Why would a straight person chose to be anything other than straight?

[patrice]

98. Agree completely. It's a threat to self-identity & causes defensiveness on those grounds alone,

regardless of what one's actual sexual tendencies are.

Self-identity should be authenticated; it's validity should be tested, but blowing it up completely with these either-or propositions is a non-starter for most of us. Being at or close to 0 is a dangerous thing.

Perhaps my deepest problem with this zero-sum cognitive paradigm, in the case of LGBTQ rights, is the implication that LGBTQ is something so bad/horrible/wrong that one MUST! NOT! CHOOSE! IT!

It's possible to draw the inference that LGBTQ is somekind of sickness, for which the only justification, like other sicknesses, is that one's biology makes it unavoidable. That implication inhers in what you just said, WingDinger; people run from it because it's negative. For a few it is a question of either-or, but, at least in the terms of rational positivism, for most of us posing the question exclusively in those terms can be perceived as a negative. Q. Who's going to identify with a negative???? A. a significant proportion of negative types.

- And - Other than if it just does not authentically appeal to you personally, WHAT on Earth is so horrible/negative about choosing to or trying to love a member of the same sex? What if one of the significant "nurture" factors in the relevant processes turns out to be "Gaia -ian stress" in the environmental context resulting from over-population and ignorance and violence? This could support LGBTQ as an evolutionary step in functional adaptation between nature/biology and nurture/environment. Would that not make LGBTQ, at least hypothetically, a positive choice for those who freely choose it? *IF* "Gaia -ian stress" were the case, if LGBTQ were an authentically positive functional choice, wouldn't negative assumptions about it HURT even relatively "successful" LGBTQ identification, maybe even severely warp systemic potential for positive effects?