A wonderful rebuke to the haters

Via Atrios, a fantastic smackdown to the homophobes out there who snort and sniff and think that being born straight makes them superior somehow. This is what family values is about--valuing your family as it is, not creating a fictional "perfect" patriarchal family to make other people feel inferior to.

I'm tired of your foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual agenda" and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.

Yep, the family values crowd values motherhood so much that they are going out of their way to ruin the lives of women who mother homosexual children. I like what she has to say about the retarded debate about where homosexuality comes from:

At the core of all your misguided beliefs is the belief that this could never happen to you, that there is some kind of subculture out there that people have chosen to join. The fact is that if it can happen to my family, it can happen to yours, and you won't get to choose. Whether it is genetic or whether something occurs during a critical time of fetal development, I don't know. I can only tell you with an absolute certainty that it is inborn.

I agree with what Molly Ivins has pointed out about homosexuality. If you can step back from all the fear and moralizing and whatnot and just look at the facts, then it's no more surprising that a certain percentage of people are homosexual than that a certain percentage of people are left-handed. We don't wring our hands and debate endlessly if left-handedness is a lifestyle choice, an inborn tendency, genetic, or the result of some kind of childhood trauma. It just is so, and we can accomodate left-handed people without breaking a sweat.
But that wasn't always so. Not that long ago, the fact that left-handedness was a minority orientation was enough for people to brand it as evil, or at least a sign of mental weakness. Children were chastised and even struck for favoring their left hands. I've heard from some older left-handed people that their left hand was bound in school so that they couldn't use it. And then one day society just woke up and realized that we were persecuting a minority for no reason whatsoever, except that they were different. And now being left-handed is regarded with roughly the same amount of interest as being near-sighted or blue-eyed or something else rare-ish but not remarkable. We need to grow up and realize that homosexuality is no more remarkable than that.
Nowadays, we have left-handed scissors, desks, and even cars with the shifter on the left side. Accomodating left-handedness has not threatened right-handed people in any way. The existence of left-handed scissors didn't drive right-handed scissors out of existence. So why should gay marriage threaten straight marriages?
From now on when people tell me that gay people can be reformed, I am going to hand them a pair of scissors, the ordinary right-handed scissors and tell them to cut a shape into a piece of paper left-handedly. Odds are that they will manage to produce something that looks similar to say, a heart-shaped piece of paper, but it will be crooked and all wrong. And that's the essence of the closet. Being in the closet, or "reformed" or whatever doesn't make gay people straight; it just means that they are producing a bad imitation of heterosexuality.
She points out how arrogant one must be to think that homosexual kids won't "happen" to the self-righteous idiotic fundamentalists. Well out here in Baptist Country you see it all the time. Families torn apart when people discover that the hated homosexual isn't a foreigner, a godless atheist, an sophisticated and debauched urbanite, or a lurking pervert but is in fact their own sons and daughters. And rather than grow up and get over it, they fight and gnash and often lose their relationships with their own children. Or the children just never tell their own parents and the cloud of lies and denial in the room at family gatherings is so thick you could swim in it. Family values indeed.