Choice

Keguro:

Those who “choose to be gay” offer the disturbing possibility that attachments and affiliations can be chosen outside of state-sanctioned norms. That there are ways of living not envisioned in school textbooks. That how we choose to live matters just as much, if not more, than how we are supposed to live.

To choose what one “likes” over one’s “duty.”

Born Which Way?

The liberal blog Talking Points Memo, always ready to score points against Republicans (a bit like shooting big fish in a little bowl these days), mocks boring presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty for his response to a question about homosexuality and genetics:

Pawlenty told Gregory on Meet The Press that when it came to whether homosexuality was a choice or an innate part of a person's character, "the science in that regard is in dispute" and that it was unclear whether it was "behavioral or partly genetic."

"There's no scientific conclusion that it's genetic," he said. "We don't know that. So we don't know to what extent, you know, it's behavioral and-- that's something that's been debated by scientists for a long time. But as I understand the science, there's no current conclusion that it's genetic."

I've long been an opponent of the "It's not a choice!" crowd, though really my opposition is to the whole way the question is framed, because the choice/not-a-choice dichotomy doesn't make any sense to me, and either side of the equation is perfectly useful to the homophobes.

Thankfully, this point is made in an excellent comment on the post at TPM. There are no permalinks to comments, so you'll have to scroll down to the comment by "kmellis" that begins "Right.  Having a strong genetic component doesn't exclude environmental components and, additionally, this doesn't tell us how much the proportions between the two varies between individuals." The final paragraph of the comment is a good summing up, though the whole comment really deserves to be read:

But I think we've gone past the science into a kind of dogma (understandably, but still) that, as I detail above, has some negative implications that we should think carefully about. It seems to me that now is about the time that we should change our focus away from the genetic argument and fully to the social justice and moral philosophy argument.  We should be going all-in on asserting the acceptability of non-traditional sexual orientation and move away from the inherently defensive genetic determinist argument.

As to the science, I don't have time to get into all that right now, but I'd recommend the chapter called "Sexual Orienteering" in Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences by Rebecca M. Jordan-Young for a start, since it's recent and gets at some of the problems with the studies of homosexuality that have tried to find a "gay gene" or some equivalent.

And I must admit, I prefer Weird Al's vaguely Butlerian "Perform This Way" to Gaga's "Born This Way".

Born to Choose

While I was away, I lost some hours of my life by watching CNN, something I don't normally do, because I don't have a TV (not because I'm a TV-hater, though I do think TV news gets more awful every time I watch it, but because I would never get anything done if I had a TV -- I find it completely addictive, regardless of quality). There was a story in rotation about the HRC/Logo forum where the various Democrats in the presidential primary were invited to talk about same-sex marriage and occasional other topics. The CNN report made it seem that candidate Bill Richardson was a troglodyte for his response to a question posed by Melissa Etheridge: "Do you think homosexuality is a choice or is it biological?" Richardson responded, "It's a choice, it's, it's..." and then there was back and forth and eventually Richardson's campaign issued a statement and Barney Frank testified to Richardson's record.

I found the whole thing cringe-inducing, mostly because Etheridge asked, with complete moral certainty, an absurd question and then Richardson got beat up for it. Marriage has become, as the pundits at The Nation pointed out, the litmus-test, but the word "choice" has, strangely, come to be The Word That Shall Not Be Uttered.

What is going on here? Certainly, the HRC and Logo do not stand for all that is queer in America, but they do represent a certain visible and politically active segment of the queer community, and it looks like that segment is growing ever more narrowly defined, intolerant, and boring.

I could get all semantic on the question "Is it a choice?" and ask, "What is this it of which you speak?" because I hate the tendency some people have of defining the vast range of human pleasures and intimacies by a couple of labels. Or I could point out that the nature/nurture dichotomy is at best naive. But I'd rather just say, "What's so bad about choice?"

In The Nation's discussion of the forum, Lisa Duggan said what happened to Richardson next: "Margaret Carlson followed up and explained to him that saying you are born gay is the ground on which equality can be claimed." Why is equality about how you're born? It's never stopped biologically-minded traditionalists from saying that anything deviating from some narrowly-defined norm ought to be cured.

If there's an "it", choice is what's it's all about. It doesn't matter whether I'm choosing at the moment to live my life with a man or a woman or no-one; the freedom to choose any of those options and not be harrassed, marginalized, or attacked for it is the freedom I want. It's why I don't have much interest in the search for "gay genes" -- sure, there are genetic components, but so what? Let's be very speculative for a moment and say a definition of non-heterosexuality can be dreamed up, and a gene or two can be attributed to it, and a test can be created to see whether a person possesses such a gene -- if they don't, and still behave in a non-hetero way, should their citizenship in the queer nation be revoked so they are forced to live in the doldrums of the choiceless land where the "I'm-entirely-heterosexual" creatures trod through their dreary days?

"It's not a choice" sounds to my ears like the proclamation of somebody drowning in heterosexism and self-hatred. "I can't help myself! I was born this way! Waaaaaa!!!" Why are these gays so afraid of choice? I suspect it's because we're terrified of the idea of being "unnatural", but the terror has nothing to do with nature (all sorts of things happen in nature!) so much as an idea of normality. The norm-obsessed gays want to be "just like everybody else" and everybody else is, apparently, inherently hetero. It's like they really want to proclaim, "We're not 100% hetero only because we were born this way -- we didn't choose to be like this, honest!"

I'm all for people who choose to get married and have kids doing so, regardless of their gender or whatever, but I doubt it's anything I'll ever choose, and so I don't have a lot of patience for the idea that that is the ultimate sort of life to live, the sine qua non, the one true path to happiness, the normal thing, the thing we were all born to do. It's a position that replaces a compulsory heterosexuality with a compulsory homosexuality for those born to it, a Procrustean bed made up by people who think everybody should live and feel only the way they themselves do. I don't like their idea of normality, I don't like their fear of choice, and that bed looks damned uncomfortable to me.