I’m guessing that consistency isn’t important here. This is about hatred and control rather than logic.

Exactly true. That’s what I was trying to get at with my “hangups preceed justification” thing. Certain people thing Teh Gays are icky, and construct religious justifications for their hangup. Or they construct political justifications for it, like the (thankfully not especially common) Marxist claim that homosexuality is bourgeois.

Generally, the people who point to others and say “what they’re doing is bad” aren’t comfortable pointing at themselves and saying “what I’m doing is good.”

McCullough’s bio describes him as a “widely respected evangelical voice.” Consequently, I’m guessing that his objection to homosexuality is at least partly motivated by his religious beliefs. So, I’m confused over his objections to the implications of Rosie O’Donnell’s ideas. He’s critiquing Rosie and the left for implying that human beings have no control over the expression of their sexuality. And yet, I often hear religious bigots using this quote to justify their condemnation of queer people:

Romans 1: 26-27: “For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error”

As I understand their interpretation of this biblical passage, it indicates that god doesn’t much like homosexuality and that homosexuality is intertwined with at kind of curse that leaves queer people unable to control themselves.

Since the collective opinions of queer supportive people are being challenged, I think it’s fair to challenge McCullough on the collective inconsistency of anti-gay Christian views of homosexuality. Some people say that we can control the expression of our sexuality and should be condemned for our choices. Others say that we can’t and consequently, can’t be trusted. Collectively, religious homophobes use both opinions to condemn us.

So which is it? Are we so inflamed by our passions that we are flawed and evil… or do we have the capacity to reign in our sexuality and choose to be heterosexual? On one hand, we’re condemned as immoral hedonists who can’t be trusted around children and members of the same sex. On the other hand we have the ex-gay ministries crap. Are we uncontrollable deviants, or are a bunch of sad individuals who have chosen a path of depravity?

I’m guessing that consistency isn’t important here. This is about hatred and control rather than logic.

You’re right that consensual sexual activity is a choice, but you’re confusing that with preference.

That’s more or less what I’ve been getting at with my tangent. You were right on with the rest of your post. Kevin McCullough has a sad and dangerous way of looking at the world.

As soon as I hit “submit”, I’ll read your post as actually comment on-topic.

Well, both of them are. It’s morally wrong to discriminate against people based on consensual sexual choices they make. It’s also a scientific fact that by and large sexual orientation is not a choice.

Seriously, why? And do you really think that gay rights rhetoric is working especially well?

The latter question first: American gay rights activists have managed to pull the median American voter left of things that were considered extreme and depraved 15 years ago, despite the Democratic Party’s earnest efforts to derail them. I can’t think of a single liberal movement in the first world in the last 15 years that has been as effective as the American gay rights movement.

As for “why,” it’s mostly a question of branding. “It’s factually wrong, but even if it were right, it’s still a violation of equal rights” could sway a judge, but not the public. It’s perceived as waffling and as scrambling to find a real justification. Bush managed to segue on Iraq once and got away with it only because he had the “We’re at war” card; once he stopped having a consistent message that sounded in touch with reality, the Iraq occupation’s support started tanking.

Part of it is that when you’re arguing out in the open, it tends to work better to have one main point and expand on it rather than a bunch of talking points. Especially but not only when it’s a bilateral debate, your entire position will get evaluated based on your weakest argument. If you field five different arguments, and your opponent drags you into a back-and-forth about just one and wins, you’ll be perceived as having lost even if your other four arguments were solid.

And as much as I hate to be the guy that draws simplistic parallels between the gay rights and civil rights movements, I think this is similar to the progression from “fuck them, they’re black” to “it’s not their fault they’re balck, so we should be sympathetic” to “and what’s so wrong about being black?”

The rhetoric that won the day was “Beneath our skins we’re all the same,” but to say anything like that about homosexuality, especially if you want to cover not just G and L but also B and even more so T, requires you to decenter sex probably more than is possible in the foreseeable future.

Nobody could possibly argue that blackness was immoral. People said black people were naturally inferior, prone to crime, lazy, hypersexual, dirty. The only one of the five that’s said about gays is hypersexual, and even then it’s as much in a “they’re all immoral” context as in a “they want to rape you” one.

The original civil rights movement did a lot of your work for you. Evidently, convincing people that homosexuality is inborn helps convince them that things like SSM are good policy. When it comes to political activism, this is all that counts.