Proposition 8 Trial: Friday Morning Update

The headline to Lisa Leff's AP story is that a witness said "Being Gay is Not a Choice".

I know why this is being brought up in the trial. The argument is that the California Marriage Amendment tries to prevent someone being who who they are, or punishes them for being who they are, and is thus unconstitutionally discriminatory. But this isn't the case. The amendment does not prevent anyone from living with, committing to, or simply hooking up with any consenting adult who agrees. It didn't remove domestic partnerships, which California treats as marriage.

We are less able to control what we feel than what we do, but we can control what we do.

That homosexuality isn't a mental illness, or isn't classified as one, does not obligate us to neuter marriage licensing. Marriage is a choice - a voluntary association. However, I will address the testimony anyway.

A social psychologist testified Friday in a trial challenging California's gay marriage ban that leading mental health associations stopped thinking of homosexuality as a mental illness decades ago.

The question is - why did they do that? Was it for internal political reasons, or legitimate evaluation of data and experience?

Lawyers for two same-sex couples suing to overturn the voter-enacted ban called University of California, Davis researcher Gregory Herek as an expert witness to bolster their argument that sexual orientation cannot be easily changed.

It doesn't matter, because nobody is forcing people to marry. In fact, we keep seeing widely reported studies that the percentage of households in the US that are headed by a married couple is lower than in the past. Also, for various reasons, some men have proclaimed themselves on a "marriage strike" - Google it if you think it is a tiny number. So marriage is optional.

The point is central to the plaintiffs' effort to show that gays deserve the same judicial protection as racial and ethnic minorities.

They already have that protection in California. But let's not pretend that behavior is the same as skin color.

Herek said he recently conducted a survey asking people if they decided to be gay, lesbian or bisexual. Eighty-eight percent of the gay men who responded said they had no choice at all about their sexual orientation. The figure was 68 percent for lesbians.

Like I said - feelings and attractions are one thing, behavior is a different. We do have choices about our behaviors. If not, most men would be rapists (please, no radical feminist talk that all men are rapists), as most men are attracted to at least some women that do not consent to sex with them. But we can refrain from making passes and refrain from engaging in sex with any given person. People who maintain monogamy or celibacy also do not act on all of their feelings. The examples are endless. We do have a choice in the person with whom we partner. Even if your parents or your cult leader arranges your marriage, they can't force you to get a state license.

This is self reporting anyway - what should we expect people to say? But notice something else... 12 percent of homosexual men and 32 percent of homosexual women indicated they could choose to be heterosexual - even though they probably had no incentive to say so.

Proposition 8 was by definition an extension of embedded social stigmas, he contended.

Proposition 8 was mostly a matter of people restoring state marriage licensing to what is in society's interest, and rejecting judicial overreaches. It doesn't stop the personal freedoms of engaging homosexual behavior, from cohabiation, to commitment ceremonies, to pride parades, to sodomy, to holding hands. A federal court striking it down would violate the rights of Californians.