Bryan Fischer says the fact that Jason Collins is gay “proves” that people are not born that way. Fischer notes that Collins has a twin brother who is heterosexual (as far as we know) and therefore Collins wasn’t born gay but has chosen to enter into “the homosexual lifestyle.”
READ: Responses To NBA’s Jason Collins Coming Out Are Incredibly Supportive
Fischer is not a geneticist, nor a medical professional, nor a scientist, but the Director of Issue Analysis for the American Family Association (AFA), a certified anti-gay hate group.
Fischer this morning writes that Collins, the NBA center who came out just 24-hours ago, “has become an instant national hero to the deviancy cabal and their allies. President Obama gave him a personal phone call, and Michelle gave him a shout out, saying ‘We’ve got your back,’ perhaps not the most felicitous turn of phrase under the circumstances.”
Get it?
Sometimes Bryan Fischer and his right wing cohorts, like Fox News host Todd Starnes, act like they’re nine years old. But I digress.
Saying that any NBA team that hires Collins, who is a free agent currently, will “introduce unwelcome sexual tension into the locker room,” Fischer is doubtful Collins will ever play professionally again, and that he knew and “flash[ed] the rainbow for maximum personal benefit.”
Fischer also proclaimed similar consequences during the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and we all know how very “disruptive” that was — not at all.
Fischer’s real focus, which is so unsupportable by scientific evidence as to warrant only a third of his column today despite making it the subject of his title, is this:
Jason Collins has an identical twin, Jaron, who was “astounded†to discover that his brother had entered into the homosexual lifestyle. He, despite sharing Jason’s identical DNA, is as straight as a laser beam. Identical twins share straits that are genetically determined: height, skin color, eye color, hair color and so forth. If homosexuality is a genetically-caused sexual preference, Jaron Collins should be as gay as his brother. He’s not.
Fischer cites one study that found that among identical twins where one is gay, only 6.7 percent of their siblings are — a low rate if you assume that identical twins are 100 percent identical in every way.
What we do know, scientifically, is that if there is no “gay gene,” there are other biological reasons why people are gay or born gay. In “Did Scientists Just Find The Gay Gene? Or An LGBT On-Off Switch?,” The New Civil Rights Movement explored the news that there are switches, called “epi-marks,” which control how our genes behave.
But identical twins are not 100 percent identical in every way, and it’s foolish to think they are. Fischer is not only foolish, he’s willing to go way out on a limb, like last week when he claimed the government had labeled the Southern Baptist Convention — 16 million Christians in the U.S. — a hate group because the military, he claimed, blocked access to the SBC website.
“Basically, the U.S. military has classified the Southern Baptist Convention as a hate group — the entire denomination,†Fischer repeatedly proclaimed.
It turned out, the SBC’s website was infested with malware, and that’s why service members using military computers could not access it and it was labeled “hostile.”
Bryan Fischer only tells the parts of the story that support his hate. And who can blame him? It’s literally how he makes his living.