Republican running for Congress in South Florida says people are ‘born straight’

A Republican running for Congress in Florida told a newspaper that you can’t be born gay. He also suggested homosexuality dates back only to the Roman Empire.

Rod Joseph, a former Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that everybody is “born straight.”

“You cannot be born gay,” he said. “That’s impossible biologically.”

His explanation of the existence of gay people? “Most of the people, they’re victims of sexual abuse at the very young age,” he said.

He also gave a somewhat anachronistic analysis of the history of same-sex attraction. “Sexual preference from the Roman Empire to date, it’s always a preference,” he said.

Of course, historians have evidence of documented same-sex couples dating back to at least 2400 B.C., millennia before same-sex relationships were widely documented in Roman society.

But what’s especially surprising about Joseph’s remarks is that they come as he runs in South Florida, a haven for LGBTQ people. Florida Congressional District 20 includes Wilton Manors, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale regularly ranked as one of the biggest gay communities in the country.

Still, he claimed homosexuality isn’t found in nature outside humans.

“Look at the natural habitat. You never see a lion that mate(s) with a male lion for life. You never see a giraffe, a male giraffe, that mate(s) with a giraffe,” Joseph said. “Myself right now saying I am a giraffe, that doesn’t mean it’s true.”

Of course, that also isn’t true. National Geographic photographers have taken numerous pictures of male lions engaging in sexual behavior, though scientists argue this is more male bonding within prides. And studies show giraffes have more gay sex than straight sex and may engage in group sex.

Those examples only scratch the surface. As The Advocate reported in May, the documentary Second Nature, narrated and executive-produced by Elliot Page, examines queerness across the animal kingdom, including same-sex penguin parenting pairs, sex changing clownfish, bonobos that use sex to resolve conflict, pregnant male seahorses, and female-dominated primate societies. The film, directed by Drew Denny, centers in part on the work of Dr. Joan Roughgarden, the transgender Stanford University evolutionary biologist whose book Evolution’s Rainbow challenged long-standing assumptions about sex roles, sexual selection, and the supposed naturalness of heterosexuality.

The point, scientists and advocates argue, is not that animals map neatly onto human identity, but that nature is far more varied than the rigid political arguments often made in its name. As Page told The Advocate, the film asks people to confront “the level of indoctrination that’s gotten you so stuck to these views that actually just simply aren’t factually true.”

Joseph is running in a district where almost 68 percent of voters supported Kamala Harris in the last presidential election, so he almost certainly will lose in November even if he wins the Republican nomination.

This is the first time Joseph has run for office as a Republican in Florida but he has run as a “moderate” Democrat for state and federal office in the past. He has a habit of endorsing Republicans in the race after losing Democratic primaries, as he did when he endorsed U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, a Republican with an anti-LGBTQ record, after running for the Democratic nomination. Joseph announced at that time he was changing his voter registration to a Republican. He told the newspaper he left the party because he disagreed with its views regarding abortion and LGBTQ issues.

The newspaper also found both Joseph’s Democratic and Republican opponents disagree with him. Elijah Manley, an out Democrat running in the same district, called the remarks “incredibly ignorant.”

"You’re born the way you are,” Manley said.