We appear to have another phrase that we must not use because it is derogatory, offensive or possibly just something the Woken SS don’t want us to say. Now it’s “sexual preference” which must not be used. For this is to insinuate, perhaps out right shout at people, that sexuality is a choice.
While discussing LGBTQ rights, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on Tuesday used a term that LGBTQ activists have called “offensive,” “outdated,” and a “dog whistle.”
“I have no agenda, and I do want to be clear that I have never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would not ever discriminate on the basis of sexual preference,” Barrett said, when asked about her stance on preserving protections for members of the LGBTQ community.
The term “sexual preference,” however, is an offensive one, which suggests that sexual orientation is a choice, Lambda Legal, a legal advocacy group, explained on Twitter.
This is the point at which we tell these people to bugger off. That buggering off being simply that there’s a limit to the micromanagement of the language that we’re going to put up with so off you go, bye bye.
It gets worse than that though for the actual complaint itself, the insistence if you prefer, makes no sense anyway.
A preference is a preference. Whether that comes from taste, choice, religion, the internalisation of societal oppression, genetics, in vivo hormones, just the way God made his special little snowflake or because Mom was cold hearted and never demonstrated proper cuddly love.
That one has a preference is nothing at all to do with how one gained that preference. Nor does preference insist nor even imply that choice is involved.
It is entirely possible for me to drink sarsparilla flavoured drinks like root beer. I don’t because I hate the stuff. My preference is for fizzy pop flavoured with kola nuts. How I gained this preference matters not – myself I think it comes from not growing up in the US and thus never developing the taste for sarsparilla. It’s not something we get much in Europe where I did grow up.
But my preferring coke to root beer is just that, my preference. Doesn’t matter how I gained it at all.
So it is with who – or what as we can be open about this and include autophiles and every other rich variety of human sexuality along with our plain vanilla het and gay – have preferences about who they have sex with. To say you “prefer” is to say that there’s a form which meets your needs/desires better. It’s not to say anything at all about how those needs/desires came about, whether they’re inherent or not. And even a choice will be influenced by inherent factors anyway.
Methinks Lambda Legal are just trying to find some other thing we can all be berated for. And if this is what LGBT activism is now reduced to then that battle’s been won, hasn’t it?
The word they’re struggling to find to mean “choice” is “choice”.
The lines that come to mind are ‘He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases.’
I also suspect that they’re fighting over a trivial matter (the word “preference”) that’s rooted in a trivial matter – is there any evidence that a meaningful number of people believe that we choose our sexual preferences? So, damn near nobody believes we choose our sexual preference and the word “prefer” doesn’t imply we choose it.
Yeah, let’s have a row over that.
The battle is indeed won. Which leaves those who fought it desperate for any excuse to keep their movement going.
LGBT may actually, having won the battle and even the war, be about to lose the peace, so ridiculous and annoying are their juvenile attempts to illogically and idiotically give moral weight to perfectly neutral words such as preference. Gay, straight, lesbian or bi, many just want these activists to shut up, for good.
Sarsaparilla was widely consumed in the north (northwest?) of England as a legacy of the Temperance movement. The stall on Blackburn market that I remember has only just closed:
https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/17633384.another-stall-closes-blackburn-market/
Sarsaparilla (and also Dandelion & Burdock) served direct from the wooden cask. Rather good.
I remember Oor Wullie’s pall – the one that wasn’t Wee Eck or Fat Boab, Soapy Sam? – hang-out of preference was the Sasaparilla bar.
Soapy Souter wasn’t it?
The way that romantic love works is that it doesn’t. It just happens. I can’t choose to fall in love with someone any more than I can choose not to. If my endocrine glands start pumping out endocrines when I see a slender young lady with her facial features arranged in a certain way, choice had nothing to do with it.
However I can choose not to act on my natural physical impulses. If the slender young lady, for example, is below a certain age or if she exhibits distaste for old goats. But if my body responded equally to slender young ladies and husky young men, while choice definitely comes into play here, I can’t see anything wrong with it. Who I choose to take off my clothes for is an entirely personal matter.