Missouri school board member Hardy Billington ran a newspaper ad in a local paper supporting a “Don’t Say Gay” bill, that falsely claims that gay people die 10 to 30 years early, and claims homosexuality is more deadly than cigarette smoking.
Blogger Joe Jervis, who first published the story, writes:
Butler County Republican Party co-chair Hardy Billington has published the above lie-filled ad in Poplar Bluff’s Daily American Republic in support of Missouri’s pending “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Billington, a Baptist deacon, is running for reelection to the Poplar Bluff school board.
Jervis points to an interview with Billington who touts his accomplishment as a school board member:
Before I was president of the board, they weren’t doing the Pledge of Allegiance at Senior High for about 16 years. The board members and I passed in our by-laws that every student would have the opportunity to do the Pledge of Allegiance at least once a week as well as have 30 seconds to reflect.
As it turns out, Billington is a very religious man. His Facebook page is loaded with references about God, and even the Rapture. Also, it’s loaded with anti-gay rhetoric, and the insinuation that all gay people have HIV/AIDS because of “the gay lifestyle.”
Billington is a man of research. Faulty, stupid, ignorant research that supports his anti-gay hatred, that is. Including the thoroughly debunked “research” of Paul Cameron.
Take the Facebook note he posted on April 27, and again on April 29. He offers an extensive list of reasons why gay people die young. Of course, he took them from a website, Citizens for Parents’ Rights, which he had to access using the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine” because it’s not published anymore. But hey, it was once, so why bother with science or recent scientific studies. (Billington probably forces students to use books from the 1950’s too, because hey, they were believed to be accurate once, right?)
(By the way, here’s the guy who started Citizens for Parents’ Rights.)
Here are a few excerpts from Svchool Board member Hardy billing ton’s Facebook note that he thinks support his lie that gay people die 10 to 30 years earlier than average:
Typical homosexual behavior includes regular contact with fecal matter from oneself and from sexual partners, tragically reversing several centuries of learning about cleanliness, and thus several centuries of growing lifespan. Homosexual behavior makes no more sense than playing in the toilet.
All available evidence indicates that the lifespan of practicing homosexual persons is drastically shortened by their behavior. No reliable study indicates otherwise. The lifespan topic is taboo among homosexual advocates because the evidence is so damaging to their case.
As early as 1858, G. Tardieu reported on the age distribution of males imprisoned in France for sodomy. Of the 216 who ages were given, the age range from under 15 to 69, with a median age of under 25. Eliminating all under 18, the median age rises to almost 40.
In 1914, M. Hirschfeld reported on German males convicted of involvement in sodomy. The age distribution ranged from under 15 to over 50, with the median of 24 years. Since “over 50” was the last category, we cannot determine just how many, if any, attain the age of 65. But only 9 % were over 50.
In the late 1930s and 1940s, Kinsey and his investigators spent more than 12 years seeking out and interviewing homosexuals. Because Kinsey and his colleagues were regarded as sexual liberators, homosexuals were eager to volunteer for his study. There is no reason to believe that his sample was not representative of all age groups available. Yet fewer than 1% of his homosexuals, male as well as female, were over the age of 65.
The Mattachine Society, the earliest of the “gay rights” organizations, gathered together a representative group of homosexuals for Evelyn Hooker to study in her highly influential 1950s study. The oldest of the 30 subjects was 50, the next oldest was 44, and the median age was 33.
Pedro Zamora, 22, a well-known AIDS educator and a cast member of “The Real World” on MTV, died of complications from AIDS today at Mercy Hospital in Miami. Partly because he was among few young people speaking out about AIDS, partly because of his heart throb looks and easy manner, Zamora became one of the most sought-after speakers on the disease after he tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, in 1989 at the age of 17. He took his prevention message into American living rooms as a young gay man with HIV on “The Real World.” He would tell students that he got the virus through unprotected sex and that he would probably not live to reach 30. Before a television appearance in New York last August, Zamora fell ill with a neurological disorder, progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, which causes rapid deterioration. He had been hospitalized since October 14th. Source: Mireya Navarro, “Life of 22 years ends, but not before many heard message on AIDS, The New York Times; November 12, 1994.
In 1998, another study using four contemporary databases suggested that homosexual activity may be associated with a lifespan shortened by 20 to 30 years. Source: Cameron, P., Cameron, K., Playfair, WL., ” Does Homosexual Activity Shorten Life? “, Psychological Reports, 1998, 83, pp. 847-66.
Lastly, Billington offers this “conclusion,” that is the text of his newspaper ad:
Study after study reveals that homosexuality, whether male or female, can take anywhere from 10, 20 to 30 years off of someone’s lifespan. With all the attention on smoking, which the National Cancer Institute says takes from 7 to 10 years off someone’s life, why not the same human outcry on homosexuality? Here’s a behavior that’s killing people 2 to 3 times the rate of smoking, yet nobody seems to care. In fact, we are encouraging and affirming individuals into the “gay” lifestyle. If you truly love someone, you would steer them away from self-destructive behaviors, rather than towards them, shouldn’t you? Homosexuals need our tough love, not blind love, the kind of love that is going to love them no matter what they say and do. We must extend that helping hand and say ” I think your worth saving, let’s work on it together.”
Hardy Billington is spreading anti-gay hate and lies. He is unfit to be on any school board, and, as New Civil Rights Movement author Scott Rose wrote recently regarding another school board member who is creating an environment of anti-gay hate, students, should they feel bullied, have options they should consider taking.
The U.S. Department of Education along with U.S. law prohibits schools from engaging in behavior like Billington is exhibiting.
Word to the wise.