Whenever people say, “You should not discriminate against people because they didn’t chose to be black,” I hear the mild tones of wild liberal condescension. Implicit in that logic is a kind of judgment, the notion that if I could choose, I obviously would choose to be white. But what if I just like being black? What if I could choose and would still choose black? Ditto for homosexuality. So what if you do choose to be gay? I understand that a lot of the science says you don’t, but why do we accept this implicit idea that heterosexuality is, necessarily, what everyone would choose?
— Ta-Nehisi Coates. I’ve been saying this for years: the gay rights era will be over when we can honestly say that we would choose to be gay. In other words, we are our own enemy.
