Mark D. Jordan is a professor at the Harvard Divinity School. His work focuses on changing religious identities and rhetoric as well as gender and sexuality.
 

"The spectacle around Zach offers another lesson for understanding our debates: many of them have centered on the adolescent, conceived as both threatened and threatening. The most effective American rhetoric for condemning civil or religious toleration of homosexuality has repeatedly warned of dangers to the young. But admitting the vulnerability of adolescents implies that happily heterosexual adults are made, not born. Every adolescent must be recruited, for one sexual side or the other, for God's procreative plan or the devil's murmured perversions. Every adolescent promises a productive future of sexual conformity while threatening a rebellious future of sterile dissent."

— Recruiting Young Love