Of course, there is no certain combination of circumstances that automatically lead to someone becoming homosexual, but as I’ve often said, there’s always a backstory. Back in the heyday of Freudian “talk therapy,” analysts often focused on their patients’ relationship with their parents as the best clues to the origin of their emotional problems, and there was extensive research about the correlations between certain disorders and various childhood factors. From this research emerged a number of observations about developmental patterns. For example, it was observed that the male homosexual was typically the son of a so-called “smother mother” household — “too much closeness to mother and a distant negative relationship with father.” We are no longer permitted to notice such patterns, apparently because any curiosity about the “why” of sexual deviance threatens the self-esteem of deviants.

So the fact that Rachel and her younger brother are both homosexuals, and that their parents divorced when they were young, is not something we can explore from the perspective of developmental psychology. Why? Because this might hurt their feelings. This quasi-therapeutic attitude of protecting the allegedly fragile self-esteem of Victims of Society is what justifies the Compulsory Approval Doctrine. We are supposed to believe that homosexuals are delicate creatures, emotional weaklings who are just one insult away from committing suicide, and therefore everyone must constantly applaud them for their courage.

Well, excuse me for not volunteering as an LGBT cheerleader, but it so happens that I know actual gay people, and in general they don’t seem to be suffering from a deficit of self-esteem. The real-life gay people I’ve actually known were not emotional basket cases, trapped in a slough of suicidal depression; quite the contrary, in fact. Exactly how this myth of gay victimhood became part of our cultural narrative is a subject worth studying, but my point is that this whole bake-me-a-cake business and the endless witch-hunt against “homophobia” is misguided, and contrary to First Amendment freedoms.