Greg Krehbiel
The other anti-choice crowd
by Greg Krehbiel on 25 January 2012
I didn’t know who Cynthia Nixon was until I saw this story. (She’s an actress.)
Anyway, to the dismay of some people in the gay community she has announced that being gay was, for her, a choice.
So … what exactly are they saying.
“You can’t join our club unless you’re born this way?”
Isn’t that sorta like racism?
Does this mean that before somebody can “come out” they have to get approval from the hierarchy to ensure that they are officially homosexual and not just choosing that lifestyle?
Or does it mean that people who do choose that lifestyle have to toe the party line and pretend that they didn’t?
It’s very confusing, and it’s quite obvious that groupthink is more important than reality.
2012-01-25 » Greg Krehbiel
25 January 2012 @ 6:05 pm
It’s really not that hard to explain. There is a spectrum of sexual preference.
But it’s also true that people assume that their own subjective experience of the world is the same as everyone else’s. I assume that when I see orange, and you see orange, we are both experiencing the same thing.
So a closeted gay or bisexual man, raised in a conservative Christian tradition, thinks that the feeling eh has are “of the Devil” and engages in a constant inner battle. “If gays would just fight the good fight, they could be cured.”
Then you find him in a cheap hotel with a male prostitute.
I think the groupthink comes from worrying about what the other side will do with the words we use. That’s why “design” was almost never used by biologists to describe those features that are obviously “designed” by natural selection.
Let the quote-mining begin!
26 January 2012 @ 12:24 pm
>I think the groupthink comes from worrying about what the
>other side will do with the words we use.
That’s definitely it, but it’s clearly at the expense of truth. They want to promote the idea that people are born homosexual, whether or not that is true.
26 January 2012 @ 2:49 pm
And the problem is that their claim is not that “some people are born homosexual” or “most homosexuals are born that way.”
It is that you must affirm that every homosexual was born that way. If they admit any exceptions or degree of choice it entirely undermines their political and social position. I don’t know that it would *have* to undermine their position, but because of their insistence on the exclusivity of congenital orientation as the explanation (at least for true Scotsmen; Anne Heche doesn’t count) they’re stuck in the bind of not being able to admit exceptions.
26 January 2012 @ 2:51 pm
But the dirty little secret is that a lot of hard-feminist lesbians acknowledge choice; they want very much to affirm that their choice is a conscious rejection of the male. There’s just a tacit agreement that they’ll keep fairly quiet about it so as not to muck things up in public.
30 January 2012 @ 10:00 pm
[...] choosing that lifestyle? Or does it mean that people who do choose that lifestyle have … Website Share Tweet Previous postHow To Improve Social Networking For Your Business [...]