The following comes from a July 21 CNS News article by Michael W. Chapman:

Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and former psychiatrist–in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital, who has studied sexuality for 40 years, said it is a scientific fact that “there is no gay gene.”

“Environment,” however, “is very important,” said Dr. McHugh, author of The Mind Has Mountains: Reflections on Society and Psychiatry. He also explained that the permissive sexual culture in the United States today has confused “desire” with “love,” and that homosexuality is a false or “erroneous desire.”

In an interview with Virtue Online: The Voice for Global Orthodox Anglicanism, reporter Lydia Evans asked Dr. McHugh, “How do you view the popular assumption that science has somehow proven that sexual orientation is determined early in childhood, if not before birth?”

Dr. McHugh, who ended the sexual reassignment surgery program at Johns Hopkins because it was not helping the patients, answered, “Well, as I have said, there is no gay gene. And there are factors more influential than biology.”

“The best data, of course, [comes from the Framingham Study],” said Dr. McHugh.  “If you are a man and you grow up in a rural environment, you are four times less likely to have homosexual relationships than if you grow up in a metropolitan area. That’s not left-handedness.”

“If you are a lesbian, you are much more likely to be college-educated,” he said.  “That’s not something that happens at conception.”

“My point is that we now know that the environment is very important,” said Dr. McHugh.

When Lydia Evans asked about how the environment of a church, or religious-minded community, could affect people’s behavior, Dr. McHugh said, “This is the point. You’ve got to get the churches — not just the Anglican churches, but the Roman Catholics and the Presbyterians.”

“They’ve got to start talking again about their foundational opinions,” he said.  “There’s an idea of there being different kinds of laws in our world: the natural law, the law of desire — but there is scriptural law that comes out of the Old Testament. And they’ve got to get all of this straight.”