What is it this year with anti-gay GOP presidential hopefuls openly declaring their love for very, very gay things? First it was Michele Bachmann queening out over Glee, possibly the gayest show on television. Now we have Tim Pawlenty offering, seemingly apropos of nothing, his opinions on which Lady Gaga songs are the best:
In an … interview, Pawlenty told the ladies of Glittarazzi (totally unprovoked, by the way) that he loves Mother Monster, despite her weirdness and her politics. Pawlenty even said he’d watched Gaga’s HBO concert special.
“I have a question for you guys, are you ready? What’s your favorite Lady Gaga song?” The ladies made their picks before Pawlenty egged them on, “How about ‘Born This Way,’ the new one, you like that?”
The former governor of Minnesota is apparently a fan.
“In terms of the beat, you know, I like ‘Bad Romance.’ I gotta say, even though she is a little unusual, ‘Born This Way’ has got some appeal.”
Okay, so he likes “Bad Romance.” I like that one too. And I like the “Born This Way” song. Unfortunately, Tim just doesn’t seem to understand that, though it is just a mere pop song, the lyrics to “Born This Way” are actually scientifically sound. David Gregory confronted him about it yesterday on Meet The Press,* and the exchange went like this:
GREGORY: Is being gay a choice?
PAWLENTY: Well, the science in that regard is in dispute. I mean, scientists work on that and try to figure out if it’s behavioral or if it’s partly genetic –
GREGORY: What do you think?
PAWLENTY: Well, I defer to the scientists in that regard.
GREGORY: So you think it’s not a choice? That you are, as Lady Gaga says, you’re born that way.
PAWLENTY: There’s no scientific conclusion that it’s genetic. We don’t know that.
And here is that video, if you want to watch it for some reason:
Okay so, of course, the science is not in dispute. Tim Pawlenty presumably either knows this and is pandering to bigots, or he needs to spend a little time with Google and learn about these things. Or he could just read what Zack Ford said on the subject yesterday:
In fact, there is no dispute among health professionals. All major medical professionalorganizations agree that sexual orientation is not a choice and cannot be changed, from gay to straight or otherwise. The American Psychological Association, the world’s largest association of psychological professionals, describes sexual orientation as “a complex interaction of environmental, cognitive and biological factors.” There is considerable evidence to suggest that biology, “including genetic or inborn hormonal factors,” plays a significant role in a person’s sexuality.
So there you go. If you’re going to “defer to the scientists,” Tim, that’s what they say. When the Religious Right talks about how they haven’t found a “gay gene,” they are either being scientifically ignorant or willfully deceptive, or both.
*The fact that I am typing words right now about a conversation that happened on Meet the Press between a journalist and a presidential candidate on the subject of Lady Gaga is absolutely insane. Reminds me of the great 1992 Color Me Badd debate between Poppy Bush and Bubba.
I’m guessing Clinton’s favorite was “I Wanna Sex You Up”, while Bush favored “Slow Motion”.
Please don’t think less of me for being able to name two songs by Color Me Badd.
Okay, lets saying same sex attraction is purely developmental. But that would still mean that ones entire subconscious, chronological, psychosexual development from childhood would have to be undone for this to be a choice. And if your psyche got attracted to the same sex somehow during this time, ITS STILL NOT A CHOICE. NO matter how you slice it, “absent father”, “traumatic home life”, “sexual abuse”. Though these DO NOT CAUSE HOMOSEXUALITY…IF THEY DID, these people are saying God would punish someone for an orientation developed from childhood/adolsecent reactions to psychosexual trauma!? Their beliefs are so whacked out and evil its unbelievable.
I think it’s 100% biological as I can remember being same-gender attracted before I even knew that girls didn’t have pee pees–plus I have gay siblings as do many of my gay friends. I believe I heard a while ago about 1 family that had 5 boys and every single one was gay! Besides, why would anyone CHOOSE to be treated like s**t, excluded, called names, beaten up, and constantly be used as a scapegoat by incredibly stupid right-wing batshit crazy a******s.
And yes wingnuts, like Wayne, I had great parents and a very happy childhood—sorry to disappoint you!
How do you explain the arguements from the greater LGBT community stating sexuality should not be restricted to a gay or non-gay definition?
