This is excactly like something me amd my girlfriends would joke about. If somebody overheard us and didn’t get the joke or got offended, we would probably explain it like this:

“Excuse us for not being PC, but most things we laugh hard about are off color or stereotypical. We do not think that homosexuality is a sickness, like cancer, and we do not believe that you choose to get cancer. But if you think that homosexuality is a sickness (like some people do)and a choice at the same time, you could argue that you are choosing to have a sickness. An example of a sickness is cancer. we are illustrating that equating homosexuality with being sick is a silly conviction. The result - a very funny joke that offend people. Sorry, we meant no harm, we were only in the fun .”

And when the offended person left we would roll our eyes, start on another bottle of wine and discuss at lenght how great our sense of humour is.

The problem is, when you get too public and monitored, you don’t get away with anything.

Thank you for this site, you have a true fan in Scandinavia!

On the T-shirt message issue, I found it funny AND poignant in the context of the video, but the shirt just has the wrong delivery to be as funny, and the message without the humour becomes tragic. Which it is, that a persons sexual persuasions have to be such a main stage polarizing issue when we have so many other far more impactful controversies that need to be dealt with. ( I mean impactful on the global/societal stage, I don’t mean to imply sexuality does not play a pivotal role on a personal level).

On the issue of sexuality as a choice vs. biological imperative, I place my flag firmly in the uhm, middle, kinda? I have friends who are strongly het (they get the “willies” when they think of man-on-man or girl-on-girl action), friends who are strictly gay (they have never mentioned being repulsed by the thought of het love, at least), friends who are staunch bi’s (get the best of both is the their mantra) and friends who have meandered through the massive and wonderful spectrum in between (and I do mean meandered). What drives them? IMHO, too many factors to shoehorn into one concept or another.
I was born with an imperative to eat, not only because it allows me to survive and thus propagate my species and genetic material, but because gosh darnit I love to eat! It’s yummy and makes me feel good. As a baby I loved peas, couldn’t get enough of them. At some point, that changed, and the taste of them made me vomit in my teens. Somewhere in my twenties, I allowed them back into my diet as long as they were mixed with potatoes or some other medium. At this stage (late 30’s), they’re palatable, not desirable. I don’t believe this is genetic (though my brother has had an almost mirrored response to eggs - weird, huh?), and our school board left pea-education out of the curriculum for some reason. Likewise, looking over my media exposure I have to say that the pea has always been treated fairly if not overly in depth by the society I grew up with (as opposed to those “pea-nazis” over in the land of the Green Giant), and my parents have been pretty non-judgemental of the whole green vegetable issue, just as long as we were getting something. So my love/hate/tepid relationship with peas - nature vs. nurture? Choice vs. imperative? I don’t know. And frankly, I don’t give a rat’s tukkus. I don’t choose to eat them now, but if a friend serves them, I can down them without a problem. Twenty years ago, if I had tried to force them down (and I did, leading to said vomit), it would only enforce my disgust with them, and thank god my parents were wise enough to recognize that.

Everything can be considered a product of choices, but if those choices are forced upon us, or lead to a life of unhappiness and dissatisfaction, can they really be called a choice?

Thank you for the amazing discourse, and the opportunity to exercise my pea catharsis, they’ve shut me out of the canned veggie blog. Sorry for the length of the post, but hey, I’m a teacher and you control the scrollbar.

As a psychologist, Anastasia argues that homosexuality is a choice, but then seems to undercut that position by stating that it is shaped “when we are young”. This too seems to ignore the twin studies showing that shared genetic identity produces a much increased likelihood of shared sexual orientation. Whether the inheritance is genetic or epigenetic is unclear (or was, the last time I looked), but there doesn’t seem to be much question that it happens. In any case, a “choice” that happens before we know we’re making it doesn’t fit my understanding of the meaning of “choice”. In my opinion, using the word “choice” for something that happens without the individual’s conscious involvement is a misuse of the word and provides ammunition for the bigots who continue to argue that gay folk could change if they just tried hard enough.

Bruce argues that we shouldn’t say it’s not a choice, because it takes power away from someone to say they have no choice. This is an approach to life I’ve never been able to understand - how is my life improved by remaining ignorant of the forces that shape me? Remember the Serenity Prayer? “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” If it’s not a choice, then it’s not a choice, and ignorance of that fact only empowers me to beat my head against a wall I’ll never be able to break down that way.

It seems to me that too much of this discussion comes from people’s difficulty in distinguishing what is true for them from what is true for people in general. If, as I have heard for decades, sexual orientation ranges from exclusively straight through bi to exclusively gay, with most people falling somewhere in the middle, then sexuality may well be a meaningful choice for many, possibly most, people, but not everyone has a choice in their sexuality. Well, a meaningful choice, anyway. For some of us, the real choices are gay vs. nothing, or straight vs. nothing. If some people have no choice in their sexual “orientation”, then laws (and, for that matter, customs) that punish their sexual orientation without very powerful justification are inhumane.

On the other hand, claims that Western (and especially American) culture has a long way to go in matters of sexuality will get no argument from me!

Anyway, my point was that you should be careful of making statements that have the slightest holes in them, because then people will seize on it and totally ignore your main point.

Also, I just thought, Meg, that you were looking for some justification, demanding why we thought we could equate the two. Well there you go! The solution wasn’t to make them both lighthearted, it was to make them both incredibly depressing! Yay!

A nice truism–I feel the need to point out the early AIDS scare: pretty much gays, for the most part. I’m not trying to nitpick, but I think we should watch out for making misstatements just because they sound nice. Also I can be kind of a smart ass sometimes, so maybe I’m just trying to be disagreeable. My mind is a mystery.

…can all the straight people who think sexuality is a choice please tell me exactly when they decided to be hetero, because I’ve been wracking my brain about this for ages and I can’t remember when or where I had to register mine!