May 24, 2012

Good rejoinder

GOP wingnut Rep. James Lankford recently said that there should be no legal protections for gay people who suffer discrimination. He thinks it's fine to fire an employee for being gay. Why? Because he subscribes to the typical fundamentalist notion that we are straight people who decided to stay up late one night and went gay.

His argument goes like this. Since being gay is a choice rather than something immutable like race, where you're born one color and stay that way for life, it's nonsensical to provide legal protections for gays.

Ed Brayton had the perfect response:
Great, so you’re fine with removing religion as a prohibited basis for discrimination, right? People change their religion all the time, so it’s clearly a choice. They’re obviously demanding “special protections” that should only be accorded based on immutable traits, right? Right? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
These people are amazingly dimwitted. Were they dropped on their heads repeatedly as infants? Was there no protein in their diets before the age of 12? How does this happen to someone?

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