A CNN poll shows, for the first time, that a majority of Americans think that sexual orientation cannot be changed.
CNN Poll
Many still disagree of course. Including of course those proverbial self-righteous but image-conscious conservatives out there, so common these days, who go around thinking and saying "I love my gay relatives, and I’m such a great person because I’m all nicey nice to gay people, but this is their choice, I know it’s a choice and therefore I can oppose gay rights without having any blood on my hands; they are the ones that chose a lifestyle where you don’t get rights."
Now obviously they are tempted to not be nice to gay people or they wouldn’t have to brag about simply treating them with friendliness and basic courtesy. And obviously even if people did choose their sexual orientation there’s no excuse to not treat everyone equally. But those things not withstanding, our modern kindler gentler homophobes rely on the "it’s a choice" BS to justify their oppression of gays including, often, their own gay loved ones; if they realized it wasn’t a choice, they know that they’d be putting gays in a situation of having NO CHOICE but to endure a life without civil rights, dignity, equality, etc.
Of course pretty much every gay person out there including myself maintains steadfastly that it’s not a choice. This is something that automatically came upon us. Any honest person has to admit they don’t choose who they are attracted to or who they love. The same is true with gay people. Many of us spent miserable, frustrating, self-hating years trying to change since, this is what Christian society has demanded of us, especially in decades past (talk about an immoral and unnatural demand, but I digress). And the fact that we could not repress our natural desires nor manufacture one iota of attraction to the opposite sex just proves how much it is something that can’t be changed. (JUST TRY TO MANUFACTURE SOME ATTRACTION TO THOSE TO WHOM YOU AREN’T ATTRACTED, EVANGELICALS, PLEASE, I DARE YOU TO JUST TRY IT.)
And everyone knows, including most homophobes who justify their views with the "it’s a choice" crap, that pretty much ALL gays and lesbians say it’s not a choice and can’t be changed. Why don’t the homophobes trust gay people’s own accounts of their own lives? Apparently they all think we’re lying for political gain. So when these anti-gay rights folks say "I love my gay relatives but I am a Christian (i.e. I know it all and am better than them) and I know it’s a choice and therefore oppose gay rights" they are trying to have it both ways. Obviously they are trying to have it both ways in trying to look like they are as loving and good as possible to their gay relatives while still maintaining their own superiority as hetero Christians and while still opposing their relatives’ rights. But they are also having it both ways by making it look like they open-mindedly think that their relatives are great individuals who they love and trust as family members, while maintaining that their relatives are actually lying to everyone about a major aspect of their life simply for political gain.
Are you calling your relatives liars? Is that very loving? Isn’t it presumptious of you to assume you know more about their own experience than they do? Or that you know that their view of their own experience is a dishonest one, even though you haven’t been through their experience and don’t really know what it’s like? Is that fair? Is that Christian? Is that what Jesus would do? Are you just in denial of how right they are and how wrong you are, because this denial justifies your otherwise undeniably unfair and hurtful political agenda?
It’s good to see progress is being made in people realizing the obvious. It’s just too bad that the obvious is so hard to grasp among those conservatives and evangelicals who are supposedly so much better than the rest of us.