The ability to deliberately affect change in the world not fully determined by circumstance.What do you think free will means?
I don't think I need to tell you what free will has to do with the suggestion that a question of choice is obvious.
Thank you!
[reads paper]
Oh my god, their options for cause were "early relationship, genetic, father problems, fear of women, mental illness, and sexual abuse". They didn't even offer the option of choice.
Schadrach saved us. We can now read the paper:The direction thing is completely laughable. Even you don't believe for a single solitary second that there's any chance it's a strong relationship in the other direction.
"...heterosexuals and those with less actual contact with homosexuals tended io endorse all factors concerned with aetiology (with the exception of father problems and sexual abuse)..."
With regards to the cause of homosexuality, they did not present options of choice, but rather presented many options of how someone externally may be caused to be gay. Presented with questions on how much genetics, or hormones, or early childhood experiences may make someone gay, they found a strong correlation between being gay / knowing more gay and rejecting all of those explanations. They highest correlations of their 6 factors by far are genetic explanations and mental illness explanations, the two which could most reasonably track to being "born that way", which is to say being straight and knowing few or no gay people was a strong predictor of claiming gay people are just born that way. The two factors they call exceptions to the trend, one is only half an exception. Straight people are still more likely to say sexual abuses causes homosexuality than gay people, but straight people knowing more gay people strengthens that correlation rather than weakens it. Father problems is the only cause factor in their list where gay people are more likely to call it a possible cause of homosexuality than straight people.
"Father problems" is distinctly not "I am deterministically gay because of my biology."
So the direction thing isn't laughable at all. This is 30 years old, society has changed, the results would certainly be different now, but in 1990, the direction of the strong correlation was that gay people disproportionately rejected the idea that they were born this way, along with rejecting the large majority of potential causes of homosexuality. Which, that's the truth as far as I can tell. "Born this way" explanations are mostly a phenomenon of this millennium. In the past, it was straight people who saw homosexuality as a physiological condition, which I think tracks exceptionally well with non-malicious homophobia. If you refuse to see the possibility of being gay yourself, you'll be inclined to think the opposite is equally true for gay people.