Life imitates a not so good novel

I spent the past few days in Sweden and flew back to the Netherlands today. Before I left I grabbed a book someone had given me to read almost a year ago. If I were doing a book review I'd call it almost a good book, but not quite. It was about a Presidential election where one of the candidates was a caricature of Jerry Falwell. He had millions of fundamentalist followers. I don't like it when Christians are presented as unthinking, racist, rich, hate-filled idiots. Much of the book was about the back and forth between the various candidates on their faith views, and the sort of things the characters said were so unbelievable it was laughable. I won't bore you with more about the book, but one of the things I have been thinking about is how difficult it would be to answer belief and social issue questions on the spot. I'm no politician, that's for sure.

So, I landed at Schiphol airport, got my bag, and headed out to take the train back home when I was met by a film crew. All of a sudden I felt like the book was coming to life. A woman with a microphone asked me where I lived and I said "Dordrecht," and she looked disappointed until I added, "But I am from the United States" and she brightened up.

"Do you mind if we ask you some questions?" she asked.

"Well, what is this for?" I asked.

"A talk show from Schiphol airport," she said. I have never heard of a talk show from Schiphol airport, so I thought, "why not, this is probably some obscure thing shown in the airport lounges" and I figured she was going to ask me what an American was doing in the Netherlands or where I was flying from or something like that.

"Okay," I said.

The camera started rolling. This nice, sweet young woman looked at me and said, "Researchers today have concluded that homosexuality cannot be reversed by therapy. Would you please tell us your opinion about that?"

I felt like doing a Ralph Kramden and saying "ah-bah-dah-bah-dah-bah...." I have all sorts of mixed feelings about this issue. I looked down at my clothing and was relieved I wasn't wearing any logos - so I would be answering anonymously.

I don't remember exactly what I said, but more or less I tried to say that these findings didn't really surprise me, that I think some people are just born that way, but at the same time I have heard of other people that are homosexual who have had traumatic experiences that happened to them that may have caused them to become homosexual and I thought these people probably could be helped by therapy. I know I also said "I don't know" and "this is complicated" a lot. I think I sounded really stupid.

After a few minutes they let me go on my way. I turned a corner and there was another film crew standing there. I took a wide turn away from them. I'd had enough "Meet the Press" for the day.

Here's my question for those of you reading this -it was obvious to me they weren't going to interview me if I was Dutch, but when I turned out to be an American, they were interested. Why do you think that is so?