Jesus Christ is reported to have performed miraculous cures. The afflicted need only reach out to him and touch his garment. The blind were made to see; the deaf could hear, and the leper was cleansed and made whole.They called such healings miracles. In 1940, scientists found a cure for leprosy. Not just one or two amongst the pitiful throng of the faithful, not only a scattered sufferer here and there, but an entire world civilization was relieved of the horror. We call such healing medical science.

Before the cure was discovered, the Leper Colony on the Island of Molokai had only Father Damien and his Christian brotherhood to ease the pain, bandage the stumps of arms and legs, reach out and console the blind, the wretched, the cast-off. Damien embraced the leper and died of his disease, but not before he shamed the professional, long-distance Christians in Honolulu into following his example.

This good man did not pontificate about miracles. He created a man-made miracle out of his own sacrificed flesh. And he set a precedent for sectarian healers of mind and spirit: Doctors Without Borders, The Red Cross, Peace Corps volunteers. Is this kind of unselfishness a miracle or is it simply man in his most intelligent, closest-to-God self-creation?

Out of what combination of human genetics and social possibilities does one individual contribute a cure for leprosy, cancer, a life of service while another gives the world a Frankenstein in the form of nuclear holocaust? Could the difference be a matter of one investigator’s harness of nuclear power for man’s benefit and another’s abuse of such God-power for destruction? If so, it ought to be obvious that neither religion nor science is to be blamed or credited for the human condition. It’s how man uses his knowledge and expresses his emotions that determine whether he’ll leave earth a better place for his having lived on it. What raises man above animal brutality is his recognition that intelligent design has been given man in the form of a brain, and he’s supposed to use it instead of ignoring what lowers his self-esteem or makes him a victim of circumstance.

It is only within the past few decades that researchers have found a “new anatomical difference in the brain structure of homosexual men and heterosexual men, a discovery that supports a theory that sexual orientation may be set by nature” (Washington AP). The study by Allen and Gorski, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, claims also that the hormones active just before and just after birth can determine the sexual behavior and brain structure.

This is not the kind of Good News that many fundamentalists want to hear. If sexual orientation is not a matter of choice or something to be labeled “sin” where does that leave the Revs Hagee and Falwell and Parsley? How can they rationalize their moral superiority without some such scapegoat to justify it?

Because the Christian bible calls the gay life “an abomination,” is that any excuse for continuing to damn rather than recognize and sympathize? Father Damien would not, did not, cast out gays anymore than he cast any helpless creature out of the circle of his loving care. Just as he would have gloried in the scientific discovery of a cure for leprosy, he would have rejoiced— reached out in understanding, not condemnation, of poor suffering humanity.

Gerry Tatham is a retired adjunct professor of English for several universities in the Tennessee-Kentucky area. She and her husband Lew live in Edgewater, Florida.

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