What if, despite all the testimonials to the contrary, people in fact choose to be gay? Would it matter? Brandon Ambrosino entertained precisely this hypothetical earlier this week in The New Republic. Writing a few days after the Grammy Awards, during which Queen Latifah officiated a mass same-sex and heterosexual wedding to the tune of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis's "Same Love," Ambrosino argued that while it may be politically expedient to say homosexuality is inborn, doing so glosses over how “fluid” sexuality really is and denies us the freedom of choosing our own identity. The chorus in "Same Love"—"I can't change even if I tried, even if I wanted to"—is wrong, he wrote, and in hewing to Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" line, gays and lesbians are failing to embrace the "sexual autonomy" and fluidity of our bisexual and transgender brethren.

This line of reasoning has a hip, "post-gay" appeal, but it is eye-rollingly naïve, a starry-eyed view you might expect from a college student who's just taken their first queer-theory class. From a political standpoint, it matters a great deal whether sexual orientation is inborn or a choice. Rightly or wrongly, social conservatives object to homosexuality on the grounds that it is a lifestyle choice. Ambrosino is right to question this premise—whether homosexuality is inborn or chosen should have no bearing on whether it is immoral. But the public makes this leap. By arguing that homosexuality is inborn, those in the gay-rights movement are able to pre-empt this line of attack.

But what if we went at it another way? Ambrosino suggests this response to social conservatives who say being gay is a choice:

"Maybe I wasn’t born this way. Now tell me why you think that matters." I imagine many religious people haven’t really thought through the implications of their own rhetoric. (What, for instance, does a socially-constructed word like “natural” even mean?)

From time to time, some celebrity or another will make this argument, giving rise to outraged headlines across the gay blogosphere. Most recently, it was Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon, who ran afoul of LGBT activists by saying she chose to be a lesbian. "I understand that for many people it's not, but for me it's a choice, and you don't get to define my gayness for me," Nixon said. "A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it's a choice, then we could opt out."

Social conservatives dismiss outright the idea that homosexuality is inborn. They insist it is a choice. From their point of view, biology is destiny. Because gay sex does not produce offspring, it is not part of God's procreative design—it's abnormal, an aberration. John Stuart Mill's idea that "no one should be forcibly prevented from acting in any way he chooses provided his acts are not invasive of the free acts of others" simply won't fly with religious conservatives.