So there I was at home yesterday, sitting with my cup of coffee and pouring over my neighbor’s New York Times. (They are out of town, I am not stealing, merely borrowing.) Anyway, I open the magazine section to an interview with Governor Perry (Texas). The words homosexual and scouts caught my eye. So I read the q and a. In response to the question about why he wants to remove "gays" from the Boy Scouts, he says:

Scouting ought to be about building character, not about sex. Period. Precious few parents enroll their boys in the Scouts to get a crash course in sexual orientation (Governor Perry).

Do any of us (gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual) walk around talking about our sexual orientation. If you’re not me (a sexuality educator) are you always talking about your sex life and your personal values about sexuality? Is he serious? This is ridiculous.

Perry basically defends the boy scouts’ decision to exclude gays, but more significantly, says that if homosexuality isn’t about sex, "perhaps they should call it something else". You know, because anything with "sex" in the word has to do with penetration. I mean am I wrong when I say that homosexuality is about attraction to one’s own sex (gender)? Last time I checked, these words have never been about the act of sex itself. Besides, if Perry’s argument is that homosexual troup leaders will talk about sex with their scouts, couldn’t a heterosexual (oops, there’s that "sex" word again) leader do the same thing? I mean their orientation does have those three letters too. Seriously, if my son was ever a scout (do they even have them in NYC?), as long as his leader inspired, educated, and protected him, I wouldn’t care what his orientation was - no matter what. Since when is a person’s character linked to who he is attracted to?