[Ghoulish Delight]

Hmm, I don't believe homosexuality is a "choice", but I do believe it's as much a factor of environment as it is of genetics. Someone who grew up in a well adjusted environment with no significant childhood trauma is likely to not exhibit signs of depression and cannot very well say, "I'm going to choose to become a manic depressive today." However, if that same person had, say, seem a parent die in fron of them at a young age, they are far more likely to exhibit such behavior. And I don't think I'd get much argument by saying that if you could theoretically take a large sampling of different people and run their lives through those two opposite situations, you'd get a wide range of results. Some people would suffer from depression whether they suffered early trauma or not. Some people would come through unscathed by such things. But (this is the less clear-cut assumption) I'd bet that most people would be more prone to depression having suffered said trauma than having not (again, assuming the impossible experiment where an identical person lives through both versions of childhood).

[It's here in the discussion that I must put my disclaimer that I in no way liken being gay to "suffering from childhood trauma". It's simply an extreme, and well accepted, example that our total behavioral profile is most likely a product of the combination of nature and nurture]

So while I agree that the idea of someone consciously choosing to become gay is ludicrous, that hardly settles the debate of nature vs. nurture, a debate I firmly believe is unsettlable. At most, I think we'll eventually manage to prove that one can have a predisposition towards being homosexual, with the actual outcome determined in varying degrees from individual to individual by environment, with the rare exception being people who would turn out gay no matter the environment.

And while I applaud any research that brigns us closer to a better understanding of what makes us tick as humans, it worries me when the gay community hangs their hat on the notion that getting everyone to accept that being gay is hardwired is the key to gaining the equality they seek. Discussions of choice, nature, nurture, exposure to homsexual imagery, etc. all seem like easily disputed red herrings to me, because neither extreme is 100% correct. Perhaps I'm wrong, but from my vantage point, the cry should be, "Who cares how I became who I am, I should be free to be who I am no matter what."

$.02