Homosexuality? A lifestyle choice! Your religious views? You're born with it!

Your skin color. The color of your eyes. Your ethnic background(s). These three things, are among a long list of other traits of things that not one person can change about themselves. What you wear, what you eat, what musical tastes you have, etc. are among an even longer list of things that everyone can change, or changes dramatically, thought the course of a lifetime. In the ever-raging debate on equal rights for the gay/lesbian community, one of the arguments I cannot, for the life of me, understand, is the argument that gay men and women have chosen to be with the same sex.

Really? One chooses to be sexually attracted to the same sex overnight? It's not just a biological wiring that one person might have, but a choice, much like a person switching from Vans to Converse shoes?

This bullshit argument has raised a notch today with House Minority Leader John Boehner of Texas explaining his opposition to hate crime protections for the gay community that's being debated on Capitol Hill, and it's a bigger load of BS than the argument I just mentioned.

Last week, House Republican Leader John Boehner objected to House passage of a bill that would expand hate crime laws and make it a federal crime to assault people on the basis of their sexual orientation.....

In an email, Boehner spokesman Kevin Smith said Boehner "supports existing federal protections (based on race, religion, gender, etc) based on immutable characteristics."

It should be noted that the current law does not include gender, though the expanded legislation would cover gender as well as sexual orientation, gender identity and disability.

"He does not support adding sexual orientation to the list of protected classes," Smith continued.

Boehner's position, then, appears to be grounded in the notion that immutable characteristics should be protected under hate crimes laws. And while religion is an immutable characteristic, his office suggests, sexual orientation is not.

That's right. The House Minority Leader is convinced that one's religious background is an immutable characteristic, as opposed to being physically attracted to the same sex.

My dad was raised in a Baptist-Christian household, along with my mom. I was raised in the same religious household as my parents were. Because of those two factors, by Bohner's logic, I should be a Christian. Yet, I consider myself to being agnostic. How does Boehner explain that? Furthermore, how does he not think to himself and say aloud, "Well...i'm a 100% dumbass?"