The Construct of Sexual OrientationFew modern concepts have been as influential as the psychosocial construct of sexual orientation. Firmly rooted in the national consciousness, the concept is considered by many Americans to be thoroughly based in credible scientific research.
The concept of sexual orientation was an intentional and quite successful attempt to redefine the debate over homosexuality from same-gender sexual acts to homosexual identity--that is, from what homosexuals do to who homosexuals are.
Yet this concept is actually of quite recent vintage. In fact, even within the past decade, the concept more commonly employed by the homosexual movement was sexual preference. The reason for the shift is clear: "Preference" implied a voluntary choice, so the clinical category of "orientation" was more useful in public arguments.
The argument now is that homosexuals exist as a special class or category--a "third sex" alongside heterosexual men and women. As Maggie Gallagher notes: "We have not always been so woefully dependent upon the sexual act itself. Two hundred years ago, for example, homosexuality did not exist. There was sodomy, of course, and buggery, and fornication and adultery and other sexual sins, but none of these forbidden acts fundamentally altered the sexual landscape. A man who committed sodomy may have lost his soul, but he did not lose his gender. He did not become a homosexual, a third sex. That was the invention of the nineteenth-century imagination."
The new notion of sexual identity, later sexual preference, and now sexual orientation, has pervasively shaped the current cultural debate. Indeed this was the ideological wedge used to force the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders in 1973. It is still the most effective tactical concept employed in the debate.
Part Three Will Appear Tomorrow, Thursday, June 24.
Click Here to Read Part One.
Excerpted from The Popular Encyclopedia of Apologetics, Edited by Ed Hindson and Ergun Caner
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