CNN news anchor Ashleigh Banfield is in all sorts of trouble for saying that being gay was a “lifestyle choice” and “voluntary” during an “Early Start” segment this week.
Unlease the hounds!
The twitter verse erupted and I’m assuming a large number of scathing emails were exploding in Banfield’s inbox because she apologized for her remarks and called them a misunderstanding.
The thing is – it was. Do you really honestly believe that Asleigh Banfield holds a thought in her head that isn’t completely politically correct? I think CNN inserts a filter into their heads when they sit at the desk in front of a camera.
She was making the distinction that the victims of pedophilia didn’t volunteer for victimhood while homosexuals voluntarily take part in homosexual acts.
I read her remarks and understood them pretty well – even though they weren’t spoken in the clearest manner possible.
But any confusion on the matter on the matter of whether it’s a choice is verboten. So the tolerance hounds descended upon poor Asleigh Banfield forcing her to collect her thoughts and verbalize her agreement with all things politically correct.
You remember poor Bill Richardson running for office and saying in the “gay debate” that he thought being gay was a choice.
Melissa Etheridge, the moderator, was so shocked that she said, “I don’t know if you understand the question.”
I, like Richardson, have no idea what inclinations people are born with and how much choice plays in the inclination but I also believe in free will. A recent study indicates that children raised in lesbian families are more likely to identify as at least partly homosexual. That would seem to indicate that genetics is not completely responsible for the inclination.
But here’s the thing – I have plenty of inclinations I don’t act on. But it always seems to me that many on the left disappear free will when they exclude the possibility of God. Without God we are all just victims of our own inclinations. If we do “good” we do it because of some evolutionary instinct that’s pushing us to do good and when we do it we feel good because that’s the way evolution has made us. And if we do bad, we’re victims of our environment.
So anti-free will are many on the left that California that they’re considering banning reversion therapy for children under 18.
And according to a story in the New York Times, Robert Spitzer, a psychologist at Columbia renounced his own study that shows that their sexual orientation was changed by reparative therapy.
I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy. I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works with some “highly motivated” individuals.
But there’s hardly an eyebrow lift when someone who was straight suddenly enters into a same sex relationship. Actress Cynthia Nixon was excoriated for saying her homosexuality was a choice.
Hmmmm…it seems that many not only don’t believe in free will…they want to stamp it out as well.
