Rick Perry: Homosexuality Is Like Alcoholism, Radical Gays Intolerant
Rick Perry, a Republican presidential candidate, equated homosexuality to alcoholism in his 2008 book, “On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting for,” and suggested “radical gay rights groups” are intolerant.
For the record, alcoholism is classified as a substance use disorder. Homosexuality is not a mental disorder at all.
Time Magazine’s Mark Benjamin writes today, “in a little-noticed passage in his first book, “On My Honor,†a encomium on the Boy Scouts published in 2008, Perry also drew a parallel between homosexuality and alcoholism. ‘Even if an alcoholic is powerless over alcohol once it enters his body, he still makes a choice to drink,’ he wrote. ‘And, even if someone is attracted to a person of the same sex, he or she still makes a choice to engage in sexual activity with someone of the same gender’.”
“In ‘On My Honor,’ Perry also punted on the exact origins of homosexuality. He wrote that he is ‘no expert on the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate,’ but that gays should simply choose abstinence. Perry’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on whether he maintains this view.”
Benjamin reminds us that, “President Obama has said repeatedly that people are born gay. Perry’s leading GOP rival, Mitt Romney, has remained coy about whether he thinks gays are born or made, recently saying that he is ‘in favor of gay rights,’ but not the right to marry. Rep. Michelle Bachmann called homosexuality a ‘sexual dysfunction’ as recently as 2004. ‘It is a very sad life,’ she said of homosexuality. ‘Its part of Satan to say that this is gay. It is anything but gay’.â€
“All of the GOP candidates, however, risk drifting away from the mainstream when it comes to civil rights for gays, a potential liability in the general election. A poll released late last month by the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights advocacy group, found that a majority of Americans now support marriage for same-sex couples, three quarters of men say they could be friends with a gay man and nearly 60% of Americans would not mind if their grand child were gay.”
Add to this what Igor Volsky of Think Progress just reported, that “Perry went on to say that he was ‘tolerant toward those who have a different sexual preference,’ but condemned ‘the agenda of radical gay rights groups that want to throw their sexual activity into the face of society, despite the decision by millions of families not to teach the gay lifestyle as an acceptable alternative’.†(Volsky has a screen shot from the book – go take a look.)
Steven Benen of the Washington Monthly, the man who delivered a stinging critique of Perry’s attempt to explain why Texas has the third-highest teen pregnancy rate in America, and why he thinks that’s OK, adds, “If, on the Crazy-O-Meter, Michele Bachmann calling homosexuality “part of Satan†registers as a 10, Perry’s published argument has to be at least a 9.5.”
“Greg Sargent asked, ‘[S]eriously: Does the Rick Perry campaign have any strategy at all to deal with the fact that a whole host of extreme views that almost certainly render him unelectable in a general election are right there in black and white, right under his own byline?'”
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(Hat tip to our friends at The Political Carnival)

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