Everyone has different crosses to bear, which God has given us, in His wisdom, along with the support to bear them, if we rest in His strength. The crosses are our own personal crosses and are ideally suited for facillitating our growth and successful mission on Earth.
Predisposition to certain temptations, whatever they are, at most is just scientific proof of certain forms of crosses or aspects of crosses that persons have to bear. To suggest that some people are not responsible for bearing their crosses is to strip those persons of their humanity. If they cease to have free will to choose, and to suffer in His service they cease to have means of freely accepting His offered mercy. God has provided boundless strength and love for us, that we might bear what is presented to us. One cannot be excused from turning one's back on that offer.
Forgiven, YES. Excused, NO.
This is not to say its not understandable why some are deceived, confused, and misguided. The explanations serve to help us point them back to the true source of love. However, the only way to turn is to repent, and to say "I HAVE done wrong. Lord I love you, let me serve you. Show me the truth that I might." One must admit mistakes that God might forgive them. Those that are held back will burn us.
Very well stated, Ceildric. Our ability to perceive people as human, from, "of the earth/dust," is Greek, is essential to this issue. Homosexuals are as earthly and as carnal as us...
Immoderate responses to this issue, on both extremes of the argument, blur people from our view and distract us from our central mission as Catholics: conversion, or being reconciled to God, or repentance (to "turn back" to God). The heart of the problem that I think LatinPassion may have perceived was pride, itself a deadly sin: we are assuming that those most in need of conversion are the homosexuals, or that we have already been converted. The problem with that is that is not how conversion works: our own conversion is what leads others to their conversion. We have to have the purest motives for the desire for the repentance of others, chiefly, that we are all reconciled to God -- there can be no room for pride.
I think the problem that LatinPassion had with the initial responses was that he perceived a heightened antipathy to this sin, as opposed to other sins -- there has been a legacy of this in Catholic social history. IMHO, I would agree with him that this is not the most productive Catholic response.
It seems that religious people can get a barely perceptible gratification from the condemnation of public sinners; although LatinPassion may have been projecting, we may have also been hurling our own guilt onto homosexuals, heaping them like scapegoats, while our own sins remain in the closet (yes, that pun was intended). I wish we would remember that we are all private sinners that haven't been found out yet -- although, we are public sinners before the eyes of God, who sees everything.
Homosexuals friends that I have (I'm thinking of one of my friends who is a very liberal, gay Catholic), have told me that this reaction only solidifies the hardness of a (gay) sinner's heart, as they feel wounded by the alienation and antipathy -- it galvanizes their tendency towards resistance and defensiveness. This disunites them from the Church and from God's grace. Obviously, this is not the result we intend.
However, on the other side of the issue, secular social and political movements rob others of their humanity as well, creating entire identities for homosexuals around one aspect of the personhood, making this aspect seem simplistic, although it is extremely complex. Although we coined the term Sodomite, describing behavior of residents of one biblical city, it was the gay political movement that created the word "homosexual," dehumanizing millions of people, dwarfing them to the most carnal act that humans do. This is the sin and degradation that, I think, we are trying to remedy and reconcile to God.
I think the issue goes beyond this sin, in particular, but to sin, in general.
