Is Gay Marriage More Dangerous Than Smoking? Ben Murray - Take Part
go to original September 10, 2012

Supporters of same-sex marriage in Australia created this sexy, poignant and innovative video in their push for marriage equality Down Under. (GetUp.org)

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.



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.

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 website 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.”

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.

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