"I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line 'I've been straight and I've been gay, and gay is better," the actress told the New York Times. "And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice."
Joy Behar, a co-host of the View, expressed confusion about the decision to be gay last year. "I don't know how to respond to that, I mean I don't think that anybody in this world wants to be gay, considering all of the vilification that is brought upon someone who is gay. Why would you choose that?"
But Nixon questions why being gay shouldn't be a choice. "I am very annoyed about this issue," she said in the Times interview. "Why can't it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate?"
Randy Thomas is the executive vice president of Exodus International, one of the world's largest outreaches to those affected by unwanted homosexual attraction. He supports that being gay is a choice, after overcoming his battles with homosexuality.
"If they prove that a 'gay gene' exists in my DNA, why then aren't those genes controlling my life now?" Thomas posed in a column on WorldNetDaily. He has remained straight for the past 15 years, and is married with three children.
Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International and a former homosexual, also agrees that being gay is a choice. "We all have the freedom to choose," Chambers told AP News.
The actress proclaimed that she chose to be gay a year after she ended her 15 year relationship with Danny Mozes, with whom she has two kids. She began a relationship with Christine Marinoni in 2004 and the two became engaged in 2009. Last year Marinoni gave birth to a son, after the couple asked a male friend to help them have a child.
In 2009 Meredith Baxter also came out as lesbian, following three marriages and five children. "It was a later in life recognition," she told Matt Lauer on the "Today" show.
Homosexuality is a divisive topic in society, and biblical interpretation of the issue for thousands of years has suggested that homosexuality is a sin. Others also criticize the homosexual lifestyle as not conducive to family values. "The potential to produce children naturally is unique to opposite-sex relationships. It is not the law that "discriminates" based on "sexual orientation"--it is nature," Tony Perkins wrote in a report for the Family Research Council titled, "Is the Defense of Marriage Act Constitutional?"
He suggests that "it is the powerful dynamic of a mother, father, and children that creates those bonds of family that form the bedrock of all societies and provide the best environment for raising children--as social science has clearly demonstrated."