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Daily Inspiration Quote by Jerry Falwell

"I believe that all of us are born heterosexual, physically created with a plumbing that's heterosexual, and created with the instincts and desires that are basically, fundamentally, heterosexual"

About this Quote

Falwell’s claim isn’t trying to describe sexuality so much as to legislate it. By invoking “born heterosexual,” he borrows the authority of biology while quietly denying the same “born this way” logic to gay people. The line is engineered to sound like common sense: simple, bodily, inevitable. That’s why the most striking word here is “plumbing” - a deliberately blunt, mechanical metaphor that reduces human intimacy to fixtures and pipes, making desire seem like an engineering problem with only one correct configuration.

The subtext is a moral argument smuggled in as anatomy. If heterosexuality is the default setting, then everything else becomes a deviation: a malfunction, a temptation, a symptom of cultural decay. Falwell’s phrasing also performs a preemptive rebuttal to gay rights claims emerging into mainstream politics. In the late 1970s through the 1990s, as the Moral Majority and its successors mobilized evangelical voters, “nature” language became a strategic bridge: it let religious conservatives argue in secular public terms without quoting scripture. “Instincts and desires” expands the claim from bodies to psychology, turning heterosexuality into an all-encompassing human baseline rather than one orientation among others.

Context matters because Falwell’s project was political as much as pastoral. This sentence aims to stabilize a social order - family structure, gender roles, authority - by framing it as physical fact. Its rhetorical power comes from flattening complexity: if sexuality is just “plumbing,” then debate looks unnecessary, and dissent can be dismissed as willful rebellion against design.

Quote Details

TopicEquality
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Falwell, Jerry. (2026, January 16). I believe that all of us are born heterosexual, physically created with a plumbing that's heterosexual, and created with the instincts and desires that are basically, fundamentally, heterosexual. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-believe-that-all-of-us-are-born-heterosexual-91612/

Chicago Style
Falwell, Jerry. "I believe that all of us are born heterosexual, physically created with a plumbing that's heterosexual, and created with the instincts and desires that are basically, fundamentally, heterosexual." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-believe-that-all-of-us-are-born-heterosexual-91612/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I believe that all of us are born heterosexual, physically created with a plumbing that's heterosexual, and created with the instincts and desires that are basically, fundamentally, heterosexual." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-believe-that-all-of-us-are-born-heterosexual-91612/. Accessed 28 Feb. 2026.

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Jerry Falwell

Jerry Falwell (August 11, 1933 - May 15, 2007) was a Clergyman from USA.

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