Ask Peter – Part Two

Thanks for your response to the question about intersex individuals, etc. I appreciate your openness in respect to this issue, and your willingness to admit that this is a difficult issue to resolve from a conservative theological standpoint.

However, the basis of the conservative position against same-sex relationships is a black and white claim that ‘God created male and female’. Evangelicals then use this claim to extrapolate the ‘wrongness’ of same-sex relationships because they don’t exhibit the ‘differences’ inherent in the ‘male-female’ standard. So this inability to articulate a clear theological position about the position before God of these individuals is a clear and glaring flaw in your theological interpretation, it seems to me.

My friend, for example – she is genetically male, yet most conservatives are quite happy to see her in a relationship with another male. Why? Because she looks and acts female. She doesn’t make them uncomfortable (as she would do, if she were in a relationship with another woman, despite being genetically male).

Yet what, really, is the difference between my friend and at least some other gay men? Well – it essentially comes down to differences in hormone levels in the womb.

She didn’t get any testosterone, so didn’t develop external male genitals.

They got testosterone, yet also got more than usual amounts of estrogen, which feminised them (based on the study showing that men with more older brothers were more likely to be gay, scientists believe that the mothers’ body gets increasingly adapt at ‘feminising’ subsequent male fetuses in order to prevent her body from rejecting them).

So – God’s standard of what is appropriate for my friend vs. a gay man comes down to different horomone levels in the womb? My friend was lucky enough to get the ‘right’ hormone levels so that her outward appearance and inner gender identity/attractions fit societal norms, so she’s OK with God when she forms relationships based on those attractions.

But a gay man got the ‘wrong’ hormone levels, so his attractions must be resisted, and any relationship formed from those attractions is anathema to God?

It feels as if you are happy to apply Romans 13 to these areas which are obviously ‘gray’, but you seem to feel that Romans 13 is irrelevant, as long as there is no clear-cut genetic abnormality, and you can ‘force’ gays and lesbians to conform to a heterosexual norm.