While reading about the recent Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling against the ban on Gay marriage (personal note to Scalia, who said, "The premise of our system is that those judgments are to be made by the people and not imposed by a governing caste that knows best": if you are going to be a Supreme Court Justice, please learn the difference between a democracy and a republic. Thanks) I found the fascinating article "The Negative Health Effects of Homosexuality" by the Family Research Council. Since this group is fanatically opposed to homosexual marriage, they fall into one of the common traps of fanaticism: trying to twist everything to be evidence in their favor, instead of sticking to the points that actually make sense for them to argue. While it's unfortunate, it also makes for some highly entertaining reading at times. My personal favorite is this choice quote:

The journal AIDS reported that men involved in relationships engaged in anal intercourse and oral-anal intercourse with greater frequency than those without a steady partner. Anal intercourse has been linked to a host of bacterial and parasitical sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS.

Well gosh, that's just shocking! Clearly they must be against heterosexual sex (I'm pretty sure that's also linked to sexually transmitted disease) which begs the question: are they against heterosexual marriage, or do they support it because they have studies that show that married couples have less sex than unmarried couples?

Even better is when they don't seem to remember which side they are on:

Homosexual and lesbian relationships are far more violent than are traditional married households: The Bureau of Justice Statistics (U.S. Department of Justice) reports that married women in traditional families experience the lowest rate of violence compared with women in other types of relationships. [...]

It should be noted that most studies of family violence do not differentiate between married and unmarried partner status. Studies that do make these distinctions have found that marriage relationships tend to have the least intimate partner violence when compared to cohabiting or dating relationships.

So... married women are abused less than unmarried women, and lesbian (and thus by definition unmarried since these are U.S. statistics) women are abused more than married couples. That seems pretty obvious, so I'm with them so far. But what's their point? Is it that they are pro–lesbian marriage, or that they are pro–abuse of lesbians?

More insidious, and thus more disturbing, is their manipulation of (lies, damned lies and) statistics. They quote statistics about things like homosexual promiscuity left and right, but never once do they give statistics on heterosexual promiscuity. They quote one study that compared promiscuity of married and unmarried gay couples in the Netherlands, and give only the statistics from the married couples—from which I can only conclude that they were, in fact, better than those of the unmarried couples. So the majority of their arguments may sound impressive, but are in fact totally meaningless since they have no context.

And finally, some food for thought. They go on and on about the abnormally high incidence of long-term depression, drug and alcohol abuse, and suicide among gays and lesbians. Am I the only one who finds it likely that this has more to do with, oh, say, living in a society where they are stigmatized, discriminated against, and tormented by their peers, rather than how they get their kicks in the bedroom?

So on the balance, the article reads to me more like advocacy for homosexual marriage than against it. What disturbs me isn't that people write things like this—it's that they (and many others) undoubtedly believe everything they are saying at face value.

Category: Society

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