Some wingnut far-right Christians are suing for the right not to have to attend tolerance training and the like.
“What if a person felt their religious view was that African Americans shouldn’t mingle with Caucasians, or that women shouldn’t work?” asked Jon Davidson, legal director of the gay rights group Lambda Legal.
Christian activist Gregory S. Baylor responds to such criticism angrily. He says he supports policies that protect people from discrimination based on race and gender. But he draws a distinction that infuriates gay rights activists when he argues that sexual orientation is different — a lifestyle choice, not an inborn trait.
By equating homosexuality with race, Baylor said, tolerance policies put conservative evangelicals in the same category as racists. He predicts the government will one day revoke the tax-exempt status of churches that preach homosexuality is sinful or that refuse to hire gays and lesbians.
“Think how marginalized racists are,” said Baylor, who directs the Christian Legal Society’s Center for Law and Religious Freedom. “If we don’t address this now, it will only get worse.”
Davidson asked the right question. Less than two centuries ago, it was these same people who were using religion to justify slavery. “Think how marginalized racists are”? They’re as marginalized as they should be for poison-spewing, dangerous, hateful bigots.
There’s nothing but hubris coming from these evangelicals here: the assumption that there is no genetics (or in-utero developmental conditions) involved in homosexuality, for example. I think there are very few evangelicals who are equipped with enough knowledge to make the claim it’s purely a lifestyle choice. They want it to be, because it fits their definition of sin and allows them some group to judge and hate. That’s why they’re willing to pervert their religion to fit with politics, and pervert politics to fit with their ill-conceived understandings of their main teacher. But they know as much about this as they do about the rest of science… not enough to know how stupid they sound.
In the end, meaning in the long, long run, evangelicals are going to be as marginalized as racists, because they’re clinging on to the right to bigotry, the right to ignorance. Go ahead and choose that. We in the Bitchun Society (to steal a feather from Cory Doctorow) will outlive you twerps, no question of it.
All links here via Weird is Relative
Argh.
I’ve read about a study that indicates that women whose mothers took a particular drug during pregnancy had a statistically significantly higher likelihood of being lesbians. That right there tells me it’s not just a choice.
(If I ever find it again, I’ll post a link. Really.)
I’ve also read a study that suggests that male children after the first male child are exposed to different hormonal levels in utero and that this could explain the higher incidence of homosexuality among second-and-later male children. And it would even have a pretty sensible function as a limiter of population growth and a community-function assignment method. I mean, you want a certain number of heavily reproducing males, and less-likely-to-reproduce males would likely fall into all kinds of other roles in a human social community.
Mind you, I don’t think choice is completely absent from a homosexual identity: there’s probably a grey area there, where society makes people choose one or another tendency as an primary identity. “Homosexuals” in the past weren’t exclusively homosexual as a rule, perhaps in part because there wasn’t a delimited, official, politically-fraught-and-therefore-exclusivist identity that had to be adopted. I also don’t think they swang both ways simply to keep their homosexual interests under wraps. In any case, modern sexual identity isn’t genetic or developmental — it has huge traces of genetic and developmental predisposition, but the pressures of culture and so on would also have to come into play somewhere. It just makes sense, given history’s apparent diversity in sexual identities.