Maybe it is a choice; so what?

[branchandroot]

*hands on hips* Okay, people, since when have we forgotten all of our political advances in the past fifty years?

When someone like Palin says "being gay is a choice" you say "maybe, what's your point?"

The point here is not whether it's predisposition or lifestyle choice. I think (I hope) we all know that, within the breadth of our community, it is and can be both. The point is not to surrender our definition and identity to the likes of her!

They are trying to invalidate all our choices of sexual expression, and it is not a good idea to go scurrying back to the 'safety' of "it's genetics/I can't help it/God made me this way". That may look like a good bastion, one that uses their own arguments against them, but what it really does is let them define us. It sacrifices any and all choices, allows them to say freely and without contradiction that our choices are invalid, because we have failed to defend them, even the theoretical ones, even the ones that some of us don't make.

Our choices are not invalid! Neither the ones made at the prompting of biological predisposition or the ones made on the basis of intellectual predisposition are invalid, stop letting our enemies say they are!

This is a wedge that I thought we'd recognized for what it is, and gotten over at least a little. It distresses me to see it cropping up again every time I turn around. Let's take back our political savvy, here, people.

Comments

[pineapplechild.insanejournal.com]

Heck yes, my choices matter! This why I am (not to start another argument in your journal, and if I do, I apologize) pro-choice. Totally aside from moral matters, it's not the government's place to make my choices for me.

[branchandroot]

Argue away and welcome. And, yes, exactly. When I went to ask for a hysterectomy the run-around I got from three doctors in a row, two of them women, reminded me unpleasantly of how I've seen other doctors refuse to do abortions. Let one choice slip out of our hands and it's a short path to similar ones going the same way. We need to defend all of them, even the ones we might not want right at this moment, or might not ever want for ourselves personally.

And now I will stop preaching to the choir. *wry grin*

[pineapplechild.insanejournal.com]

Well, you managed to be a lot more eloquent then I do. I tend to flail about and make vague gestures of "do not want!".

[annotated_em.insanejournal.com]

I believe the words I'm groping for here are "Word. Wordy McWord."

[branchandroot]

Yeah. It just gets on my nerves to see us backsliding.

[akai_senshi.insanejournal.com]

There's a part of me that wants to see her kidnapped, blindfolded, and gang-banged by a bunch of FtM's and lesbians with strap-ons.

She actually might discover what an orgasm is. :P

[branchandroot]

*wry* Can't say I'd go that far, but I'm all for playing audio books of Judith Butler to her while she sleeps.