Note that in the following, I’m figuring out something that is probably obvious to everyone except me.

The other day I found myself expostulating, “How can anyone think people choose which sex they’re attracted to???” (Yes, with three question marks. I was expostulating.) I followed this with the well-worn, “If they think homosexuality is a choice, then they must also think that heterosexuality is. But at what point in their lives did they really make a choice between finding boys or girls hot? Never!!!”

My argument is not a good one. For at least some anti-gay folks, it poses a false equivalence. I think.

Thinking that gays choose their sexual “preference” but straights do not appears to be a contradiction until you factor in some assumptions about nature and temptation. So: God set it up so that humans naturally are drawn to the opposite sex. But we can be tempted toward all sorts of sins: We can lust after a neighbor’s spouse. We can be drawn toward liquor. We can be tempted to shoplift. We all face many different temptations of varying degrees of badness. Good people resist temptations as firmly as they can. Homosexuals give in to their temptations, and even flaunt them.

Thus, the proper equivalence isn’t between heterosexuals and homosexuals deciding which gender they’ll desire. It’s between homosexuals giving in to their temptation (same-sex sex) and heterosexuals giving in to their temptation (adultery, promiscuity, or some such). The equivalence isn’t in the choice of temptations but in the reaction to those temptations.

I’m not agreeing, of course. I fly my rainbow flag high. But this helps me to understand what otherwise looks like an argument so incoherent that it’s incomprehensible how anyone could actually hold it. It’s not incoherent, given a certain set of premises. It’s coherent…but wrong.

Categories: philosophy dw