Centre Daily
BY ELLEN GOODMAN
ellengoodman@globe.com
Somewhere along the way, the dividing line over gay issues picked up and moved. It's no longer between red and blue states, or left and right wings, but between nature and nurture. Or to be more precise, between those who believe that homosexuality is a choice and those who believe that homosexuality is innate.
Remember the moment in the 2004 debate when CBS' Bob Schieffer asked President Bush and Sen. John Kerry whether they thought that homosexuality was a choice? The president answered, ''I don't know,'' and the senator replied, ``We're all God's children.''
Well, it turns out that the more you believe homosexuality is innate, the more accepting you are of gay rights. A full 79 percent of people who think that human beings are born with a sexual orientation support gay rights, including civil unions or marriage equality.
But only 22 percent of those who believe homosexuality is a choice agree. ...
Thirty years ago the Catholic Church accepted the view that some were definitively gay. Church teachings said that ''they do not choose their homosexual condition.'' Nevertheless, the new document doesn't just ban gays who ''practice'' homosexuality, breaking the vows of celibacy. It bans all those with homosexual ``tendencies.''
In the strange new backsliding language of the Vatican, homosexuality is a ''tendency.'' The church doesn't define tendency, nor does it say whether such a tendency is biological. Voluntary or not, it marks a man permanently. As Matt Foreman, a gay activist raised Catholic, says, ``Doesn't matter what you do or believe or practice. If you are gay, there is no making that better in the eyes of the church.''