Your Divorced, Atheist Parents Made You Gay

I would like to take a moment and thank Pat Fagan and all the fine folks at the Family Research Council for spending so very much of their precious time figuring out the origins of homosexuality. Having now proven, or at least declared solemnly and with only a tinge of insane fervor, that there is no gay gene, the folks in the back room over there have finally solved it: your divorced parents who never took you to church made you gay.

There are charts, and fancy color-coded graphics. Footnotes, even. Impressive, highly scientific stuff. The proof is pretty irrefutable. If you came from what FRC calls a "broken home" — if you didn't grow up with both of your biological parents living under the same roof — you pretty much have no choice but to grow up to be a lesbian. Well, not totally lesbian, just more likely to kiss a girl and like it. Truth is, the numbers aren't that convincing. And oddly, the source material doesn't support the FRC's findings. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure they made it up.

The study looks at two main factors — a woman's "family of origin" structure and her weekly church attendance. Basically if a woman's family of origin was "intact," meaning her mom and dad were married and they took her to church once a week, her chance of having a lesbian experience is a slight 2.1%. But should that woman come from a "non-intact" family (which ranges from single parent to cohabitating with an unmarried partner to a step-parent situation) who never took her to church, she has a 9.5% of living with the sin of a lesbian experience forever on her record.

So those are the big numbers. Each factor gets broken down into further categories; you can check out all three of the colorful graphs here. The truth is there aren't really any actual numbers involved, only a small print that there were about 7,500 women surveyed. How many of them came from "intact" homes, how many identify as a lesbian, that kind of supporting factual data didn't seem to make it into the final report.

First things first, the FRC doesn't do its own research. Instead it relies upon data collected by the National Survey of Family Growth, a branch of the CDC. For this newest map of America, FRC cites the NSFG's Cycle 6 research as "source material." I read an unnecessarily large chunk of that study. Funny, not a single mention of a woman's family of origin or church attendance as a child. Huh.

Well then, it must be the other three source materials referenced in the study. The second footnote references Michele Dillon of Yale University who reported that 44 percent of frequent Catholic church attendees "said that sexual relations between two adults of the same sex were wrong," compared to 10 percent "of those who attended occasionally or never." I am totally shocked. That means 56% of frequent Catholic church attendees don't have a moral issue with homosexuality. I'm pretty sure that's not at all what Fagan wants me to focus on, but it still feels significant. The point is, if you go to church once a week, you have likely been told over and over and over again that homosexuality is wrong. I would argue that such a fact simply means that going to church keeps more people in the closet, but I'm not Pat Fagan, thank God.

This leads to source number three. Darren Sherkat of Southern Illinois University also found that heterosexual women have much higher rates of church attendance than homosexual women. I wonder if part of Darren's research included the number of churches who actively bar homosexual women from attending ... Both studies are curiously silent on the matter.

And finally, this one is awesome, the fine research of one Daryl Higgins of Deakin University. Daryl astutely noted that homosexual men who initially marry women and then get divorced experienced "an increase in the range of sexual behaviors engaged in with other men." I am assuming that Fagan found this to be a fine example of how divorce leads to deviant sexual behavior, completing ignoring the fact that the men in that study identified as homosexual before they married a woman. I have no idea why this fact is included, because Fagan's study is about lesbians and their experiences as children. Feels like padding to me.

Now, I'm not a research psychologist or anything, but I would guess that a more efficient way to determine if there is a correlation between the marital status of one's parents, church attendance and lesbianism, one would want to poll actual lesbians about this stuff. But, as I will continue to remind you, I am not Pat Fagan.

For as long as there are gay people, there will be religious fanatics trying to figure out where things went "wrong." I'm not sure why homosexuality is so fascinating, but it is. I wish they were as fascinated with the truth. The FRC is to blame for so many mis-truths about homosexuals: repeal of DADT will lead to sexual assault by homosexual soldiers, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act stifles religious freedom, reparative therapy works, gay men are disease riddled and molest children, same-sex couples have high levels of infidelity and domestic abuse. All of them based on the same kind of unscientific, unspecified and unreliable research.

The FRC strives to "repeatedly make clear, the overwhelming majority of social science data supports the premise that the intact married family that worships weekly is the greatest generator of human and social goods and the core strength of the United States, and a norm to be considered again, first for those who worship God, but also for all men and women of good will." Dude, I totally agree, except for maybe the worship part, but that's a personal choice.

All men and women of good will, when committed to an intact family unit, will elevate the core strength of the United States. Well said, Mr. Fagan.

Photo credit: Chris Schroeder