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Should It Matter If Being Gay Is A Choice?

Let us assume something- that being gay is a choice.

Just assume that being gay is a choice and that the bulk of humanity is inherently bisexual. What does that mean in terms of the battle for rights?

Absolutely nothing.

You see, this assumption has a lot to do with something else. Read, sometime, the Nun’s Tale from Canterbury Tales and what you find is a story full of anti-Semitic stereotypes. There are tons of anti-Catholic stereotypes in the works of Samuel Johnson and Johnathan Swift, and up until 1789, Catholics had few rights in the United States. In 1878, there was even an attempt to amend the US Constitution to effectively ban Catholicism in this nation. The thing is, religion is a choice. You are not born Catholic, but you are born into Catholicism.

Of course, according to people like Maggie Gallagher, being gay is a choice, and they feel that it is alright to persecute gays like people use to persecute Catholics. At one time, Catholics had few rights, and could not practice their religion in what became this nation.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference, Gallagher told EqualityMatters that:

GALLAGHER: I think honestly, partly, it’s that personally, people still find it quite painful to come to terms with being gay and the way they do it is by saying, “I’m born that way,” “God made me that way,” so it becomes part of their identity structure for coping with what was probably initially not very happy feelings about it. And so your — it is kind of threat — the idea that that might not be true, which you think they might welcome, they might say “well even if I couldn’t be gay, could not be gay, I’m” — you know, the analogy that’s been constructed between orientation and race, which is also — it’s the foundation of the outrage they feel that you disagree with them on gay marriage. It’s — I mean — to me It’s very hard to explain, but on the other hand I’ve never struggled with being gay, so I try to say, you know, I mean obviously it must be — have been a difficult experience. So I think that’s it. I mean I know politically that the activists are just outraged by it because it’s core to the belief that we need to remake society so that disagreement with or disapproval of gay sexual relationships is the equivalent of racism, and they’ve gone pretty far. It’s really quite amazing to watch them construct something which is so weird.

[...]

GALLAGHER: There are a lot of women who will tell you that they made a choice to be lesbian. In fact, some famous celebrity just did this.

EQUALITY MATTERS: Cynthia Nixon

GALLAGHER: Cynthia Nixon. And then they all dumped on her, and she retreated and said her orientation is bisexual. So, I mean, that’s part of their definition too. I think it’s definitional. If you could have a relationship with both – a non-gay relationship, that means your orientation’s not gay, your orientation is bisexual by definition, right? So they would — that’s the way they understand it. If you could change that would show that you weren’t really gay. I don’t know how you get to decide who’s gay and not gay, but it’s an interesting conversation. I don’t know. I mean, I — you gotta realize that these guys are — it’s hard to be gay in America, so I guess that probably does deeply relate to it — it’s probably going up on a gay website in a few minutes.

The thing is, most people actually do tend to forget that bisexuality exists, and that bisexuals do have a choice when it comes to their sexuality. Last year, NOM crowed heavily over a study that purported to show that being gay is a choice and that ‘ex-gay’ therapy worked. Brian Brown even stated about one 2011 study that “Even those who disagree with us about gay marriage (or Christian sexual ethics) should feel good about this this scientific verification of the possibility of free will triumphing over desire. We are all more than our instincts, sexual or otherwise.”

Of course, there is a reason why you should always take a study with a grain of salt. This study was an extension of a study published back in 2009 that was, in short order, completely debunked.

Maggie Gallagher is right, though, about one thing. It is not easy to be gay or lesbian in the United States. It is no easier than being a Catholic was back in the 1930′s or being Jewish was in the 1950′s. You see, back in the 1950′s, Jews took to decorating their houses at Christmas time with blue and white lights and Hanukkah bushes in order to fit in because, outside of certain areas, being Jewish was very risky. It was socially unacceptable to be Catholic or Jewish right up into the mid-20th Century. This would be why one World War II Veteran Corporal Melvin Kaminsky would change his name to Mel Brooks.

Being lesbian or gay is not a choice, of course. There is a lot of scientific evidence that it is not. The problem, of course, is that Gallagher and company want to ignore the accurate scientific data for the ones that support their beliefs.