I can’t decide whether this is more dumb, more offensive, or equally dumb and offensive. Colorado teabagger candidate Ken Buck was on Meet the Press yesterday and had the following exchange with David Gregory:
GREGORY: Do you believe that being gay is a choice?
BUCK: I do.
GREGORY: Based on what?
BUCK: Based on what? I guess you can choose who your partner is.
GREGORY: You don’t think it’s something that’s determined at birth?
BUCK: I think that birth has an influence over it, like alcoholism and some other things, but I think that basically, you have a choice.
I love it when straight conservative men speak as if they have any authority on the subject of sexuality. It’s just laughable.
Watch it:
Amanda Terkel at HuffPost points out that which we at Truth Wins Out know all too well: That, aside from the bigotry in his remarks, his “ideas” on the subject are considered flat wrong by every major, credible scientific medical association. She also points out that Buck is facing backlash from a situation when he was a District Attorney, where he refused to pursue rape allegations, and made comments that bordered on apologizing for rape:
Gregory also pressed Buck about his refusal to follow up on rape allegations involving a University of North Colorado student in 2005, while he was Weld County District Attorney. Buck declined to file criminal charges against the alleged victim’s attacker on the belief that not enough evidence existed to win the case, a conclusion that is not entirely rare with such delicate cases.
Controversy has erupted over some of Buck’s newly resurfaced remarks, including his comments to The Greeley Tribune that a jury may simply conclude it was a case of her “buyer’s remorse.” In an audio recording obtained by The Huffington Post, Buck told the victim, “It appears to me and it appears to others that you invited him over to have sex with him,” before acknowledging she may have been unconscious at the time.
How shocking! An anti-gay politician also not all that concerned about rape? I can’t believe it.
