I was surfing through Facebook looking for some good articles to comment on, and I came across this post with an accompanying sign:

“If God didn’t make gays, there wouldn’t be any.”

Most of the hundreds of comments I read didn’t see how absolutely illogical this attempt at being logical in support of homosexual behavior actually is. Too many of those who commented saw this as a slam-dunk refutation of anti-homosexual opinion. It’s nothing of the sort.

I’m reminded of two lines from the film First Blood (1982) the first of three Rambo movies starring Sylvester Stallone. Stallone plays John Rambo, a troubled and misunderstood Vietnam War veteran. He is trained to kill. Here’s how Major Trautman, played by the late Richard Crenna (1926–2003), describes him:

You’re dealing with an expert in guerilla warfare. He’s the best with a gun, a knife and his bare hands. He was trained to ignore pain and the weather, and to eat things a goat would puke up. In Vietnam his job was to get rid of enemy personnel, to kill them. Winning by attrition. And Rambo was the best!

Before saying this, Sheriff Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy) as his nemesis asks this question: “Whatever possessed God in heaven to make a man like Rambo?” Trautman responds: “God didn’t make Rambo, I did!” Rambo wasn’t born with the skills to “win by attrition.” He learned them.

I’m glad that God was brought into the equation because it gives us a starting point. First, God created male and female to be joined as one flesh, not male and male or female and female. The Bible makes this clear without any equivocation (e.g., Gen. 1:27–28; 2:18–25; Matt. 19:1–12).

Second, the way God made males and females is empirical evidence that they were made for each other sexually. The sexual equipment is a “natural” fit unlike that of homosexual relationships (Rom. 1:26–27).

If we follow the logic of “If God didn’t make gays, there wouldn’t be any,” we end up having to account for all types of behaviors and justify their morality because such people with these behaviors exist.

Let’s apply the logic to some other behaviors:

  • “If God didn’t make thieves, there wouldn’t be any thieves.”
  • “If God didn’t make adulterers, there wouldn’t be any adulterers.”
  • “If God didn’t make murderers, there wouldn’t be any murderers.”
  • “If God didn’t make child molesters, there wouldn’t be any child molesters.”
  • “If God didn’t make _____________, there wouldn’t be any ____________.”

This type of illogic claims that what is natural is inherently good or right. It’s called deriving an “ought” from an “is”: Since there are people who engage in homosexual behavior, therefore homosexual behavior is good and morally right.

The fallacy is what gives legitimacy to the caste system in India where heredity determines social classification. Support for slavery was based on the same type of logic. Aristotle believed in the reasonableness and “natural order” for slavery because there are some people who are “slaves by nature,” a phrase found in his Politics. Aristotle’s views, as a champion of reason, made their way to the early years of discovery:

Of all the ideas churned up during the early tumultuous years of American history, none had a more dramatic application than the attempts made to apply to the natives there the Aristotelian doctrine of natural slavery: that one part of mankind is set aside by nature to be slaves in the service of masters born for a life of virtue free of manual labour. ((Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians (London: Hollis & Carter, 1959), 12–13.))

Once we go down the road of claiming that because there is a behavior that many people engage in, thus making it morally legitimate, there is no way to stop the process.