This week’s entry from our friend RedLightPolitics is an older one, but I thought it fit in nicely with Spirit Day. Don’t forget to read more of her writing at her Tumblr – today it’s PurpleLightPolitics!, and yes I’m going to tell you to go every week. The more we read smart women writers, the more smart women writers will write. In this week’s Crosspost, RLP’s optimism is thwarted by a Google search. Her words after the cut.
“is a lifestyle choice”
Yeah, I am feeling somehow pessimistic today and because I need reinforcement, I decided to type the words “is a lifestyle choice” into Google. I don’t know what I was hoping to find but it was a moment akin to the day I discovered there was such a thing as “The Flat Earth Society”.
Some of the “lifestyle choices” I came across, mostly linked to articles, blogposts or news items people felt the need to create in order to support their absurdist opinions:
- Being gay is a lifestyle choice
- Mental Illness is a lifestyle choice
- Infertility is a lifestyle choice
- Poverty is a lifestyle choice (apparently someone even felt compelled to create YouTube videos to support this argument)
- Suicide is a lifestyle choice
- Obesity is a lifestyle choice (I suspect this one would go hand in hand with “poverty” as a choice)
- Alcoholism is a lifestyle choice
I guess all of these “lifestyle choices“ just enable people to exercise prejudice, bigotry and hate in a guilt-free fashion. Really, none of the “choices” above require help or intervention or government assistance because all the individuals just need to make better choices. See? Homophobia? Sorry, if people chose not to be gay, we wouldn’t have such problem! Fatphobia? Well, you know all too well what those fatties should do! Infertility? I ain’t paying for anyone’s fertility treatment, they should just make a better choice!
I think we should apply this principle across the board. The solution to all of the world’s problems is for people to just stop making the wrong choices.
Image Credit by Angela Marie on Flickr