Frosstbyte

It's threads like this when I really miss Gilda. Wonder how she's doing these days.

I think Tully's last point pretty much sums up the issue for me. My wife is a teacher and I've seen kids in her schools as young as four acting in ways that simply can't be described as anything but gay. A kid from a fundamentalist Muslim family who likes to paint his nails, wear dresses and otherwise acts like a five year old girl instead of a five year old buy sure as shit didn't "learn" that behavior from his family or "choose" to be that way in some conscious sense.

And, to put it another way, EVEN IF being gay is a choice, we treat your creed or religion the same way we treat someone's race. It gets strict scrutiny, you can't discriminate against people on the basis of it. If being gay or straight is a "lifestyle choice" it's without question a more fundamental and baseline choice than the choice of which god to believe in. To take this lovely conversation to a ridiculous extreme, if we're not going to protect people's personal choices about who they fuck which have no impact on anyone else, there shouldn't be any protection for religion either.

That is to say, even if we could all agree that it's a choice and not physiologically ingrained (though I think it's much more the latter than the former), we have no problem at all protecting fundamental choices and the mere fact that it is a choice should not automatically end the discussion of whether or not it should be protected, as is argued above.