Time and time again American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer has advocated for the criminalization of homosexuality, and has been quite disturbed by the recent repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and court rulings that found DOMA to be unconstitutional. So today he posted a column arguing for a new campaign to “reclaim the ‘D’ word”—discrimination—and saying that government should discriminate against gays and lesbians to stop them from “destroying themselves through non-normative sexual behavior.”
Fischer claims that it is ironic that gays don’t face discrimination even as the government wages an “all-out war against cigarette smoking,” condemns “pedophilia, rape, bestiality” and punishes people who “burgle houses, drive while drunk, eat the faces off homeless people, gun down servicemen on military bases, embezzle funds from employers or clients, or beat their wives.”
Public policy is about discriminating against behaviors that are socially destructive and corrosive to the social fabric. So, we rightly discriminate against people who rip off convenience stores, burgle houses, drive while drunk, eat the faces off homeless people, gun down servicemen on military bases, embezzle funds from employers or clients, or beat their wives.
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We discriminate against adults, even priests, who have sex with children. We discriminate against teachers who have affairs with students. We discriminate against teachers who moonlight in the porn industry. We discriminate against students who engage in sexting. We discriminate against rapists. We discriminate against those who expose sexual partners unknowingly to the AIDS virus. We discriminate against those adults who commit statutory rape against minors. We discriminate against homosexuals and prostitutes by refusing to allow them to give blood.
The point is this: we discriminate against sexually immoral and inappropriate behavior all the time, and homosexual behavior is sexually immoral and inappropriate.
As the president of the American Family Association, Tim Wildmon, has often said, homosexual behavior is “immoral, unnatural and unhealthy.” It is contrary to “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” as the Founders would have put it. It puts the human body to sexual uses which are utterly contrary to the way in which the human body is designed. And it is accompanied by a raft of pathologies, including HIV/AIDS and a host of other debilitating sexually transmitted diseases. It shortens the lifespan of those who engage in it by as much as 30 years.
In other words, this is behavior that no rational society should ever condone, endorse, subsidize, or enshrine. We’ve waged all-out war against cigarette smoking because it cuts six to seven years off the lives of smokers. We should care no less about those who are destroying themselves through non-normative sexual behavior.
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Bottom line: it’s time for conservatives to unhesitatingly reclaim the “D” word, dust it off, and use it without apology. A rational culture that cares about its people will in fact discriminate against adultery, pedophilia, rape, bestiality, and, yes, homosexual behavior.
