Homosexuality and Science
Aug 01
By Rabbi David Eidensohn
What does science say about homosexuality? Are gays "normal" or are they sick? Are gays reduced to their condition or can they change? There is another issue about science and homosexuality that lurks behind every discussion of homosexual rights: what does science have to say about Leviticus 18:22, that homosexuality is an "abomination" before G-d?
Until the Gay Lobby, in the sixties, launched a furious assault on the minions of therapists, science maintained that gays were sick. All of a sudden, a new, politically correct science declared that homosexuality is just fine. Now, therapists have gone so far as to suggest that children molested by pedophiles may benefit emotionally!
If we were not politically scientific, we would define a mental illness as anything that forces a person to do what he prefers not to do. Any behavior that causes a person social, family, cultural or religious anguish, is a sickness. Homosexuality, because it forces a person to act in a way that he prefers not to, is surely an illness. The politically correct or frightened therapists declared that homosexuality is not an illness, and even hinted at sanctions at anyone who treated a homosexual who wants to become heterosexual. At the same time, they debated declaring all forced behavior a disease, even if there are no ill effects, such as a condition whereby a person must stare at a wall. The fact that a person must do something he prefers not to do is an illness. And yet, homosexuality, because of its political status, is not an illness!
Let us take the case of Jack who comes to his therapist. Jack, married with children, suffers from his homosexuality. He knows that the homosexuals he meets practice unsafe sex and he may end up infected and even kill his wife. He therefore seeks help. The therapist, however, in his most politically correct indignation, responds that homosexuality is just as normal as heterosexuality, and Jack's pain is due only to social bigotry and homophobia. Jack leaves, and cries in his beer; his life is ruined. In comes Tony, who can't help staring for five minutes a day at the wall. Tony gets such sympathy. "My friend," says the doctor, "we are going to make you better. A human being must be free of any coerced behavior!" Tony, who stares at a wall for five minutes a day, gets help from science, and Tony, whose life is ruined by his terrible and uncontrollable homosexual illness, gets a lecture on something that has nothing to do with science and medicine.
We then come to the issue of science and whether homosexuality is treatable. Can a homosexual become a heterosexual? Dr. Spitzer, the noted Columbia Professor, presented proof to the American Psychiatric Assocation, on May 9 of this year, that homosexuals can become heterosexual. Indeed, there are many people running around in this country who have changed. There are organizations that work day and night to change homosexuals, such as Narth, Exodus, and Jonah. All of those who changed don't exist according to the politically correct therapists. Ex-gays who marry and have families are declared phantoms, frauds, the product of religious fanaticism, and a phenomenon that flies in the face of what science must truly believe. Such scientific thought denies even the finding of a respected colleague, the same Dr. Spitzer who led the fight to make homosexuality a politically correct issue rather than a disease. On May 9, 2,001, Dr. Spitzer announced to the world that homosexuals can change and become heterosexual, and on July 9, Dr. Satcher, the Surgeon General holdover from Clinton, announced that there is no scientific evidence that a homosexual can change. Modern science has the power to press a magic, politically correct wand, and make real people, ex-gays, disappear. It can even make a therapist from Columbia, speaking at the national convention of the American Psychiatric Association, disappear, with his evidence, with his ex-gays, and presto, (probably retroactively) the good name of politically correct science is restored.
We then come to the last issue: What does science say about Leviticus 18:22, that G-d considers homosexuality to be an "abomination"? I am an Orthodox Jew, and I believe that Leviticus is G-d's word to Moses, a divine Law. I am the son of America's leading battery scientist, Samuel Eidensohn, who doubled the American battery submarine fleet's power with one invention; my brothers have medical doctorates, and we all believe in the Torah Law as a scientific fact. How can we feel that way?
Einstein's theory of relativity posited a Big Bang, a creatio-ex-nihilo, comprising a singular physics that violates physics as we know it. This is Creation. We know that an imploding star collapses eventually into a small ball or speck. This small ball or speck has such a huge mass that is creates a black hole around it. In the environment of the black hole everything is sucked in, because the great mass violates the surrounding spatial gravitational fabric so that nothing there can escape its pull. Everything is pulled in, to disappear and never re-appear. How then did the universe, which began in the Big Bang as the tiniest of specks containing the mass of the entire universe, expand? How could anything leave that primal speck? How could the speck expand, even turn into the large universe? Obviously, only a Creator could so bend scientific laws to create a universe and release the universe from the grip of infinite mass. Science reveals the glory of G-d, whose will is revealed at Sinai and the Torah Law in Leviticus.
In August, 2,001, an international scientific study found mighty blazing quasars, an advanced level of star, at the very dawn of the Big Bang. A researcher asked, "How in the devil did such massive beacons, with their accompanying huge black holes, get created so quickly? It tells us that we don't really understand enough detail about how galaxies formed." Of course, if we accept creation, the Big Bang had no reason to wait around before allowing tufts of primal plasma to form stars. G-d wanted stars, and they came earlier than if they had just formed accidentally.
How did people form? The icon of evolution, Dr. Steven Gould of Harvard, tells it like it is: There is no biological process that produces higher life forms, because nature and biology produce only the same life, not higher forms. Therefore, "If the Tree of Life was planted again, life would not form as it is today." If so, how did we get here, Dr. Gould? "It was an accident that took place over a long period of time." What long period of time? How much time is needed for a primal plasma to produce life as we know it? A mathematical study showed that the odds against accidental evolution are not one to a million, not one to a billion, not one to a trillion, but one to such a high number that just writing the zeros to its power would be prohibitive. I told this to Dr. Paul Erdos, the Hungarian mathematical genius who explained the Theory of Numbers to Albert Einstein, and he said that he had heard of the study. Did Dr. Gould hear of it?
Let's talk science. Physics believes in entropy, a major law of nature whereby all organized systems tend to disorder and eventually break down. This is the precise opposite of evolution, which posits that organized systems tend to improve and become higher and more complex. Evolution thus defies mathematics and physics, which is a hard thing to do and remain scientific. No, evolution is anti-science; it is a fanaticism made every day more unscientific, especially by the revelation of life processes such as DNA.
So, G-d created the world. Why did He do it? Only He can tell us, as we cannot anticipate His ideas. Therefore, we must assume that if there is a Creator there must be a Torah, a Law. We must also assume that this Law was given in a rational, scientific way, because we cannot have truth without logic and science. This is exactly what the Torah teaches. G-d spoke at Sinai to an entire nation and publicly spoke the Ten Commandments, and commanded the Torah to Moses. That Torah considers homosexuality wrong.
A scientific thesis is proven when experiment, repeatedly, authenticates it. The Jewish people's history is utterly remarkable and unusual in the annals of history. That Jewry survives, despite being hated for millenniums by the major powers of the earth, and even thrives, is a proof, a scientific one, of G-d and the veracity of His Torah Law. Frederick the Great, the philosopher king of Prussia, once asked a Lutheran minister for proof of G-d. He relied, "The Jews."
We must discuss homosexuality from a rational and scientific point of view. We will find this in the Bible, and in rational, true science. Homosexuality can only thrive in a world where creation is a magic or mysticism, evolution is an "accident" that defies all scientific criteria, and mental illness is defined by the sickest of our society. Today the therapists, in the name of "science," declare that pedophilia is healthy for children, that a person in anguish because of homosexuality may not be treated, and that anyone who disagrees has a mental illness called "homophobia." This is not science. It is a post-modern and post-scientific science, an anti-truth dedicated to perverting truth, society, and children.