KarMel Scholarship 2008

Essay

“Why Homosexuality is Not a Choice”

By Nicole Zanier

Desciption of Submission: “My thoughts and reasonings on homosexuality and bisexuality.” - Nicole

I used to identify as a straight female. Especially in high school. The thought of being gay passed completely over me and I just knew at the wise age of fifteen that none of that applied to me. I’d make fun of gays. I’d avoid and gossip about girls who were rumored be gay but no one at school was sure. Then one night that all changed. I had a lesbian-themed dream during my junior year of high school. Though this dream brought about many curious feelings, I pushed it from my mind. However, it came back stronger and by the time I graduated high school I knew I was bisexual. I realized then that gay and bisexual people WERE just like everyone else because I was one! I had a first-hand view. I couldn’t imagine how someone could deny me for it…I was still the same person. I now understood the hurt that gay people could feel from friends and family who would deny them based solely on who they loved.

I still have friends who consider it wrong. Friends who adamantly consider it a choice or a cry for attention. Their views have led me to write the following analogy. I have yet to receive any sort of substantial rebuttal from those friends who know my orientation.

Homosexuality and bisexuality is not a choice. By this I mean if you are attracted sexually to a gender it is not a choice. The only choice is the act itself, like how 99% of what we do are choices. It's not a choice by me that I need to breathe air to survive, but at any moment I could choose I don’t want to breathe anymore, suffocate myself and die. Conscious actions by humans are choices, how you're born is not a choice. What kind of person you are and what you're born with isn’t a choice.

If it were a choice, then everyone could choose to be gay. Obviously this cant be true since not everyone has homosexual tendencies (so they say) and you know for a fact no gay-haters who say its a choice would admit they had homosexual tendencies, though by saying its a choice they are saying they themselves could choose to be gay.

Here is my food analogy. Think of a food you love, say pizza. Can you wake up one morning and choose to not like the taste of pizza anymore? No. Can you stop eating it? Yes. Do you still like pizza even though you don’t eat it? Yes.

Can you make yourself like a food you don’t like the taste of? No. If I think something tastes bad, I can’t sit there and go "You know what, I'm going to choose to like this" and all of a sudden love the taste of it.

Choosing not to act on how you feel doesn’t change how you feel.

Anyways, I think there are more important issues than gay people.

Aren’t there more important issues we as a race on a planet should be dealing with? Like ending poverty, curing diseases, getting along?!, ending meaningless killing and wars, protecting our environment and resources etc etc etc.

I'm 100 % right on all of this. If you are going to argue that the attraction to the same sex is a choice please make an intelligent argument, reread it and ask yourself "Am I talking about the act or the attraction?"

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