That some individuals morph into gay, bi etc. and is fluid not to be shackled by the confines of a particular time and space.
@Eric — Why not, they condemn survivors of rape and abuse, and tell us that if we had “made better choices”, we wouldn’t have been raped or abused. They call us “paranoid” for being forever wary of men. It doesn’t surprise me in the least to hear that these same people (mostly men, of course) would condemn a person for “making [the] bad choice” to be gay.
Apologies for the double post, I just have to respond to Billie.
Sexuality itself may very well be fluid, but due to the human need to put things in neat little categories, we have defined terms for various orientations, and insist on using these inexact (and rather rigid) terms.
Well then WMD,
It seems that is at odds with the genetic arguement.
Unless, of course we’re now talking about an individual with a “fluid sexuality gene”.
It’s amazing how things get reinvented and redefined to suit the politics of identity.
^ fail.
Billie people don’t change their orientations. Some are 100% gay, some are 100% heterosexual, and some are some combination of the two.
Here is what I think ths the likeliest genetic explanation for this:
http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/em_homosexuality.html
WMD:
Exactly…look up some of the stuff Dr. Roy Baumeister has published over the past 10 years: he’s one of the foremost authorities on sexuality and how our society shapes our definitions of how we see ourselves (most notably, he was the one to define “female sexual plasticity,” or the social phenomenon whereby females are more likely to change their self-label for how they define themselves, in comparison to males, who are more likely to feel a social pressure to “take one label and go with it.”)
Or hell the Kinsey scale, for some you are 100% straight or 100% gay but those are rare. Most are some fluid form of bisexuality. As we have seen there is some genetic component, but genes are tricky things. There ARE other components, and we are starting to figure those out but it keeps coming back that for most its some more fluid then we think but for some its more rigid.
Billie, the actual issue is innateness, whatever that might mean.
I’m 61 years old. Long before I knew about boys and girls together, long before I had ever heard the word homosexual, long before I thought boys could like other boys the way boys like girls, long before there was ANYTHING except the most covert knowledge of something that, in a vague, general sort of a way, might be termed same sex oriented…
…long before ANY of that, when I was four, I knew I was gay. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t know what it meant, but I certainly knew IT. And as clearly as I knew that, I knew I damn well better not talk about IT. Certainly, no one else did.
I have observed an apparent contradiction: while I believe that the vast majority of people are bisexual to some extent, I believe that relatively few people actually double their chances for a date on Saturday night. Not that the actively bisexual don’t exist, but that most people who call themselves bisexual really tend more one way than the other, and most people who might be termed bisexual by others are in fact predominant hetero or homo for large periods of their lives.
I have known a number of men (I know more men) who were bi-but-primarily-hetero (and possibly exclusively hetero) for a good portion of their lives, coming out later in life. Most have said that they always knew they were gay, but for whatever reason, acted out as hetero. I have known almost no one who started out gay but went the other direction, though I have known a few. And these people were not just straight-for-pay, like certain ex-gay legends in their own media.
I have also known many men like myself, with just a little bit of heterosexual experience which I enjoyed thoroughly, but was completely uninterested in repeating. By no stretch of the imagination would or could I call myself bisexual.
My quite gay husband actually had an affair (for some reason I cannot begin to fathom) with a woman before he met me, and before that he had been in a gay relationship for 15 years. We’re going on 10 years ourselves. So, a bit more bisexual than me, but still, a big queer just like me.
We are both of us quite gay, quite innately gay, and quite unable to change the fact.
And I also know a few men who had a gay experience or two, but decided it wasn’t either them or for them. Also an innate thing.
There might be a fluid sexuality gene, and there might not. There might be a homosexual gene, their might be a heterosexual gene. There might not. There isn’t a gene for left-handedness, but no one would argue that it is not innate, AND immutable.
