>>14898396It's essentially a cognitive split, yeah. It's not really a rational necessity to defend homosexuality even; you can make a perfectly cogent liberal argument to defend homosexuality based purely on the harm principle ("it's none of your business what two consenting adults do in their own bedroom, it doesn't affect you").
The problem really is that gays could not get attached to Civil Rights legislation unless homosexuality was cast as a birth condition. It had to be an accident of birth, then you can say
>You can't discriminate against them, they couldn't help it!If they could theoretically help it; if it were a choice; then there's more leeway for saying it's okay to discriminate against them in employment/housing/etc. At the time there was much more inertia against open homosexuality, so they really needed the strongest argument possible. Gay as a birth condition was it.
We all live downstream of this momentary rhetorical necessity.
