Newt Gingrich on Thursday denied that
gay rights are civil rights, noting that a gay person could choose to
be celibate.
Gingrich
made his remarks in the wake of signing on to the National
Organization for Marriage's (NOM) anti-gay marriage 5-point pledge.
When the Des Moines Register's
editorial board asked Gingrich to talk about the subject of gay
rights as civil rights, Gingrich suggested sexual orientation was a
choice.
“I think there is an enormous
difference between an inescapable fact of race. And you have to
decide whether or not you're in fact going to tolerate discrimination
based on race,” Gingrich said.
“And I think that it is frankly
offensive to have this whole effort to draw the contrast and to say,
'If you feel strongly about marriage being between a man and a woman,
geez is that parallel to being a racist.' The answer is no.”
Which later lead into the question, “Do
you believe that people choose to be gay?”
“I believe it's a combination of
genetics and environment,” Gingrich said. “I think both are
involved. I think people have many ranges of choices. Part of the
question is, do you want a society which has a bias in one direction
or another?
“I think people have a significant
range of choice within a genetic pattern. I don't believe in genetic
determinism and I don't think there is any great evidence of genetic
determinism. There are propensities. Are you more likely to do this
or more likely to do that? But that doesn't mean it's definitional.”
“So a person can then choose to be
straight?”
“Look, people choose to be celibate.
People choose many things in life. You know, there is a bias in
favor of non-celibacy. It's part of how the species recreates. And
yet there is a substantial amount of people who choose celibacy as a
religious vocation or for other reasons,” he added. (The video is
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