to our book, I've created links to organizations on both sides of the issue and equally so. So if you want to explore what both sides are saying, you could do so from davidmyers.org. So that would be one way. I would also say that there are a couple other new books that are kindred spirited to my own that I'd recommend very highly. One is by William Stacy Johnson, just published by Eerdmans, entitled "A Time to Embrace". He's a theologian at Princeton Theological Seminary, which has turned out a lot of evangelical pastors. And then the evangelical theologian, Jack Rogers, formerly with Fuller Theological Seminary and later San Francisco Theological Seminary, also has a wonderful recent book on his pilgrimage on this particular topic and why he's changed his mind. On the other side, to just mention a couple colleague Christian psychologists, who are my friends and for whom I have high regards; Stanton Jones who's the provost of Wheaton College in Illinois, and Mark Yarhouse at Regent University, have done a number of articles and a book together, and I link to their site from my own. But they would provide a traditionalist conservative prospective.

JUSTIN: Before we go, since you bring that up, I would love to give you a chance briefly to "respond" to the critics, if you will, especially on this question of the psychology of it all, since that's your field. Because sometimes, I will hear from the conservative Christians, that any attempt to say that the psychological research shows a biological root of sexual orientation, is flawed, that the research is flawed. When we bring out the famous study regarding the INAH3 cluster in the hypothalamus, they say, "Well, you know, the research was flawed, it had problems and therefore it's invalid." And they take a similar approach to some of the other better-known studies, how would you respond to some of those folks?

DR MYERS: I would say, first, the process of science is ongoing and so the story is still being written, so I think it's possible to criticize some of these individual studies. Although the study with the brain center study that you were just referring to, is one that has been replicated with sheep as I was mentioning earlier in our conversation. But the weight of the evidence is becoming stronger and stronger in total. There's more and more legs being added under the table of this conclusion that sexual orientation is a biologically influenced natural orientation. And so people have managed to pull out one or two of those legs, but while they are doing it, six more have been added. Let's put it this way, when I first wrote a book with a British colleague more than a decade ago entitled "Psychology Through The Eyes of Faith", in fact that was twenty years ago, we sort of bet that it looked like biological influences were really important for sexual orientation. And now twenty years later that stock has risen way up from where it was twenty years ago. I would say that it's the total weight of the evidence and it's not that every one of the individual findings are beyond criticism.

JUSTIN: Well, Dr. Myers, thank you so much for joining us on the show today.

BRIAN: Absolutely!

JUSTIN: I know that this show's going to be very, very interesting to a lot of our listeners. Those who are interested in learning more can check out your book with Letha Scanzoni, "What God Has Joined Together: The Christian Case for Gay Marriage". We're going to put that up in the book section of GCN as well, so you can find that there. Also, check out Dr. Myer's website at www.davidmyers.org.

DR. MYERS: Thanks for having me guys!

JUSTIN: Well, thank you!

DR. MYERS: Blessings on you and your ministry.

BRIAN: What a fantastic guy, Dr. Myers.

JUSTIN: There's so much good stuff that he's written about and he does some public speaking on this topic, and the science is really very interesting to me on all of this. So, I hope our listeners will take the chance to check that out if they're interested. That leads me right into a question for this week.

BRIAN: Okay, a question of the week! What've you got?

JUSTIN: Here's the question, I'm asking for more questions. Here's my specific question: What do you wish you knew about the whole Gay Christian thing? What do you wish if you could, you know, if you could ask one question and have it answered concretely, whether it's, what caused me to be gay? Or, is it possible to become straight? Or, you know all these kinds of questions that we talk about or maybe something totally unrelated to that. What do you, if you could have one question answered about your sexuality and your faith, what would it be? That's my question.

BRIAN: It's funny, because I already have my question, just as soon you asked it. I'll save it for when we discuss the answers, but I know my question right now!

JUSTIN: Okay! So that's what we'd like to hear. We'd like to hear from as many listeners as possible. Tell us, what question do you wish you could have answered on this topic. You can send that to us through our website at www.gaychristian.net/gcnradio, but we would love to have you call in and tell it to us by phone and recorded that question on our voicemail and then we may play it on a future show. If somebody wanted to do that, how exactly might they do that, Brian?

BRIAN: Yes, yes, yes! Well, they would pick up the phone and call 1-888-GAY-4GOD.

JUSTIN: And that's 1-888-429-4463, GAY-4GOD. And it's not 800. I always feel the need to say that, because we've had a couple people like, "I called 800-GAY-4GOD and it--" No, no! It's 8-8-8! It's even easier that 800, it's three eights in a row.

BRIAN: Exactly!

JUSTIN: How hard could it be? Not at all, which is why you should do it right now, and you should call 888-GAY-4GOD.

BRIAN: Tells us what it is what you always want to know about being a gay Christian.

JUSTIN: Exactly, and if you're scared, if you're scared because you're not sure what's going to happen, I'll tell you right now what happens. You call the number, you'll get a nice little recording and it will give you options, and option three is to record your answer to the GCN Radio Question of the Week. That's all you have to do! Is push the number 3, there's a little voice mailbox, and you just say whatever you want to say, and we may very well play it on a future show! So that is toll free from within the US and Canada, but if you can't call in that number for whatever reason, or are just too scared to do it, that's all right, you can send us a text response at www.gaychristian.net/gcnradio and we will chose some of those to read on future shows, as well.

BRIAN: Exactly.

JUSTIN: So once more that question is: If you could have one question answered about your faith and sexuality, what would it be?

BRIAN: And we'll try to have Jesus on the show before I leave, so that He can answer the questions and take your phone calls.

JUSTIN: HA, HA, HA!

BRIAN: I'm still working on that. I've got, uh, about seven weeks or so. [Laughs]

JUSTIN: [Laughs] Thanks, Brian, I appreciate that! I was worried for a minute that one was going to fall to me, I'm glad you're going to take care of that.

BRIAN: I'll see what I can do, you know, my contacts in my former days as a news reporter, we'll see if we can get the Big J on.

JUSTIN: All right, sounds good!

BRIAN: If you guys have any inside contacts, you can just direct to them privately at gcnradio@gaychristian.net, that's my email, you can also write me for any other reasons, with comments or questions that you have about the show. I read every thing I get, so please do send anything, any information, guest leads, guest suggestions to gcnradio@gaychristian.net.

JUSTIN: Well Brian, in these last few episodes, the show has been getting longer and longer. People have been asking us forever to make this show longer, so, we've done it! I hope they like it. We're always happy to hear your comments, so please do, if you have comments on the show, if you would like to see it be shorter again or...

BRIAN: [Laughs.]

JUSTIN: Or, you really like the new length, or you really like the format, or something, please feel free to send those to us, either through the website there at gaychristian.net/gcnradio. So, yes, I think that's it.

BRIAN: I think that about does it for this week. We will be with you next time. We appreciate you listening this time. Do call in and answer our question of the week. So for this week, though, I'm Brian.

JUSTIN: And I'm Justin. Have a wonderful weekend. We'll chat, I assume. Bye, now!