And Another Thing: Choices

By Carole Taylor

It's interesting to me how some people can leap from one side of a definition to another with such mental agility. Right wing Republicans (is there any other kind?) seem to me to be exceptionally agile when it comes to their ability to define a word like choice.

Now you'd think choice is a simple enough English word, one even the most narrow, most rigid mind could wrap itself around with little need for mental gymnastics. But it seems to mean different things to certain folks, depending on the issue to which it's applied.

According to the conservative element, you and I *have* a choice about whether or not to be gay or lesbian. Straight people, of course, don't have a choice about being straight, they just somehow are. It's one of the few areas of life where they will allow us a choice while refusing to have one themselves. I think they ought to ease up on their little pointed heads and grant themselves a choice in the matter, too. We mustn't be greedy.

In other areas of the World According to the Reich, women ought not to have a choice should it be choice regarding a zygote. As the bumper sticker says, "How can you think I'm capable of raising a child when you don't think I'm capable of raising an issue?"

Straights have a choice about whether or not to get married, but they don't want us to have a choice in this area at all. They have a choice whether or not to join the military and be open about their sexuality while serving; we can choose to join as long as we choose to lie.

Parents and doctors can choose *for* a child what gender to surgically assign to the child if the kid is born with an ambiguous set of genitals. But once the child becomes an adult, he or she can't then choose to do the same thing to their own bodies without twisting in and out of amazingly intricate legal and emotional Gordian knots. For one thing, to be approved for the surgery, transgendered people have to live for a year pre-op as the other gender, dress as the other gender, work as the other gender, in order to prove to some psychologist that they can take the pressure. In many states, it's illegal for a man to dress as a woman, so in order to pass the psychological requirement, one is required to violate the law and risk arrest. And if it isn't illegal, it's certainly extremely risky to dress and act as the other gender before surgery should one be found out. Witness Brandon Teena, and hundreds of other bashings each year. It's all right for adults to deny a child the right to wait and make his/her own choice about his/her own body when s/he's old enough to decide, but by that time, making a choice is presented as decidedly psychotic, and difficult in the extreme.

The point of all this is that choice is something "conservatives" want reserved for themselves. Which of course means it's not a choice at all. Getting to have a choice is the point of freedom, the point of having the Constitution: choosing whether or not to worship and how; whether or not to vote and how; whether or not to speak one's mind and how....all those rights given theoretically to all of us. Which means that what "conservatives" want is freedom for those to whom they chose to grant the favor. In this, they like the definition of choice.

I can't help it. I'm just a pro choice kinda gal. Not just as it relates to zygotes, but pro choice anything. Which means, I know, that I have to allow all those Log Cabin Republicans out there to exist, and worse, other lesbigats who for whatever reason vote Republican and support Shrub Bush. :::sigh::: I think it's a HUGE mistake, but go ahead if you must.

Just don't come crying to me if you make the choice to vote for the man and then find out it's the last time you get to have any kind of choice at all. Well, other than to be a big ole flaming queer. :) You did make that choice, right?

Carole Taylor holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called
"A Third Story". You can email her here.