Rick Warren's Gay Problem

There has recently been a flap over president-elect Obama inviting minister Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration.

In a recent interview, Ann Curry snarled at Rick, hurling the accusation of “homophobe.”

From the video:

ANN CURRY: Your position [on gay marriage] has raised the spectre that you are homophobic.

(Warren responds with a hearty laugh.)

CURRY: You laugh, but that is why gay people are angry.

RICK WARREN: Well, I could give you a hundred --

CURRY: Are you homophobic?

WARREN: I don't know any church in America that's done more to help the gay community, particularly with AIDS, than Saddleback. But the hate speech against me is incendiary.

CURRY: If science finds that this is biological, that people are born gay, would you change your position?

WARREN: No, and the reason why is because we all have biological predispositions. I'm naturally inclined to have sex with every beautiful woman I see. But that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.


In defending himself, Rick resorts to typical Christian thought:

1)Humans are evil or sinful by nature

2)Humans have natural desires, whether a man desires to have sex with a beautiful woman or with another man

3)Since these desires are an expression of a sinful nature, they must be suppressed

The image created by Rick is of a man constantly at war with himself, following the seemingly arbitrary dictates of divine law. If you don't accept scripture, then Rick has run out of arguments. The rationale for fighting human nature evaporates if you don't accept the Bible as authoritative.

But there is another argument to be made, one that is supported by the Bible as well as reason. All living creatures have an incredible drive to reproduce. Animals such as salmon, preying mantises and black widow spiders will die to reproduce. According to evolutionary psychologist David Buss, if any aspect of human behavior is inherited, it is mating and sexual behavior.

Let me make a simple observation: Healthy orientations are those that lead to successful reproduction.

If a man is sexually attracted to plants, I can safely say that is not a normal or a healthy behavior. I don't have to quote the Bible to prove my point, either. Now you can try to paint me as a hate mongering “botanophobe,” but nature itself makes the judgment. A man with an attraction to plants will not have offspring, and so the gene that causes his attraction will die out.

Homosexuals get upset that homosexual marriage is compared to incest and pedophilia, but deal with it, losers. Like homosexuality, incestuous relationships have been universally banned throughout human history. Child brides are the exception as well (Mohammed had one, for instance), occurring either ceremonially or when there is a shortage of more suitable women.

Given the standard, “What is a reproductively healthy orientation?” we can say the following are not healthy behaviors:

pedophilia
homosexuality
incest
attraction to a post-menopausal woman
attraction to an obese woman
bestiality
fetishism
transexualism

Some of these behaviors are more emotionally loaded (e.g., “They oughta kill those sick bastards!”) than others. In some cultures some of these behaviors are punishable by death.

This is the idea of tolerance. We no longer arrest or execute people for being gay. Just don't ask me to pretend that you're normal.

The gay movement goes ape feces whenever someone who was formerly gay announces that he has changed his sexual orientation. Gays want to pretend these people don't exist, but they do. It makes sense that some sort of psychological disturbance causes a man to adopt behaviors that are counter-productive. Given the right support and the will to change, stronger, innate desires to reproduce will predominate.

But now we get to the other side of the equation: What is a healthy orientation? For men, a healthy sexual orientation means a desire to have sex with...

young women
curvaceous women
women who are not fat (i.e. do not have either a high BMI [body mass index] or a high hip-to-waist ratio)
women who are not too thin
multiple women, both one after another and at the same time (i.e., a threesome)
beautiful women

This is where Rick Warren is asleep at the wheel and headed off the cliff. Rick thinks that he's supposed to give up on sex with attractive women because of scriptural reasons. But in the Old Testament, a married man having sex with a single woman or a prostitute was not adultery. When I first learned this I almost fell out of my chair. For years in Sunday school I read the old stories in which men had multiple wives, and concubines, yet I was brainwashed into thinking that the Old Testament standard for adultery included a married man having sex with other women.

That a married man was free to have sex with other women was the standard for ancient Israel, Greece, and Rome. That such a standard is now seen as immoral shows how far America is from a “patriarchy.” When there really was a patriarchy, men had multiple wives, concubines, visited prostitutes at will and divorce was not an option –for women, that is.

The “ideal” of a man having sex with a single woman until the day he dies (and he may find himself wishing that day would come sooner rather than later) is not a sexually healthy behavior. Yes, being in a committed, long-term relationship with a fertile woman is a healthy behavior, but nature defines “long-term” as several years, not a lifetime. It also is self-defeating for a man to pass up sexual opportunities.

Rick Warren and other Christians want to relegate sex with busty women, with young women, with curvaceous women, with multiple women, to a realm of sin and shame. This makes no more sense than accepting homosexuality as a normal behavior.