Over the weekend, Republican Iowa Representative Steve King (of the illegal immigrants “have calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert” fame) turned his attention to Arizona governor Jan Brewer’s recent veto of the state’s Senate Bill 1062, which would have allowed business owners to deny service to gays and lesbians on religious grounds. You will not be surprised to learn that King did not agree with her decision. In an interview with a Des Moines local television station, King explained that he doesn’t think that homosexuals should receive equal protection for their “self-professed behavior.”
Does this mean that King thinks being gay is a choice? He’s not quite sure, but he has some very half-baked theories. “I don’t know whether that’s a choice or not. I think that that exists across the continuum, in some type of a…curve, and I don’t know what that curve actually looks like,” he said. “I think some’s nature and some’s nurture, and some might be purely each.”
Either way, King is concerned about the possibility of these people trapping business owners into discriminating against them: “And the one thing I referenced when I say ‘self-professed,’ how do you know who to discriminate against?” he explained. “They about have to tell you. And are they then setting up a case, is this about bringing a grievance or is it actually about a service that they’d like to have?” Of course, this (fake) threat to bigoted business owners could easily be eliminated if they simply stopped being so determined to discriminate against someone, but that probably has not occurred to King.
