Being a bigot is a choice. When you feel that pang of self-righteousness at the expense of someone else's sexuality, religion, color, life-circumstance, then you can be assured that you've made the choice to be a bigot.

Okay, so, here's something I don't get. Why the hell does it matter if being gay is a choice? It's an anti-gay stall tactic at best. If you believe in free will, then EVERY action is a choice. Being hetero is a choice, wearing white after labour day etc. Unless you mean the desire to be with same sex partners, which I suspect proponents of it not being a choice are. But then that's the problem, because of this ambiguity, anti-gay types always end up being persuasive because they can jump between implying choice in desire and choice in action due to a lack of term definition.

I say, fuck it, say it's a choice, take the wind out of their sails. And when they act like that matters, start lobbying against their right to practice religion. When they bitch about freedom, just say it's a choice and the state needn't implicitly endorse it by granting tax exempt status.

Furthermore, don't buy into this essentialist bullshit by acting like you are essentially one set of traits your whole life. People aren't "gay" or "straight" in their "soul" for lack of a better figure of speech. You make the choice to act on those desires for an infinitely complex, ever-changing and varied list of life experiences and genetic dispositions. JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER CHOICE AND EVERY OTHER DESIRE! Don't let them talk us into acting like there needs to be a special defense of some set of desires and actions they either don't have or don't understand. Fuck them! You, me and anyone don't need to justify the way we want to live our lives on the grounds of some kind of semi-abstract fatalism.

@28, 35: You're making a common mistake for people who don't understand cultural discursive construction of subjects: something doesn't have to be genetic or "biological" for it to not be a choice (thank you venomlash). It doesn't even have to be the result of physical environment. Social environment impacts us both psychologically and physically in ways that we cannot always control, measure, and/or predict. Too, genetic features rarely COMPLETELY determine a feature; most of them are predispositions to certain physical traits or behaviors that are then inflected and made manifest through environmental factors, be they physical or social or both.

Postmodern analytical theory has more-or-less destroyed the Essentialist/Naturalist assertions that have been made since the formalized theories were introduced into Western academic discourse during the Enlightenment. The "gay gene" is a bit of a misnomer: 1) the identified genetic "predictor" of homosexuality is CORRELATED with homosexual behavior and/or identity, not determined to be completely causative; and 2) the idea of "homosexuality" as a stable, uniform, trans-historical identity or set of behaviors is a fiction - same-sex sexual behavior can exist as part of a "homosexual" identity or not ("gay" people, "experimentation" by "straight" or "bi-curious" people, men on the down-low, RentBoy-renting male preachers, "bisexual" people, "pan-sexual" people, "sexual" people, "queer" people), the "gay" identity is an extremely recent historical phenomenon (historically, in Western cultures, the focus had been on "buggery" or "sodomy" as individual acts that did not operate as part of an "identity"), sexuality can be viewed from many different angles (acts, desires, fantasies, identities, etc.), not to mention that the idea of same-sex sex presupposes a binary definition of sex and gender, neither of which hold up under scrutiny - so, because we can't actually concretely define what we mean by "homosexual", we can't identify a "homosexuality" gene (we obviously can't establish a genetic determinate for something that we can't actually define).

Anyway, homosexuality-as-desire (and homosexuality-as-identity), however we define it, is not 100% genetically determined, and it also isn't a choice, conscious or not. All you need to do to understand this is to turn it around: did you "choose" to be heterosexual, to be attracted to "opposite-sex" persons? Homosexuality-as-behavior IS a "choice" in the same way that heterosexuality-as-behavior is a choice: we all choose whether and with whom to have partnered sex, but we don't have direct control over the objects of our desire (and, frankly, most Christians who want to "wait until marriage" and think monogamy is mandated by Yahweh fail to do either of those things, so it's pretty hypocritical to insist that gay people abstain from sexual activity, even if it WERE any of their business, which it is not).

What was this post about? Oh, right. Fuck these mini-bigots, and fuck the uncritical modes of thought that their religion-as-unquestionable-doctrine-centric upbringings mandated.

@107: You seem to have conflated "innate" with "genetic". Try to talk science with me, and I will END YOU.
WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?

@106: High-five, chief.

And here I went a rhetoricized (I'm making that a verb, fuck you) my comment and then John goes and makes it in the much more expanded intellectual form.

I have to disagree that post-modern analytic theory, especially concerning science, did much of anything but point out a need for humility. Nevertheless, the argument that followed was fairly cogent for the space allowed so your theory dropping shall pass by unscathed by my irrelevant wrath.

So what if it were a choice! Shouldn't we have the freedom to do with our bodies and hearts whatever we want?

Freedom of orientation, folks. Right wingers love to talk about freedom, but as usual, they're lying.

This should be THE argument, not whether it is a choice.

Homosexuality *is* about choice: it's about the choice to live honestly, openly, and with integrity, being truthful with yourself about who you are and what you want, or being a lying, hypocritical, self-righteous, cowardly cunt, like all the supposedly 'ex-gay' or closeted assholes who hide behind a wall of bigotry and dishonesty, deflecting attention from themselves by attacking the rights and characters of people who live with much greater integrity. The basic choice is: do you cop to what you want, or do you spend the rest of your life overcompensating for what other people think are unforgivable sins? #douchenozzles

ug, Dan, you did the right thing by blurring their names. Please don't contribute to the use of FB by adults to spy on and punish kids for a private conversation that takes place outside of the classroom. I'm all for anti-bullying to save lives, but can't we have anti-bullying without allowing it to be used as another excuse to infringe on kids' free speech and (illusion of) privacy?

@114: Y U MAD THO?

@117: Go back to /b/, newfag.
But they're not your personal army either.

My name is kyleigh I am 14years old im not a lesbian and I do not care if people are lesbian gay or both because they are still people and they will always be loved.....I support those who are gay because no one else will and because I think gay people are some of the strongest people out there!LOVE YA!