“For the tiny percentage of the population which much empirical data reveals to have an INBORN disorder, I believe these ought to be free to choose to live with a homosexual partner. I do not believe God condemns these in any manner. To me, they are like the deaf or blind: Just different.”
You do not grasp the significance of “nature” in us. Heterosexuality is the only natural form of sexuality. You are, in effect, saying that same-sex attraction is, for some small percentage of the population, “natural” (inborn).
You really, really, really, don’t want to go there, as a Christian.
We dare not give up on nature, natural, natural law. Your approach puts all the freight on “empirical evidence” of “inbornness.” Who decides that? Empiricality is a chimaera. It will reach around and bite you in the butt.
The same issues arises with regard to contraception. If one sticks with the position that the very nature of the sex act involves the reproductive system, thus, to remove the procreative aspect via a condom or the Pill is to be unnatural, one has a solid ground to stand on: out of respect of the way God made us, we will not use our sexuality in ways that deny the nature of our sexuality.
But if you start saying, well, there’s Nature 1 (heterosexual) and Nature 2 (homosexual, at least for a very few, inborn), then you have no natural heterosexuality left, really. Once you go there, you have no convincing argument that same-sex attraction, though not chosen, is disordered and unnatural and should not be given in to.
I expect you will think this is a distinction without a difference.
Natural law is the crucial issue of our day. A lot of Evangelical Christians don’t get it. Al Mohler had a good piece on this with regard to contraception. He mostly “gets it.”
Well, I really do actually want to go there, as a Christian: I studied Nichomachean ethics, metaphysics, politics, in an intensive Aristotlean study ; I am schooled in Thomas Aquinas and his Natural Law theory, and am Thomistic myself, philosophically. His Summa Theologica was one of my first loves.
But we both know nature makes mistakes: The autistic, the deaf, the blind, those with juvenile diabetes: the list goes on and on. And some seem homosexual in JUST this manner. I will not doubt what experience and empirical studies have shown me. And let us face it, we are in the 21st century, and must pay heed to sociological and neuro-brain science studies and a plethora of social advances.
For the rest, for the vast culture, heterosexuality and Natural Law theory must hold. But we will not ask the autistic to act normal. We will not demand conformity where there can be none.
The Mercy of Jesus over-rides Natural Law theory and Thomistic philosophy. But even Jesus would be appalled at the gay agenda. In summnation, then: Tolerance for the miscreant, but no celebration of a vast, vast agenda to glorify and multiply some hybrid of miscreant and normal on a global scale.