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.
June 4, 2012 at 5:42 pm
Absolutely.
I think there are a lot of ways that LGBT folks are not treated fairly in society.
However, people need to suck it up once in a while when someone says something they don't agree with or that might not be consistent with their ideology.
I never understand how such overly sensitive people have managed to get to be adults and still be so easily outraged.
How hard are these folks TRYING to get outraged by Banfield's comment?
June 4, 2012 at 5:58 pm
It is a travesty when choice is removed regarding ones sexuality but choice is
demanded when the murder of an innocent being is involved.
We are a very sick society.
Karl
June 4, 2012 at 8:49 pm
If I'm just a victim of my inclinations, then I can't be held responsible for how I feel on any topic, including the topic of homosexuality.
And I better not hear anyone say that I can change my inclinations.
Ahhh…there's nothing like complete lack of responsibility for my thoughts and actions. It's so freeing. Too bad I actually believe what I'm saying when I recite the Confiteor. "…in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do…"
June 4, 2012 at 11:41 pm
…so they're saying homosexuals *don't* voluntarily take part in homosexual acts? In other words all homosexual acts are non-consensual? Doesn't make sense.
June 5, 2012 at 6:33 am
The sexual deviants don't really want "equality"; they want to DOMINATE. Don't ever forget that.
June 5, 2012 at 11:09 pm
Let's all come together and Pray
The 3rd Annual Global Rosary Relay for Priests
The Annual Global Rosary Relay idea is a simple one: in that each of the 60 participating shrines prays a particular mystery of the Rosary at a particular half hour on the day in thanksgiving to God for our priests and to implore the protection and loving care of Our Lady, Mother of all priests, for all her priestly sons. With the coming of midnight on the 15th June 2012, the entire world, by then, will have been encircled in prayer for our priests on this The Annual Rosary Relay Day.
http://catholicloyaltyfoundation.org/rosary_relay.html
June 6, 2012 at 9:22 pm
God did not create homosexuality. God did not create the atomic bomb. Human beings make choices, bad and good and it is their choice to use the things God created in good or bad ways or not use them at all. Relating bad, un-biblical choices to God or to so-called "nature" is a lie or to say the least, is not true.
June 7, 2012 at 4:01 pm
My aunt, a lifelong Lutheran who has now resigned from the ELCA over their position on homosexual ministers, sent me this quote from Wolfhart Pannenberg:
“If a church were to let itself be pushed to the point where it ceased to treat homosexual activity as a departure from the biblical norm, and recognized homosexual unions as a personal partnership of love equivalent to marriage, such a church would stand no longer on biblical ground but against the unequivocal witness of Scripture. A church that took this step would cease to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.”
I think that about covers it.