Yesterday, Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters celebrated its 200,000th hit. Not bad for a part-time blog, huh. In celebration of this, I want to republish one of my most popular posts. It is especially poignant today when one takes into account the increasingly amount of venom recently against the lgbt community from the religious right:
I've been having a very interesting email exchange with Peter LaBarbera regarding his stigmatization of the lgbt community.
For LaBarbera, every lie he tells is justifiable because of his belief that gay men have "health risks" greater than that of heterosexuals. In fact, it's something he likes to highlight every chance he gets:
“Barack Obama’s homosexual agenda is beginning to take shape – but he has no election mandate to impose GLSEN’s radical vision of celebrating homosexuality, bisexuality and gender confusion (transsexuality) in U.S. schools,” LaBarbera said. “Anti-religious bigots should not be setting policy for schools — and promoting dangerous sex and gender identities to youth is the antithesis of ‘safety.’ (Men who have sex with other men (MSM) suffer from much higher rates of sexual diseases – including anal cancer, HIV, syphilis, and gonorrhea — than non-MSMs.)
Also:
LaBarbera also argues that many liberal school districts teach false facts about AIDS. He says they imply that everyone is at equal risk for contracting the disease -- even though in 2005 71 percent of U.S. male AIDS cases involved homosexuals. He contends that many American young people are not being informed about other health risks associated with homosexuality either -- such as increased infections of the Hepatitis B or C virus and the herpes virus. "We have all this evidence out there that homosexual behavior is dangerous," the activist point out, "and yet our politically correct elites are promoting gay identity" to teens and children.
And he is not the only one to assert this "gays are dangerous because of their behavior" claim:
If there was ever a clarion call for our entire society to say with one united voice that homosexual behavior is a danger to health and should be discouraged at all costs, this is it. We've found one voice as a society with regard to drug use and drunk driving; it's time we find it with regard to homosexual behavior. - Bryan Fischer
In fact, multiple studies have established that homosexual conduct, especially among males, is considerably more hazardous to one’s health than a lifetime of chain smoking. - Matt Barber
The "homosexuality is a health risk" factoid is a popular talking point in religious right circles. It stems from manipulating legitimate medical information regarding disease and the lgbt community. Rather than go into detail about just how this information is manipulated, I'm going to take another route.
I found this video on youtube. I dare anyone to tell me the difference between it and the nonsense about the supposed "health risks of homosexuality" factoid pushed by the religious right:
The only thing worse than the message is the music.
ReplyDeleteThese people who are supposedly opposed to homosexuality for health reasons never mention that for women, lesbian sex is less risky in terms of STD transmission and carries no risk of pregnancy.
ReplyDelete