Disorder

I'm in Psych class... do you think Homosexuality is a cognitive disorder?
Is it chemically/mentally abnormal?

The four indications of abnormal behavior or mindset that we just got on our notes are

1) Statistical Deviance
2) Cultural Deviance
3) Emotional Distress
4) Dysfunction

...ok, so there's a girl who has proved to the class to be very, very dumb talking about how of course it (homosexuality) is a disorder because life is a lot harder as a gay. While this isn't the reason for the post, not everybody is a Christian in a small town in NW Iowa where there are seven churches in a two-mile radius. Which means that, more and more, it is becoming acceptable to be a homosexual in the world... which means

1) There are more and more homosexuals in the world
2) Our laws and tolerance are shifting towards general acceptance, generally, as a society
3) We read some texts over the weekend about how, by their 20s, homosexuals usually make their peace with their sexual orientation
4) Only until you "make your peace" would the struggle keep you from living your life

In this world today... which, on the one hand, is good - people who are struggling with personal orientation should never feel rejected or abandoned by society.

But here's the question.

Say it IS a mental disorder (strictly a hypothetical). What if the individual does not want to be cured? Say he/she embraces her homosexuality and chooses to live with it.

What if someone suffered from Major Depression, but felt that they did not want to be cured (with neither medication nor therapy)? Immediately, I thought of Hemingway and Woolf and a billiong songwriters - all of their works were affected by their depression/adversity. What if Ms. Dickinson didn't suffer from agoraphobia... would she have written less poems? Different poems? I don't know or imagine that she embraced her disorder... but can you imagine? If F. Scott Fitzgerald wasn't an alcoholic... he wouldn't need to write for booze money... which is what we were taught in high school.

On the one hand, I guess it doesn't matter - in this case - whether it is a disorder or not. But it does matter a bit because... if/when we (in our place in history) reach the point where homosexuality is the complete norm, there is not way it would be considered a disorder - even if discoveries were made in the physical brain anatomy (and they HAVE made some already: they don't allude to homosexuality as a disorder, but more as an inherent "born with it" condition).