It’s quite possible that culture may have a role in the self-perception of homosexuality. (As an aside, and in answer to you, I sincerely doubt politics does). As a sociologist, I have certainly considered it. But i have concluded that the role culture has is how same-sex attraction and/or homosexuality is expressed, not whether it exists in individuals. I don’t think that, apart from the issue of orientation, that there is any great difference between the great mass of gay people and the great mass of heterosexuals. And I really doubt that people now feel things differently than people of whatever time before did, though those people may have had different cultures and worldviews. There is great evidence that gay people have existed in every time and in every culture. Put those facts together, and the obvious becomes more so:
heterosexuality for everyone is not a fact, it is an assumption, one that 2) ignores the fact it is very obvious that human sexuality encompasses a range from one to the other, plus everything in between, plus all of the kinks and fetishes and interests and cultural expectations and familial and religious upbringing that muddy the waters still further.
Putting it another way, heterosexuality isn’t normal, it’s just distressingly common, and exclusive heterosexuality is probably nowhere near as common as many people would like to think.
Regarding the politics of identity—that’s just another way of saying that the personal is political, and vice versa. No news on that since 1968. But that does not lessen or disparage either identity or politics. But if you are going to speak about identity politics, than don’t forget to look at the identity politics of the nominally heterosexual majority, which has resulted in the always present, always assumed, but otherwise wholly imaginary superiority of the nominally exclusively heterosexual, and more importantly, the concomitant social privileging of heterosexuals and the dis-privileging of everyone else. If that weren’t the case, we would not be having the marriage battles we are having, nor would we be having to suffer with the ignorance of Pawlenty or the money-grubbing, smug self-righteousness of Princess Porcine Polly, nor would our country be suffering over the disinterest in our real problems in favor of the imaginary threat of treating gay people like human beings.
I’ll eave you with this quotation from Dr. Francis Collins, Evangelical man about town and former head of the Human Grenome Project:
It troubles me greatly to learn that anything I have written would cause anguish for you or others who are seeking answers to the basis of homosexuality. The words quoted by NARTH all come from the Appendix to my book “The Language of God” (pp. 260-263), but have been juxtaposed in a way that suggests a somewhat different conclusion that I intended. I would urge anyone who is concerned about the meaning to refer back to the original text.
The evidence we have at present strongly supports the proposition that there are hereditary factors in male homosexuality — the observation that an identical twin of a male homosexual has approximately a 20% likelihood of also being gay points to this conclusion, since that is 10 times the population incidence. But the fact that the answer is not 100% also suggests that other factors besides DNA must be involved. That certainly doesn’t imply, however, that those other undefined factors are inherently alterable.
Your note indicated that your real interest is in the truth. And this is about all that we really know. No one has yet identified an actual gene that contributes to the hereditary component (the reports about a gene on the X chromosome from the 1990s have not
@WMD Kitty, you are eerily right. It just makes me SO MAD!
And @Gary, what church do you attend?
Ben,
You responded with a very thoughtful post.
Not sure it moved the needle for my own understanding.
No reflection on your insignts, etc.
You cerainly aren’t just spouting a slew of robotic ‘talking points”.
If you’re inclined to do so, please explain how you knew at age 4 of your sexuality?
I really can’t for the life of me even think of anything sexual back in those early years of childhood.
Thanks
@David:
Kinsey’s scale is kinda seen as a bit “outdated” in the realm of human sexuality…a couple of the more “modern” scales are Klein’s multi-dimensional scale and Bem’s scale based upon seven facets of personality. =)
(Kinsey works for the layman, but for people who study sexuality, it’s not the one we like to point to…sorta like how Freud is pointed to a lot in pop culture, but it’s not much more than a building block for more modern theories in Psychology)
@Billie:
Back when I was 9-10-11, before I knew what anything to do with sex was (heck, I didn’t know squat about sex until I was about 14-15, which is why I’m now wholly interested in Human Sexuality, to the point where I minored in it in college), I was wanting to be close to, cuddle with, and just be affectionate to boys that I was friends with and thought were attractive.
This was before puberty hit (around 13 in my case, which is about average), and I knew little-to-nothing about gay people, other than that “they” were the object of some fun-poking (malicious, I can’t say, since in this small town, it just didn’t exist in any overt way).
In this way, though, I was understanding my sexuality, even though what I was wishing to do wasn’t an overtly “sexual” act; it still, however, was an expression of caring and love that was more than just “something that kids do”…it was an actual budding crush that I had to keep hidden from the people I was having feelings toward, so it felt very real…
Heh, didn’t know learn something every day.
