DR. CUMMINGS: 'Doin' what comes natur'lly
Most of you still remember Betty Hutton as Annie in the musical "Annie, get your gun." Irving Berlin wrote it way back in 1946 but it never gets old. My favorite song has always been "Doin what comes natur'lly," where Annie explains how she and her family and friends have made it just fine out here in the country, without education or money. She sings:
"You don't have to know how to read or write when you're out with a feller in the pale moonlight — That comes natur'lly."
Sure, Annie, it just comes natur'lly — if you're heterosexual. But what if you're a lesbian? What if your "natural" sexual tendencies favor another girl — not some feller in the pale moonlight? What if you just don't have those kinds of feelings for a man; in fact, you never did. Then what? Well, then — the movie will be banned, that's what. It's just not natural.
Shift the movie-set to the White House. President Obama is signing another executive order. The room is full of people. The cameras are clicking and millions of Americans are watching on TV. The president is sitting at the table. The document lies before him. The pen is in his hand. Now he starts to write. But stop! Obama is not "doin' it natur'lly;" he's doing it left-handed. Shut off the cameras quickly and change the channel to Fox News. We can't let our children see this.
It's my opinion (here we go again) that nobody chooses to be gay just as nobody chooses to be left-handed. We were made that way, and if God's the one who did the making — then God's the one to blame. We can try all we want to make a child write with her right hand or a boy to be heterosexual, but we don't succeed very well, do we?
Haven't we tried that enough times? Didn't every third grade teacher take the pen from Jimmy's left hand and put it in his right hand? Didn't every Catholic priest try to talk Frank out of a long-term loving relationship with John? Did it work?
We can say that left-handed people are not natural, that only right-handed people are natural, but saying it, doesn't make is so. People used to say that left-handedness is the mark of the devil, a sign of neurosis, rebellion and criminal activities. In fact, the word 'left' in English comes from the Anglo-Saxon word 'lyft', meaning broken or weak. The Latin word for "left" is "sinister."
We can say that homosexual men and women are destroying family life, but the statistics don't back that up. People used to think that homosexuals were pedophiles but that too has been proven false beyond a shadow of a doubt. When I was growing up, Christianity excluded all gays and taught us how evil they were. The Catholic Church would never allow a gay man to be a priest until the 1980s when 20,000 heterosexual priests left to get married and hundreds of parishes needed a priest — "even a gay!" Many Christians — even today — still think that the six anti-gay scripture quotes refer not just to homosexual acts, but to gay marriage.
Life has gotten better for the left-handers. We've elected at least seven of them to the office of president. However, it has taken gays a lot longer. It wasn't till June of last year that our Supreme Court accepted same-sex marriages, and many states are still fighting it. Many clubs will not invite gays to join, and when a local church recently published a notice inviting gays and lesbians, 60 percent of the parishioners left.
Living a heterosexual life has always felt "natural" to me. When I married Ann nearly 50 years ago, both of us dedicated ourselves to embracing both the joys and the heartaches of a lifelong marriage. Both of us have always felt we were made for each other. But guess what? Every gay couple I know feels the same way. They don't want to change any more than the left-handers want to change. They feel they were made for each other.
They're just "doin what comes natur'lly."
Dr. Bill Cummings is the CEO of Cummings Consolidated Corporation and Cummings Management Consultants. His blog is www.progressiveheretic.com.
This story was originally published February 6, 2016 at 7:47 PM with the headline "DR. CUMMINGS: 'Doin' what comes natur'lly ."