If you live in Indiana, you can now get a special license plate, a portion of the proceeds from which will go to the Indiana Youth Group, which works with issues related to LGBT teens across that state. If you are a normal person, your reaction to this is somewhere between shrugging and being happy that an LGBT youth group has been added to the myriad organizations which benefit from customized license plates. If you are a wingnut from the American Family Association, you are blowing a gasket:
A pro-family activist has said Indiana ignored the health issues involved in the homosexual lifestyle when it decided to issue an LGBT license plate.
[...]
Micah Clark, Executive Director for the American Family Association, said the DMV’s decision to approve the plate was troubling when one considers the tremendous health risks associated with the homosexual lifestyle.
The Center for Disease Control says that practicing homosexual men accounted for 61% of new HIV infections, despite being only 2% of the U.S. population. Homosexual men aged 13-29 accounted for 27% of the new cases.
“You have to question what the DMV was thinking when they approved a license plate for a group which recruits teens into the homosexual lifestyle. Since health risks do not seem to matter, what is to prevent a cigar club from now getting a license plate from the DMV?”
Oh, Micah is one of those really, really confused wingnuts who still thinks that gays recruit. Poor thing. Most of the wingnuts who believe that died in the 80′s. How did reality miss him?
Also, we will simply note that it’s still grotesque to watch “pro-family” leaders, who seriously do not care about how many gay people die, whether from being bullied to death, or from AIDS, concern troll about the “health risks of homosexual behavior.” If they actually cared, they would get on board with real, grown-up sexual education, for all people, including LGBT people, and with making prevention a priority. They would not be spewing alternate-reality hatred about groups “recruiting teens into the homosexual lifestyle.” As usual, it is their ideology they care about, and nothing more.
One more thing, to the journalist who wrote the piece: it is highly misleading to refer to Clark as a “pro-family activist.” He is the spokesperson for a well-known and certified hate group, and nothing more.
How can homosexuality be so utterly appalling, yet so infinitely appealing, in the same breath?
Let’s put Micah into a chair and use some aversion therapies on him like were used on Samuel Brinton to see if Micah’s sexual orientation changes, to see if he can be recruited into a “homosexual lifestyle”. If his orientation doesn’t change (and it won’t), we can then call him a hypocrite.
I wouldn’t refer to the articles’ writer as a “journalist” since a quick glance at some of his other posts seem to indicate religious right activism and anti-gay slants on his carefully selected stories.
What do you expect from a state that use to have the strongest organization in the country of the KKK? For many of these wingnuts and bigots in Indiana, it’s part of their proud ignorant heritage.
As a lifelong Hoosier, I am appaled by this man’s comments. I can safely say that he does not represent me or any of my friends in the state.
Cameron I think you are totally right. I wont lie at first I thought you were probably just paranoid, but I read it, and then just had to read the titles of his other peices. This “journalist” guy is a big douche.
“Mom, how should I ask Ashley to go to prom with me….oh, wow, look at that licence plate on the car in front of us! Never mind, I’m taking my best friend Sean! I can’t wait to be gay with him!”
Of course, what they leave out of those statistics are a few important ones. It is not necessarily gay men who are producing those new infections. It is men who have sex with men.
About 14% of gay men are HIV positive. The other 86% are not. Not good, but a Different picture entirely. And of course, lesbians are at almost 0%, unless they have sex with men or share needles.
And of course, if gay people would be allowed to be normal, I suspect this would drop even further.
What about the health risks surrounding the Indy 500
lots of cars going really fast is an invitation to crashes.
This sick man is basically apauding the disparities of gay kids (and adults) just to promote the abusive policies that made those disparities happen in the first place.
He may be an activist, but he certainly is not “pro family.”
Just for the record, I’m from England, and quite frankly, I have to take a step back and wonder how people like this, vomiting forth homophobic hate, are allowed to have a public platform in the USA. Where I live, they’d be regarded either as a sad, pathetic joke, or, if they insisted that they were serious, they’d commit political suicide.
These people are the modern day equivalent of Julius Streicher, peddling crude, lowbrow, sewer-level drivel, absolutely stinking of inhuman hatred, and I’m wondering when these people age going to get around to publishing the Christofascist version of “Der Giftpilz”. Because their attitudes emanate *exactly* the vile and recrudescently rabid character that was last seen doing the rounds when Streicher was strutting around the streets of Nuremberg in his bathing trunks carrying a whip.
