How the Mighty Have Fallen

Prejudice Masquerading As a Truth Claim

We recently read the following assertion from the normally reliable David Farrar:

Gay conversion therapy is a terrible thing which does cause harm. It is based on the false belief that being gay is a choice. Gay people no more choose to be gay than I choose to be heterosexual. [Kiwiblog]

Farrar asserts that it is a false belief to hold that being a homosexual is not a choice--along with (by logical extension) all the mutations of gender identificationism.  And your evidence for this is what,  pray tell. What an absurd, silly claim.

The thing that stands out here is the absolute nature of Farrar's truth claim: "gay people no more choose to be gay than I choose to be heterosexual."  For that claim to be approaching the status of being proved, established, and reified as scientifically grounded, it must be subject to falsification.  If it cannot be falsified, then scientific it ain't. 

How would Farrar prove such a claim?
Well, he would have to assert that there has never been any human being who consciously chose to be a homosexual, and then changed their minds, and reverted to heterosexuality.  Every human being who has changed back to their biological sex from a state of identifying as a homosexual would falsify Farrar's truth claim, viz "Gay people no more choose to be gay than I choose to be heterosexual."

In our personal experience we have known folk over many years who chose to identify (for a time) as a homosexual, only to choose to reject that paradigm as wrong and destructive, and who subsequently have lived a fulfilled, happy heterosexual life.   If we know such folk, we figure that the conversion of people who once thought of themselves as homosexual to straight heterosexuality would number in the millions.

So, then: Farrar's claim is false-at least as far as scientific evidence is concerned.  Scientifically, the claim "Gay people no more choose to be gay than I choose to be heterosexual," is actually a religious claim which happens to defy the structure of human DNA.  It is an heroic assertion, but one that carries no more authority and truth than a personal opinion, which--in this case--is readily proven to be false.