"I’m sorry, your sexual choice is not a God-given right."

"You’re talking about a choice and you’re talking about elevating a choice to an inalienable right, which is impossible, you can’t, not under the definition of American documents.”

Said David Barton, as if choice and rights are unrelated concepts. The document in question is the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

How can you understand liberty and the pursuit of happiness without seeing choice as a necessary part of the right? You are free to do — what? — only one thing? It is true that, in recent years, gay rights proponents have fixated on the idea that gay people have no choice in their sexual orientation, but their demand for rights has to do with letting people make their own choices about what to do with their preferences and desires. Those who oppose gay rights know that perfectly well: They predictably respond to the argument that sexual orientation is inborn and unchangeable by saying that sexual behavior is a choice.

If you don't believe sexual freedom is a fundamental right, think of some rights that you are fond of — freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, freedom of speech — and try to explain them devoid of choice. To focus particularly on religion: Do you think that the Founders saw religion as something apart from choice? Here's a famous American document, James Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessment:

If "all men are by nature equally free and independent," [Virginia Declaration of Rights, art. 1] all men are to be considered as entering into Society on equal conditions; as relinquishing no more, and therefore retaining no less, one than another, of their natural rights. Above all are they to be considered as retaining an "equal title to the free exercise of Religion according to the dictates of Conscience." [Virginia Declaration of Rights, art. 16] Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offence against God, not against man: To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered.

That's all about choice, my friend.

ADDED: Barton presents himself as a Christian, so it's especially interesting that Madison relied, in part, on principles he found in the Christian religion itself:

[T]he Christian Religion itself... disavows a dependence on the powers of this world: it is a contradiction to fact; for it is known that this Religion both existed and flourished, not only without the support of human laws, but in spite of every opposition from them....