From Rick “Frothy Mix” Santorum, through Michelle Bachmann and her quack husband (who is manifestly hiding something in his closet worthy of law enforcement), to Rick “Brokeback Fashion” Perry, not to mention the likes of Paul Cameron and the über-wingnuts clustered around Fred Phelps, I have to ask what the hell went wrong over there?
Observing the wingnuts in action in the USA, I cannot help but think that I’m watching some sort of Danse Macabre, a bizarre circus that was meant to stay within the realms of Dante’s writing, but somehow managed to will itself into life. How do you live with these life forms? And how come you haven’t got together and organised *seriously* to kick them out of the public arena, and back into the political equivalent of the Mesozoic era, where they belong?
Tell you what, send some of them over to Europe, and let them experience a taste of the best hospitality that Stonewall has to offer them. :)
@ Neil
They have the First Amendment, an admirable thing but a double edged sword in instances such as this one, methinks.
Anyway, I thought the AFA didn’t believe in AIDS anymore…
@ Neil, how do you think WE feel having to live around nutballs like that (and I live in a fairly liberal (blue state)). I remember that book you mentioned Der Giftpilz (the poison mushroom) from books I’ve seen on the history of nazi Germany. I believe it was a children’s book with 2 ‘Aryan’ kids talking to a mushroom that had a ‘Jewish’ face on it.
I’m from Indiana, and my plate reads EMPATHY. It doesn’t seem likely that these people would choose a message like that. But I have a big list of suggestions that might suit them better, including CRAZIES and IDIOTIC: http://daisybrain.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/seven/
Wow. Such hatred here. It’s a sad day when a sexual sin is glorified, but no reason to be hateful. God loves all of us sinners, and we should, too. Love the sinner, not the sin…and it IS a sin. It is what it is…for now. All of us will have to speak for our CHOICES one day…to God himself.
Or not.
In the meantime, will you love-the-sim-hate-the-sinner types just shut up and mind your own business?
@Laura
too bad it’s not a sin :D
Homophobia is a sin. Gay is good.
Laura? Wow! Such a lot of hatred in Fundyworld. It’s a sad day when gays are demeaned & reduced to the nonsensical ‘hate the sun, love the sinner’. Do you only speak & think in worn-out old religious cliches or have you ever thought for yourself? My guess is that you do not possess the capacity for original thought but rely on a bible & a pastor to tell you what to think. Too bad.
Ahh, “choices”? How wrong can you be? And when did you choose to be straight? When did you choose to be xtian? That ‘choice’ meme is pretty outdated too. But you have certainly chosen to be ignorant.
when I was younger, I was a homophobe. but then through prayer and reading the Bible, I realized I was gay and stopped being so homophobic
^ true story
Oops, I mean ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’. Then again, hate the ‘sun’ is an interesting slip.
That’s very interesting to know Denise. I reluctantly read the bible at sunday school & church & saw only hate & destruction & a brutal, murderous God. So I stopped reading it.
@Devin then you were reading the wrong parts
@Peter Hargmier
Free speech only means that they won’t be thrown in jail for what they believe or say. That’s ALL it means. Ridiculing someone and preventing them from spewing their hate through social pressure does NOT violate their rights.
Denise, I disagree. There may be love parts to the bible mostly found in the NT but they do not make the brutal parts disappear. I consider myself to be a xtian, but I do not read the bible because I have chronic PTSD & the bible is detrimental to my mental health. Seeing the way the bible is used I feel it is detrimental to a lot of people’s wellbeing.
@Devin I know where you’re coming from. honestly I myself am sometimes intimidated by it because of the way people use it, but I remind myself they are not using it for its intended purpose
the brutality of the OT is in there so we can tell the difference between then and now. before Christ came everything God made the Jews do, especially the law, was to prepare them for Christ
the law of Moses was written for the Jews after they came out of Egypt because they were ignorant and had no moral compass. they needed God to tell them exactly what to do and how and where and when they had to do it, so that’s what God did. He gave them a law because that was what they needed. but when Christ came, He fulfilled the purpose of the law and enforced the “two greatest commandments” which is to love God and love your neighbor as yourself
the fact that there is brutality and hatred in the Bible doesn’t mean that it condones it. people who use it as a tool of hatred are ignorant and don’t understand what they’re doing, just like the Jews were back in old testament times
Denise, the god in your bible ordered most of that brutality and hatred, the bible certainly condones it.