The gay rights movement has made considerable progress over the last several decades in securing domestic partner benefits and getting anti-discrimination laws passed at the city and state level. Societal prejudices have receded, making it easier for people to be open about their sexuality. But one roadblock keeps popping up: the question of whether one’s orientation is a choice.

Legislators vote down anti-discrimination laws that protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans because of this uncertainty, when existing laws protect people based on marital status, religion and military service – all of which are choices.

Maybe one’s sexual orientation is a choice and maybe it isn’t. We won’t ever know, and who cares anyway? Why should that be the deciding factor on whether it’s okay to be gay?

We have to look at the logic behind this discrimination. When we do that, we find that, as with most discrimination, there is no logic behind it.

A person in most Illinois cities can be fired for not being straight, whether they’re driving a truck, teaching a classroom or planting corn. Are straight people better farmers, drivers and teachers? Are we going to have safer truckers, yummier corn and smarter kids with straight people running everything?

A lot of people don’t want same sex couples to marry. Sorry, straight folks, but you all haven’t exactly done a fab job in that department. More than half of the sacred straight marriages in this country end in divorce. What’s to protect? Maybe throwing some gay color in there will improve the average. Of course we don’t know that for sure, but I guess I don’t get why everyone is so vehement about protecting something that looks to be in the crapper.

If people want to keep gay people out of things like marriage and parenting, that means that gay people are associated with something bad. There has to be something fundamentally wrong with batting for the other team, or else why would we sanctify the prejudice against them? We reserve the rights of people like the Boys Scouts to keep filthy gay ideas far away from little boys who could give a damn less about their own or anyone else’s sexuality.

People don’t detest homosexuality or its variations because they think it’s a choice, they do it because they think it’s a bad choice. Marriage is a choice, but we respect a people’s choice to marry or not marry, at least enough for them to keep their jobs. One’s religion is a choice, often one made three or four times in a one’s life, and it’s a choice we let people make without repercussions.

I am what I am and I don’t know why. I didn’t wake up one day and say, “I’ve decided I will engage in relationships with people regardless of what their gender is, was or ever will be.” But if I had, who would I be hurting? I’m doing the same thing, whether I picked it or it picked me, and I’m not stopping.

So many people who know and are comfortable with gay people don’t support the laws that protect their rights. Why? The gay community doesn’t send out ambassadors to the straight world for positive representation while the real gay people are off being perverts. Gay people you know are like the gay people you don’t know: they’re people.

The only reason to worry about whether being gay is a choice is so that anti-gay people can say that we could have chosen the other way, the right way. Well, love is love, gay or straight. Sex is sex, gay or straight. And I don’t trust anyone to tell me what “the right way” is in those arenas.