Ken Buck’s unscripted comments on the campaign trail continue to reveal a candidate who, at the very least, is an undisciplined politician who ought to start thinking through his positions on complex issues.
Buck’s high-profile statement on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” about people choosing to be gay, and then linking homosexuality with having a disease, was offensive.
We’re glad he quickly stepped away from his ill-chosen comparison. But as we noted in our Sunday endorsement of his opponent, Sen. Michael Bennet, Buck has displayed an affinity for putting his boot in his mouth during this campaign.
Nearly 40 years have passed since scientists set aside notions that homosexuality springs from disease or mental illness, yet Colorado’s Republican U.S. Senate candidate offered an analogy in the nationally televised debate that harkened back to those days. Asked by host David Gregory whether he believed homosexuality was a choice, Buck answered in the affirmative, but then conceded biology does play a role, just as it does in “alcoholism and some other things.”
Buck said after the debate he didn’t mean to equate being gay with having a disease. But Buck’s insistence that being gay is a choice contradicts accepted scientific thought, according to the American Psychological Association, among others.
Boiling down the association’s literature on the subject, the APA explains that choosing sexual orientation isn’t possible. Rather, a complex mix of environmental, biological and cognitive factors determines, usually by adolescence, where a person falls on the homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual continuum.
“Psychologists do not consider sexual orientation to be a conscious choice that can be voluntarily changed,” the APA says. In fact, sexual orientation is so hard-wired in an individual that psychologists advise against attempts to reverse it through therapy.
Yes, psychologists agree that it is a choice to act on sexual desires, but that’s not what Buck was suggesting.
These distinctions matter. That’s why Gregory asked the question about choice as a follow-up to Buck’s position against repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that we think discriminates against homosexual men and women who want to serve their country in the military.
If sexual orientation was based on choice and not complex genetic factors, one could argue more convincingly that the military’s policy — or other anti-gay policies — isn’t discriminatory. But given that the accepted science regarding sexual orientation is that it is an essential feature of who we are as individuals, and that it isn’t primarily a choice, the ban can be seen as discriminatory.
Discussing such complex questions in a “lightning round” of debate isn’t easy, nor is it exactly fair. But it’s a question the Senate candidate should have anticipated and thought through.
There is a difference between being so scripted as to speak in meaningless phrases and so unscripted as to be haphazard.
Buck’s gaffe likely will energize the left in this campaign, but we also hope it reinvigorates the debate over “don’t ask, don’t tell” — a policy that needs to be repealed.
