Sexuality and Choice

You don't choose your sexuality.
However, you choose whether or not you will act on your sexuality.

That video once posted here said it all, with the question asked of the interviewees "When did you choose to be straight?"

 

". We could choose never to have sex with people of the same gender. "

And yet you would still be gay.

 

Exactly. Or bi. Which then begs the question "Since abstaining isn't going to change anything, why not act on it?" It seemed logical to me.

 

True, but while there are still people incorrectly spouting the falsehood that it IS a choice, we have a need to make the correction.

 

I think I agree with what your saying. If being gay was 100% a choice I don't think that would change the morals of it. I haven't heard an good argument as to why it's a bad choice. Also if being gay was truly a bad thing, like if it caused forest fires, then it being a not a choice wouldn't really make it less bad.

 

"That...motivates a search for a cure."

True, some people take it that way, and for all we know there is one. If they find a sexuality gene and can alter it by manipulation, then they've cured it. The difference is, that the people who find it and say 'well we found the cure, now take your medicine' are the same people who are already saying it's a choice.

The rest will see a sexuality gene the same as those in control of height and hair colour and everything else that just happens to be swimming about in there. My point is, that it's not like saying 'being gay is a choice' is going to start convincing people who don't ALREADY think it's a bad thing to start calling us bad.

 

Sexuality isn't a choice. You are who you are born to be. I was born to be gay and like men. My dad was born to be straight and like women. It is what it is. I did not choose to be gay.

 

Liking men or women is not a choice. It is, however, a choice to be in a relationship with a man or woman. It doesn't mean you'd enjoy it.

 

" Propagating the argument that it isn't a choice implies that being queer is bad"

So in that case, would you consider saying 'being straight isn't a choice' to be an improvement? You argument appears to hinge upon the use of the word choice as the source of the negativity. Where as I would contend that it's the word 'gay'. The people who use that argument already think there is something wrong with being gay, so they are going to see it that way. If you said to those people 'being straight isn't a choice', then I don't think we would suggest there is the same implication of it being something we ought to feel ashamed of.

 

Even if being queer were a choice, there would still be no justification for discrimination. That said, there's the attitude of "if it's a choice, you deserve anything we dish out" which conservatives at high and low levels perpetuate. As such, it's important to focus both on why it's not wrong in the first place, but how it's still not a choice.

A lot of campaigning seems to encourage us to be ashamed of our various gender and sexual identities; "it's not a choice," "they can't help it" etc. just makes us seem like a bunch of victims ashamed of who we are.

Whether or not it's a choice or not, the choice argument against us is never about choice; it's about breaking the gender and sexual boundaries that are laid down and which make people uncomfortable to see breached. It's a distraction, an argument pulled out of nowhere which could easily disappear to be replaced by another red-herring, so long as they never have to openly admit it's about men and women keeping to the rules they adhere to.

 

So basically, if nothing else, we can agree that standard practice morality is in this instance, faulty. In which case are we not doing ourselves somewhat of a disservice by devoting time question our tag lines that could be better used attempting to lay out an easier access to the basic understandings of morality?

Having said that, I think we have about as much chance of getting everyone to ditch the 'so and so says its wrong' as we have of proving that the moon can fit inside for VW Camper.

 

When someone says it's a choice I always say this Try denying your sexual just for one month if your hetero and only date and have sex with the same sex and see if you can do it for a long time with out getting frustrated that means no having sex with opposite sex , no dating the opposite sex and when you see an attractive woman look down at your feet and try to ignore it let's see how long you can do that for .

 

Personally I think that we should always be making both arguments. Firstly, being queer isn't a choice. Secondly, there'd be nothing wrong with it if it was.

I think you make a good point, though. The loudest arguments against homophobia aren't always the best ones. My personal bugbear is the whole 'there are animals that exhibit gay behaviour' line, because it's not really a valid point. Whilst there are species where animals of the same gender engage in sexual activity, there is no documented example of this happening to the exclusion of heterosexual, reproductive activity. Bonobo monkeys may fool around with same-sex partners all the time, but they all also breed.

Which is all especially annoying since it's beside the point. When has 'do animals also do it?' ever been an appropriate yardstick against which to measure human society. Despite the all-too-familiar line, no animal is 'gay' or 'bisexual' in the human sense of those words, but that's because human and animal sexuality are fundamentally different things!