Denying The Journey Doesn't Help

It has been a long hard road in trying to get equal rights for all American citizens and the battle is not yet over -- especially for the gays and lesbians in this country. They are still discriminated against and denied the most basic of rights -- the right to marry the person they love. Fortunately, as recent polls show, this is slowly changing and the younger generation is not nearly as bigoted as us older folks. The future should be better than the past or the present.

One of the biggest battles has been over the causes of homosexuality. Most decent people, like myself, don't really care. All of us are individuals and all of us are different in our own way. Those differences should never be used as a reason to deny anyone their equal rights as an American.

Religious fundamentalists have said (and still say) that homosexuality is a choice and making that choice is a sin. Many have countered that there is no choice -- gays and lesbians are born to be what they are. I have tended to come down on the latter side.

But there is a new Houston blog that has had me thinking. It is Lesbians in My Soup, and the author has declared that just saying homosexuals are "born that way" tends to denigrate the journey that most of them have had to make in this society. It almost makes it a simple and painless process to be gay or lesbian, and that is far from the truth. I urge you to go read this young woman's thought-provoking post.

Our society puts pressure on everyone to fall in line and live up to traditional models of behavior from the time we are toddlers, including sexual models of behavior. Anyone who doesn't fit the traditional heterosexual behavior model is in for a lot of trouble -- whether they are born that way or not. Most of them are forced to make a long and sometimes very painful journey of self-discovery before developing into a happy and centered individual.

I think this is correct. Too often we use the term "born that way" to make it sound like gays and lesbians know who they are from birth, when in reality it takes a lot of soul-searching and pain before that realization is made for many (and our society doesn't help this search at all).

Are homosexuals "born that way"? Who cares? The important thing is to accept others as they are and not as who we want them to be -- and to recognize the journey they had to make to find themselves (no matter who they are). Life is not easy for anyone, and we should not be making it any harder for anyone else. That shows a flaw in our own character -- not theirs.