Heredity & Sexuality

Heredity & Sexuality

Program Transcript:

Hi. I'm Mike Carducci, with Coming Out Ministries, your host today for Pure Choices. Today with me, I have my fellow colleagues from Coming Out Ministries, Ron Woolsey and Wayne Blakely and we also have with us today Elder Raymond King. Today our topic is gonna be about "Heredity and Sexuality." Coming from the homosexual background that I had, when I gave my heart to the Lord, I wanted to know how this happened. I wanted to know why it was that I was not in control of who I was attracted to. And so as Jesus was leading me out of that lifestyle, I was asking God, I said, "Lord show me how this happened? How was it that, that if I was born gay," which is what I understood by the history of 20-years in that lifestyle, "then why Lord would you call me an abomination?" And so in my search to find legitimate answers to, to what it was that that had caused this, you know, this understanding or this attraction in me, I was desperate to find out how homosexuality actually originated.

My understanding and some of the things that I actually was able to glean from, from different sermons, from different things that I read articles, and even my own Bible study, was that there was a hereditary component and then also there was this environmental component. Now, because of my history, my mother came from sexual abuse, she was molested by her father. My grandmother, my mother's mother was also raped by her stepfather and my great grandmother was actually a prostitute during the depression. So, you can see the hereditary predisposition from the generations of sin and then on my father's side, he was a philanderer, he had many affairs.

He was also a sexual addict which was also what I struggled with.

As well as his father was a musician, who was also very popular with the ladies and his and my grandmother whose father had actually murdered a man because he thought that somebody was having an affair with his wife, he had actually murdered a man and actually died in jail. So not only did I see the hereditary predisposition for sexual sin, but I also saw areas of anger management and an impulse control. So, today what we want to talk about is, we want to talk about the hereditary components.

One of the phrases that I heard in my quest to find out more was the word epigenetics. And Dr. Arlene Taylor, I went to a conference of hers and she was talking about how epigenetics is, is the genetic link that whatever my history is if, if I get married and to my wife, we actually have a child together, what happens is when the egg meets the sperm, all of my history all of the, the history from not only me, but my generation behind me and generation before that is combined with, with my wife's and when the child is born, all of that history actually comes through to that child. So I started to recognize that some of what I was struggling with, were things that I wasn't even responsible for.

In Exodus 20:5 it talks about visiting the sins of the generations, "to the third and fourth generations of them that hate me." And so, I started to see biblical evidence that supported the understanding that there is a genetic link to the sexual sin that I was struggling with. I was also raised by a single mother and three sisters so, so I also had an environmental factor. I didn't have a father, a gender role model that I could relate to or that I could be affirmed by.

And so, I also believe that this had an influence as well. So, panel if you would this morning, my first question is, is it possible to be born gay?