I almost can't believe that I'm writing this, but....I'm going to defend Bill Richardson on the whole "is being gay a choice" thing.
Sort of.
For those of you who might have missed the brouhaha, here's the deal: during a round table discussion with the Democratic candidates about LGBT issues, Bill Richardson was asked if he thought that being gay was a choice. He said yes.
You could have heard a pin drop.
He was asked the question again. He said yes. It got very uncomfortable in the room. And he's getting a lot of flak for it.
Perhaps rightly so, but I think that the Left needs to think through more fully the reason why this position is so upsetting.
The logic goes something like this: "if it's a choice, then it can be condemned. If it's inborn, then it is morally neutral."
But this logic cedes the parameters and the terms of the argument to the anti-gay bigots. The Left does this frequently, and the Right is terrific at exploiting it: look at the way the Left's rhetoric of equality gets used by the Right to justify ending affirmative action and to support neo-segregation.
With the is-it-a-choice-or-is-it-biological argument what the Left has ceded is this: the implicit presumption that if it's a choice, then it must be a moral choice and choosing to be gay is the wrong moral choice. The very terms of the debate presume that homosexuality is something that needs to be explained away or apologized for.
Now, I don't thing that being gay is a choice. But I do think that this debate profoundly misses the point.
Because what's really at the heart of the matter is bigotry. There is no one who is condemning homosexuality whose position will change if they can be convinced that it's biological. Then they will simply argue that that gays are organistically defective. As a friend of mine once said: "If they think it's biological, then they'll identify it as a disease." The real problem is pathologizing homosexuality, whether as a genetic or a psychiatric or moral disorder.
The other thing that should alert good leftists about the fucked-upness of the inborn vs. choice debate is how simplistic it is and how it runs counter to what has been at the center of intellectual leftism for the past forty years. For the past several decades, it has been a hallmark of leftist theories that "nature" itself is just an expression of culture. Gender and race have been agressively denaturalized, exposing these seemingly indisputably natural categories as social constructions and exposing the ideological work that these categories perform. The left has fought against biodeterministic explanations of everything from femininity to criminality. But we are capitulating on this one, letting people who are hostile to homosexuality paint us into an intellectual corner and ignoring the fact that by ceding the terms of the debate, we have already lost.
Who we are at any level isn't as simple as choice vs. biology. Identity isn't a matter of just biochemistry or decision making. And rather than silencing one another for deviating from orthodoxy, we should focus on fighting bigotry and discrimination. And nothing was ever solved by imposing intellectual orthodoxies.
Not that I think Richardson was likely thinking of the social construction of reality or Foucauldian epistemes or scholarly debates about enculturation or whatever when he made his blunder, but I think the reaction does highlight how by allowing the Right to (once again) set the terms, the Left has once again lost its moral authority.
For a better analysis than my hasty Saturday morning post can provide, here's what the fantastically smart Stanley Fish has to say.