The incoherence of the popular defense of homosexuality (“it’s a choice” v “it’s natural”) should alert us to what is really happening: a spiritual war against God and creation. The alternating appeal to nature and free choice illustrate how thin the intellectual fig leaf really is. Christians ought to be gracious, kind, patient but firm in our insistence that there is such a thing as nature (creation).

Late at night and sometimes in the middle of the night I listen to sport-talk radio as a distraction, so I can sleep. Sports-talk radio is usually inconsequential and it works. Sometimes, however, real life intrudes into Nebraska football talk. That happened this week. In the last few days a University of Missouri football player, who is apparently headed for the NFL, has announced publicly that he is homosexual. This announcement has provoked, among sports commentators, comparisons with Jackie Robinson (1919–72), the first African-American baseball player in the Major League Baseball, who broke the color barrier in 1947. Others, have trouble with this comparison. I’m in the latter group. Homosexuality is one thing, an ethnic group, or a racial designation is something else. The fundamental basis for thinking that race and sexuality are analogous is theassumption that both are equally natural, that neither is a choice.

Some human characteristics are changeable and some are fixed. It is evident that no one chooses to be Caucasian, Asian, or African. No one can change his racial heritage. It just is. He can announce to the world that he identifies with or as another racial classification but that doesn’t change what he actually is. Cultural characteristics, habits, and practices are quite different. One may be born into one culture and by choice and decision change one’s cultural identification, characteristics, and habits. A Frenchman can decide to give up his language and adopt English instead. He can give up French cuisine for German. He may study to become aware of prevailing French assumptions and habits about work and leisure and adopt prevailing Nigerian instead.
Voluntarily changing outlook, habits, and practices, however, does not change one’s racial heritage.

The prophet Jeremiah (13:23) asks rhetorically,

Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?

It’s a rhetorical question because the assumption is that, no, neither a leopard nor an Ethiopian can fundamental, natural characteristics. As the learned Nebraska Football Coach Bo Pelini often says, “It is what it is.” An even more basic assumption behind the rhetorical question is that there is such a thing as nature or creation, that some things are built into reality such that they are beyond choice and beyond deconstruction. The question is whether homosexuality is one of those human qualities that is beyond choice.

In recent decades our prevailing cultural rhetoric has been schizophrenic on the question of whether homosexuality is a choice. At once we are told that it is not a choice, that it is every bit as “natural” as heterosexuality and because that is obviously and necessarily so, no one’s sexual identity may be challenged, that all sexual inclinations are equally valid because they’re all equally natural. Ironically, to the degree this idea prevails, to the same degree there may be hope for those who think this way since it assumes that there is such a thing as nature. If it can be demonstrated that homosexuality is not just as natural as heterosexuality, then presumably rational people will change their thinking and their rhetoric.

The difficulty is that many of the same people who argue that homosexuality is an innate, natural, trait with which some people are irrevocably born (like a racial heritage) also argue that it is a choice, a volition, a matter of the will. Now, no one chooses his racial designation but we do speak of “sexual preferences.” That implies a degree of choice.

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