What does it matter if someone says they chose to be gay? Well,
as Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon recently found out,
apparently it matters a lot. In an interview in the New York Times,
Nixon said that while she understood that for many people it wasn't
a choice, she had chosen to be gay.
Having already made similar comments in a speech for a gay
audience, Nixon was well aware of the kind of criticism she faces
for having such views, and critics across the internet lined up to
slam her comments after publication of the interview. Across
Twitter, her comments were decried as harming the gay community and
on AmericaBlog, John Aravosis called the interview "incredibly
irresponsible" and warned that "every religious right hatemonger is
now going to quote this woman every single time they want to deny
us our civil rights".
Why could the comments of one actress apparently endanger the
gay rights movement? The answer is because for decades, the gay
rights movement has used the arguments of the naturalness of
homosexuality as a core weapon against its opponents. Leaping on
studies that demonstrate homosexual behaviour in animals, the
message is clear - gay is natural, natural is good, and therefore
it's wrong to deny rights to gays. Any gay person who dares to
suggest their sexuality might have involved an element of choice
punctures the whole narrative of the pure natural goodness of
homosexual behaviour, and so risks pulling down the whole
edifice.
The reason the gay rights movement even found itself involved in
promoting the idea of the naturalness of homosexuality was to
counteract arguments coming from their opponents - denouncing
homosexual behaviour as unnatural often goes hand-in-hand with
calling it unbiblical. But rather than rejecting the whole premise
that what was natural was moral and what was unnatural was immoral,
the gay rights movement sought to appease their opponents by
seeking out evidence that homosexuality was, in fact, natural and
constantly asserting that gays couldn't help it, so were deserving
of rights.
It only takes a little scratching to reveal that the whole
argument from nature has no substance in reasonable political
discourse. Animals engage in plenty of behaviours that no
right-thinking person would agree with and humans take part in
numerous behaviours that are distinctly unnatural, yet we have no
qualms about seeing them as moral or deserving of rights. The
correct response to the assertion that homosexual relationships are
unnatural and therefore undeserving of rights is not to come
running back with reams of scientific papers in hand, but rather to
reject the idea that nature even matters.
The true core of gay rights is the freedom for consenting,
rational adults to live their lives as they see fit, including the
ability to choose freely who they form relationships with. It is
this ability to choose freely, unrestricted by the state, which is
the most important idea behind the gay rights movement. So, far
from endangering the movement, Nixon's comments are far closer to
what's important, and represent a far more positive way of arguing
for gay rights than feebly complaining that she couldn't help the
way nature made her. It is not Nixon's fault that gay activists
have made something as shaky as naturalness a key plank of their
campaign. Only by blindly accepting the grounds of their opponents'
arguments could activists make comments as innocuous as Nixon's a
threat to the movement.
This is not to argue that every gay, lesbian and bisexual person
consciously woke up one morning and decided "today I'm going to be
gay". Many people feel that there was absolutely no element of
choice involved at all, as can be seen in the responses to Nixon's
interview - and this is something Nixon herself recognized in her
interview. The point is that her declaration should have no bearing
on the political debate for gay rights. Whether you're gay by
choice or gay by nature, we can all choose to reject the idea that
nature matters.
