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...]

By Will Hall, Baptist Message executive editor Modified, Oct.11, to combine old paragraphs 10 and 11, adding new information in italics, and to combine old paragraphs 12 and 13. Corrected, Oct. 12, to indicate a change in church membership for J.D. Perry. NASHVILLE, Tenn. (LBM)—A recording made by an unknown LifeWay employee purports to contain remarks by Ben Mandrell, LifeWay’s president and CEO, claiming that the lucrative deal given his predecessor Thom Rainer was negotiated without the input, oversight or knowledge of the board of trustees elected by the Southern Baptist Convention. The alleged Oct. 7 exchange with LifeWay employees was in response to the recent whirlwind of controversy surrounding a LifeWay lawsuit against Rainer for breaking terms of his severance agreement which included at least $1 million and a non-compete clause that was to run until October 2021. BACKGROUND In this 2006 Baptist Press photo at Lifeway’s former Glorieta Conference Center (sold in 2013 for $1) CEO Thom Rainer is shown telling trustees “Being a Christian resource provider is a tough business. I don’t like to talk about competition, but we’ve got to do something different if we are going to be an effective, viable ministry in the … [Read more...]