The same gang that for decades has warred against any invasion of the womb in which a developing fetus (which they call an “unborn child)” resides now hopes to put a fetus on a sure road to heterosexuality.
 
As interesting as the concept of a gay fetus may seem, the image of hordes of so-called Christians fretting about the sexual orientation of the not-yet-born boggles the mind. Yet the Reverend R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Louisville’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, claims that in utero gays can find salvation through hormonal interventions that might make them straight from the moment when the obstetrician whacks their newly born bottom.
 
Mohler belongs to the same faction that has opposed pre-birth medical tampering in the past. Gender selection, in vitro fertilizations, even some pre-birth surgical procedures have all been deemed wrongful interference in divine territory. Now that these people see a way to diddle with the sexuality of the unborn, however, many of them are all over that possibility.
 
In the award-winning film Far From Heaven, Dennis Quaid plays a successful 1950s executive with the de rigueur lovely suburban home, beautiful wife (Julianne Moore) and two children (one of each gender.) His only problem is that he is a closeted homosexual who gets revealed when his thoughtful wife brings his dinner to the office, where he is allegedly working late one night.
 
What follows in the film is a series of tragic and painful views of the couple’s naïve attempts to change the sexuality of Quaid’s character, most poignantly with a series of “therapy” sessions in which his genitals are connected to a machine that delivers electric shocks whenever the “therapist” shows him gay porno.
 
Is this the kind of thing that “people of God” really support?
 
Predictably, in the film, Quaid’s character remains his innate self, the marriage collapses, and he goes off to live with a young blond lover — a man he met when he took Moore on a “second honeymoon” in celebration of the alleged success of the aversive electric shock therapy.
 
If Mohler is allowed to have his way, and society begins to tamper with the sexual preferences of about-to-be citizens still floating in the womb, the probable result will be a generation of would-be heterosexuals who eventually revert to their preferences for same-gender lovers.
 
Some of Mohler’s fellow believers oppose his proposal because they need to believe gayness is a sinful choice, not a natal anomaly. These folks hate to give up what they see as a legitimate “biblical” reason to hate homosexuals. Such ends of the far right spectrum squeeze from any possible comfort zone those gays and lesbians who may wish to embrace evangelical Christianity.
 
Ironically, there seems to be “no room in the inn” for them, either.
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