By Will Hall, Baptist Message executive editor CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (LBM) – While U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Webster’s Dictionary were assailing Judge Amy Coney Barrett and Americans’ sensibilities about the notion of “sexual preference,” they ignored the results of one of the largest research efforts ever about homosexual behavior. The international study (published a year ago), led by researchers from Harvard and MIT, looked at the genomes of nearly 500,000 people in the United States, the United Kingdom and Sweden and concluded that any genetic influence on homosexual behavior was minimal and hardly deterministic. Of particular interest, they concluded that between 8 - 25 percent of homosexual behavior had a small but inconsistent influence from five genetic variants, and conceded that these also related to behaviors “such as smoking, cannabis use, risk-taking, and the personality trait ‘openness to experience’” as well as “sexual behavior, attraction, identity, and fantasies.” Likewise, some of these indicators also were “genetically correlated with several psychiatric or mental health traits” such as depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The researchers concluded that in aggregate these genetic … [Read more...]