Is Gay Marriage More Dangerous Than Smoking?
It’s getting hard to keep up with all the three-alarm-bells frantic statements from religious ideologues about apocalypse-driving topics like so-called feigned rape and gay marriage. That doesn’t mean we can’t try.
Word comes from Australia this week that—if what he’s reading is right—Jim Wallace of the Australian Christian Lobby has found that smoking is healthier than the lifestyle of people who are gay-married.
“It has higher rates of drug-taking, of suicide, it has the life of a male reduced by up to 20 years,” Wallace said in a debate reported on by the Sydney Morning Herald.
MORE: Australia Video The Most Effective Argument for Gay Marriage?
Yes, that’s right: According to Wallace the Christian lobbyist, you could burn down four packs of cowboy-killers a day and still be much healthier than a man who has shared his-and-his toothbrush holders in his bathroom. Scared yet?
Weirdly, the truth is, he’s almost right about one thing: Suicide rates are higher among some gay segments, according to a near-simultaneous report at the European Symposium of Suicide and Suicidal Behavior. That is, among religious gay people.
The paper, as reported in the Jewish Press, looked at Israeli youth and found that more than 20 percent of religious gays attempt suicide.
The implication is this: Gay people are somehow infecting babies they can not possibly create. Scared now?
But hold on, is this coupling of homosexuality with truncated life expectancy just an Australian and Israeli issue? No!
American alarmists are onto the supposed gayness=illness link too. As noted on conservative Web site WND (formerly World News Daily), which has a piece called “How Gays Promiscuity Can Make You Sick,” a group called the Center for Marriage Policy is way ahead of that Aussie guy.
“Public policy must discourage promiscuity and homosexuality for the same reasons we discourage drug abuse and smoking,” reads a flyer from the Center, promoting its “Protecting Marriage Month.” Because people you don’t even know having sex make you and everybody around you ill, of course.
That is especially true of second-hand gay, a problem raised by another U.S. figurehead, and recapped here by Stephen Colbert.
The CMP flyer lets you know that things are far worse than just airborne gayness, such as: “HIV is the #14 cause of infant death in the United States.” The implication is this: Gay people are somehow infecting babies they can not possibly create. Scared now?
Buckle up then, because the road ahead is even rockier!
In a related WND commentary by president and executive director of the Center for Marriage Policy, the “national health crisis” includes the stroke-of-doom news that, “Children raised by homosexual parents are dramatically more likely than peers raised by married heterosexual parents to suffer from a host of social problems.”
Well, apparently there is some dissent on this topic. Including by people who do research. Like the studies cited in this book excerpt promoted on Salon this week, which say kids raised by gay parents are indistinguishable in terms of self-esteem, social adjustment and academics. Or you could go all the way back to January for this comprehensive look on the topic, titled “Why Gay Parents May Be the Best Parents.”
But let’s get to the certainties of the here and now, where a Utah NBC affiliate refused to air a new show about a gay couple trying to have a baby through a surrogate. In that case, The Atlantic recently made the keen observation that the irony is that gay people can not pursue surrogacy in Utah.
Only married people can pursue a surrogate to carry a child in the state. Gay people can’t get married there so… why put something like that on TV? Eventually, another station did.
But can you get gay-ish diseases through the TV? Doubtless, we’ll have that update for you soon.
What is the most outrageous anti-gay claim you’ve ever heard? Leave the insanity in COMMENTS.
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Ben Murray has been a frontline correspondent for Stars and Stripes and a producer on The Deadliest Catch. A normally calm person, Ben gets all kinds of fired up by abuse of power and ignorance in high places. To keep from igniting, he writes about these topics and more and does his best to keep the profanity out of it. But every once in a while... earmuffs, kids.