Billie… not an easy question to answer.
How did I know? How do heterosexuals know they are heterosexual, and at what age? I’ve heard lots of different answers. Ultimately, they just know. Cody, just below my post, said pretty much the same thing.
Was it sexual? How sexual can a four year old be? I knew I wanted to see boys naked, but i didn’t know what for. I knew I wanted to be physically close to other boys and men, but it didn’t occur to me that there was something to be “done”
I can tell you this. I wasn’t molested or seduced. I wasn’t talked into it. My parents were decent enough as parents. There were no great family traumas.
My brother was gay, and it was a great trouble in his life. Had he learned to accept it, he probably owuld have been a lot happier and healthier. But he bought the whole gay is bad story, and just added that to his list of woes as to why he was not a worthwhile human being. He died about 9 years ago– murdered, suicide, or both. Hard to tell.
I will resent to the end of my days the theft of my brother by people who said his way of loving was sick, or sinful, or criminal, or all three.
Oh God Ben….I am so sorry to hear this. It may have been 9 years ago, but…I am really sorry for your loss.
I wont even bother tryting to find the ‘right’ words to say…I don’t think they exist. But I am sorry you lost your brother. And, for all the other people who are someones brother (or sister) and may grow up accepting who they are because of men like you and your partner who stand up proudly and serve as examples, thanks for doing so.
Thanks you, gene.
Ben, I just want to echo Gene’s comment. And you honor your brother’s memory every day with your intelligent insightful comments here at TWO and elsewhere.
Ya know, you so-called gay leaders can be a bit harsh on heterosexuals. You got Pawlenty here actually listening to Gaga, liking it, pretty much restating the American Psychological Assoc. findings and you want to nail him to a cross. What part of potential ally don’t you understand.
“Do you Love President Obama? Want to do something to give him a second term? Then consider being a BLUE Republican, its only for one year and come time to vote for Obama, you still can!
What’s a BLUE Republican you ask? A BLUE Republican in a democrat who votes for the republican who is anti-war and voted against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Ron Paul, in the GOP race. Democrats Dennis Kucinch and Barney Frank often team up with Ron Paul on the good causes. A BLUE Republican helps Ron Paul, who cares about our civil rights to beat Mitt Romney and Michelle Bachman. Do you want to help President Obama? Do you want to help America? Well then, just for one year, become a BLUE Republican. Do something good for President Obama. Come election time, the national debate will not be for more wars, it will be for less, and that’s a good thing. Paul wants government out of our bedrooms, what more can we ask than that?! Paul is a 1000 times better than Pawlenty!
Yes, you can do something good for President Obama; Become a BLUE Republican today (just for a year) and help move the county in a peaceful direction.”
“Do you Love President Obama? Want to do something to give him a second term? Then consider being a BLUE Republican, its only for one year and come time to vote for Obama, you still can!
What’s a BLUE Republican you ask? A BLUE Republican is a Democrat or Independent who votes for the republican who is anti-war and voted against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, that’s Ron Paul, over in the GOP race. Get in it, lets make our voices heard! Democrats Dennis Kucinch and Barney Frank often team up with Ron Paul on the good causes. A BLUE Republican helps Ron Paul beat Mitt Romney and Michelle Bachman, isn’t that reason enough? Do you want to help President Obama? Do you want to help America? Well then, just for one year, become a BLUE Republican. Do something good for President Obama. Come election time, the national debate will not be for more wars, it will be for less, and that’s a good thing. Paul wants government out of our bedrooms, what more can we ask than that?! Paul is a 1000 times better than Pawlenty, Newt, and all the rest!
Yes, you can do something good for President Obama; Become a BLUE Republican today (just for a year) and help move the county in a peaceful direction.”
muttseye, are you kidding? What has Pawlenty said that leads you to believe he’s a potential ally? That he listens to Lady Gaga means nothing. I knew a woman back in Utah who listened to Johnny Mathis but was still a raging racist. Listening to music means nothing. He’s still demonstrably anti-gay.
Ben,
Thanks for your responses.
Sorry about your brother, I’ve had people close to me pass as well.
I wish you well.