alain said:
If a man has a right to be gay, surely the school has the right not to employ him.
Nobody has a "right" to be gay or straight. They're either gay or they're straight, but it's not something they choose to do.
I don't mean to pick on you because by and large you express a fairly sensible position on this issue. But it's a widespread notion that people can choose to be or not to be gay.
People who talk that way are clearly talking from zero experience. Probably never knowingly met a gay person in their life. My wife and I have lived in major cosmopolitan areas AND worked in civil service for most of our lives, so we know a lot of out-of-the-closet gay people. Trust me, whenever the ridiculous subject of "choosing" one's sexual orientation comes up, nineteen out of twenty of them burst into laugher and say, "Do you think anyone in their right mind would have chosen this life? To be ostracized, ridiculed and punished, to have to keep some of the most important aspects of your life (like who your significant other is) secret from almost everyone you know, to be discriminated against (until very recently) in child custody, community property, medical care, and inheritance decisions? I'm happy being gay because it's what I am, but if what I am were straight, I'd be a whole lot happier."
What many gay people have done is try to live a straight lifestyle with a heterosexual marriage and children and the whole thing. Some because they were brought up in an atmosphere where homosexuality was never discussed and they just assumed that no matter how they felt in their hearts, the only possible life choice was to attempt to fit in and live like everybody else. Others because they perceived that being known as gay would be very dangerous, so they tried to live straight as a survival tactic.
Look at all the things people are able to force themselves to do because they have a good reason. Just the things people do in the name of their religion are plenty scary. If you think it would be impossibly difficult to spend your life celibate or to marry and have relations with a person of the gender you're not attracted to, in order to avoid being persecuted, imagine how much harder it was for people of an unpopular religion to be burned at the stake, in order to avoid disgracing their faith by pretending to convert. Humans have a remarkable ability to endure pain, both physical and emotional, for the right cause.
I don't think that most of the anti-gay crowd really believes that sexual orientation is a choice. But they do believe that gay people can choose not to
live gay, and simply fake heterosexuality. All that matters to these people is appearance, not substance. I guess deep down inside they believe the statistic that ten percent of the population is gay (personally I think it's not totally wrong but perhaps just a teeny bit exaggerated) and that therefore one of their own children might be gay. They don't give a damn about the child's happiness, they just don't want him to embarrass them by being gay openly. They'd rather the kid be miserable and pretend to be straight. One of our friends from a hard-ass Catholic family did that for 25 years, got married and sired five really nice children. When his wife died and the children grew up he moved to the big city and got himself a boyfriend that he lived with for the next 25 years. His kids still love him and call his boyfriend Uncle.
So the anti-gay crowd does not want their children to have role models of people who are gay and are not ashamed to admit it. Because if one of their children is gay, they don't want him to admit it. They just want him to suffer in silence.
That's what the anti-gay-teacher movement is all about. When you think about it, it's child abuse! Forcing your child to live a miserable life to avoid making you uncomfortable.
