An Epidemic of Homosexuals

IN 1970 Dr. Charles W. Socarides of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York, warned that homosexuality was an epidemic growing faster than the four major medical diseases.

Nine years later election officials in San Francisco were estimating that nearly 30 percent of city voters were gay. There are elected officials who openly admit to being gay. There are gay political clubs, gay churches, gay synagogues and a gay dating service.

By 1982 homosexuals were parading in the streets and claiming 25 percent of the vote in Atlanta, Georgia. The Institute of Sex Research estimates that 10 percent of the United States population is gay. “Homosexual men and women are coming out of the closet as never before to live openly,” says Time magazine. “They are colonizing areas of big cities as their own turf, operating bars and even founding churches in conservative small towns, and setting up a nationwide network of organizations to offer counseling and companionship to those gays​—still the vast majority—​who continue to conceal their sexual orientation.”

There was a time when mental-health authorities dealt with homosexuality as though it were an illness. But had not Freud himself held that homosexual behavior “cannot be classified as an illness”? In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association’s Board of Trustees ruled that “homosexuality . . . by itself does not necessarily constitute a psychiatric disorder.”

First-century Christians did not view homosexuality as something normal, like blue eyes or dark skin. They viewed it as the cultivating of “disgraceful sexual appetites” when homosexual women “changed the natural use of themselves into one contrary to nature,” and homosexual men ‘worked what is obscene’ with one another.​—Romans 1:26, 27.

Yet, like other unclean appetites and hurtful desires, homosexual tendencies can be controlled and even overcome, stripped off as part of the old personality. In the Corinthian congregation there were some who had been homosexuals, as well as others who had been thieves, greedy persons, extortioners, drunkards, adulterers and idolaters. Yet all of these had changed. They had been “washed clean . . . sanctified . . . declared righteous.”​—1 Corinthians 6:9-11; Colossians 3:5-11.