I have always been very tolerant of gay and lesbian issues and irritated when I evidenced discrimination, especially the religious/ biblical based admonishments that it is a sin. Catholics are among the worst when it comes to this. Despite my Catholic beliefs, I could never accept the idea that homosexuality is a sin. I believe that promiscuity is wrong be it same sex or heterosexual and that is about as far as my morality extends to the issue.

I could never explain why I was so accepting of homosexuality to my Catholic friends, and quite frankly, I could never explain it even to myself. The only thing I could fall back on was that homosexuality occurred naturally in the wild. For instance, ducks mate for life and when a duck loses its mate, it bonds with a same sex duck for the rest of its life. Nature is rife with examples of intersex* species and homosexuality, and animals cannot 'sin'.
(*Born with both male and female sexual organs.)

The other day I watched a special on Discovery or Nat Geo- who knows; I often don't pay attention to the channel. It was about intersexual and trans-gender persons. What an eye opener! In our country alone, the (APA) Am. Pediatric Assoc. reports that the rate of intersex* babies born is estimated be about one in 1,000. That is an awful lot of babies! On the other hand, people who exhibit transgender identities as early childhood is estimated to be about one in 700. God makes no mistakes. Isn't it about time we accepted that our limited understanding of 'male and female' is just that...limited!

From: Blackless, Melanie, Anthony Charuvastra, Amanda Derryck, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Karl Lauzanne, and Ellen Lee. 2000. How sexually dimorphic are we? Review and synthesis. American Journal of Human Biology 12:151-166.

"Below we provide a summary of statistics drawn from an article by Brown University researcher Anne Fausto-Sterling.2 The basis for that article was an extensive review of the medical literature from 1955 to 1998 aimed at producing numeric estimates for the frequency of sex variations. Note that the frequency of some of these conditions, such as congenital adrenal hyperplasia, differs for different populations. These statistics are approximations.


Not XX and not XY-one in 1,666 births
Klinefelter (XXY)-one in 1,000 births
Androgen insensitivity syndrome one in 13,000 births
Partial androgen insensitivity syndrome one in 130,000 births
Classical congenital adrenal hyperplasia-one in 13,000 births
Late onset adrenal hyperplasia-one in 66 individuals
Vaginal agenesis-one in 6,000 births
Ovotestes-one in 83,000 births
Idiopathic (no discernable medical cause)-one in 110,000 births
Complete gonadal dysgenesis-one in 150,000 births
Hypospadias (urethral opening in perineum or along penile shaft)-one in 2,000 births
Hypospadias (urethral opening between corona and tip of glans penis)-one in 770 births
Total number of people whose bodies differ from standard male or female- one in 100 births
Total number of people receiving surgery to “normalize” genital appearance-one or two in 1,000 births"

While in most cases the APA strongly discourages surgery on these infants, most parents opt to surgically alter these babies and raise them as either male or female.