Monday, January 23, 2012

Cynthia Nixon’s Sexuality a Choice


“I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice.

And here’s the problem: In the fight for equality (marital and otherwise), a sizable group of LGBT activists have built their argument around the idea that being gay is “not a choice.” By this they mean that for many gay people, their attraction to the same sex is essentially an inborn trait—something that they have experienced for as long as they can remember—and so may be thought of as immutably biological. And from thence stem most mainstream arguments about “protected classes”, civil rights, and the like, even if science hasn’t yet entirely sorted the precise balances of nature and nurture in determining sexuality.


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