ROOK, IOWA — As his young presidential campaign attempts to gather momentum, Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker knows he needs to ingratiate himself to his party’s socially conservative base. That’s a base, Walker aides say, that the candidate is acutely aware of being unhappy with the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling from earlier this summer that made same-sex marriage legally protected in all 50 states, and so Walker and his staff have decided to “toe the line between 1915 and 2015” with their rhetoric on marriage equality. This decision, aides say, is what led Walker do declare that he isn’t sure if homosexuality is a lifestyle choice that homosexuals make.
Claiming that whether homosexuality is a choice or not is “not even an issue for [him] to be involved in,” Walker told CNN’s Dana Bash when pressed, “I don’t know the answer to that question. So, I’m saying I don’t know what the answer to that is. And I’m going to spend my time focused on things that I do know and I can work on.” The question of whether homosexuality is a lifestyle choice or not is one that has had volumes of research done on it in the past three or four decades, and the overwhelming consensus of the psychological and scientific communities is that homosexuality is not a lifestyle choice.
Walker is hardly the first socially conservative Republican in the presidential field to buck modern social and biological scientific evidence. Dr. Ben Carson also implied such a connection — between choice and homosexuality — and was bludgeoned in the press for such comments. Walker’s campaign staff is quick to point out that he also told bash he’d “work hard for every American regardless of who they are, no matter where they come from, no matter what their background,” though they were also just as quick to point out for any social conservatives listening that “by work hard for every American the Governor certainly didn’t mean doing simple things like treating homosexuals with dignity and respect by letting them marry and divorce if they want to in total peace and without judgment from others.”
“Let me be very clear,” Walker told a crowd at a WalMart in Rook, Iowa on Monday, “I don’t believe in higher education. I dropped out, and my life has been so much gooder for it, and no one can even possibly tell how much school I’ve tooken. So don’t come to me with your fancy-shmancy double-blind studies. I only know what I’ve learned in Sunday School and as a red-blooded American male adult living my life in as much freedom as the Good Lord above will give me. But that doesn’t mean I’m being a homophobe on purpose. I genuinely don’t know if being gay is a choice because I, like so many conservatives, have spent the better part of my life simply running far away from learning anything about homosexuality because it makes me feel icky, but it’s really nothing unique that I don’t know about this, because I don’t know a whole lotta shit!”
When asked by the press for some other examples of things that most people might know, but he doesn’t have clue about, Walker rattled off a list that included “why come your tongue gets stuck to a metal pole in winter,” “how magnets work,” and “whether or not being an outright stubborn asshole is a choice” as well.
“I mean, seriously, I can’t tell if being an asshole is a choice or not either,” Walker pleaded his case. “I know I wake up every day and the first thought on my mind actually isn’t whether the sinister liberal agenda has forced us to be more tolerant and nice to gay people. I don’t spend the first ten minutes I’m awake crafting new ways to screw over the middle class in favor of helping my rich, elite benefactors,” the Wisconsin Republican told the press, “But by the time I’ve gone to bed at night I’ve done all of those things so many times I can’t count. It’s almost like being an obtuse, antiquated asshole is just innate for me; like breathing for other people. So am I making a choice to say and do those things instead of just growing up and getting with the times? I can’t say. I’m not a high-fallutin’ fancy pants book-learnin’ scholar boy, am I?”
“I guess at the end of it all, I just presume that since I have to choose to go from generally not giving a fuck about gay people to saying the most regressive and nonsensical shit possible about them,” Walker said as he was wrapping up the press conference, “that most people must be as disingenuous as I am. In the final analysis, maybe I’m just assuming that everyone is a fraud like me. Everyone else puts on a facade to convince people that they care about something they don’t, right? So if I make a choice to be an asshole every day, clearly that means LGB-LTG-BLT…you know, those types…choose to be that way too! Because I say so, and that’s all I need.
God Bless America, God Bless the Republican Party, and God Bless Me!”
