LGBT People ‘Have Maybe 60 Years on Their Side’
A virulently anti-gay Australian Member of Parliament delivered a speech this week insisting, among other insane claims, that gay people have been around for only 60 years or so. That is false. The lawmaker, Bob Katter, also claims there are more gay people in Australia than in other countries and as a result young men commit suicide at a higher rate. Katter also thinks only gay men and drug users get HIV, and blames gay men for what he claims are 72 children who were infected via transfusions of blood that contained HIV.
Almost none of what Katter says is correct.
Katter, who was one of just four out of 150 Australian lawmakers to vote “no” on a bill legalizing same-sex marriage, was the last MP to speak before the vote, Buzzfeed News reports.
“The people advocating this proposition tonight, the LGBTIs, have maybe 60 years on their side,” Katter, who calls being gay a “persuasion,” told his fellow Members of Parliament. “I have 3.5 million years of genetic programming on my side, because we human beings, they tell us, have been around for 3.5 million years.”
Metro reports Katter made a similar claim later the same day.
“His outrageous and homophobic rant on Wednesday night, which came just hours after politicans voted in favour of a same-sex marriage bill, also saw him claim that gay people have only existed ‘for maybe 60 years’.”
He also linked being gay with suicide, a false and dangerous accusation. At least one study has shown that teens who grow up in more anti-gay or conservative environments are at greater risk of attempting suicide. Many LGBT people believe attacks on the LGBT community from the religious right and other anti-gay activists contribute to such an environment.
“If you analyze why this country continuously has the highest male juvenile suicide rates in the world – why is that?” Katter asked rhetorically, as Buzzfeed notes. “There is something going wrong here. We have an extraordinary incidence of homosexual behavior in Australia compared with other nations, and I think the people who have been speaking for this bill would agree with me on that.”
Buzzfeed also reports that “Australia does frequently rank as the country with one of the higher rates of youth male suicide in the world, but there is no data to suggest that “homosexual behavior” is higher in Australia than any other comparable nation.”
Katter claimed that two mothers at an anti-gay event shared with him they were told by a school official it would be mandatory for their sons to go to school wearing dresses.
“The first one started off by saying: ‘My son told me that he had to go to school tomorrow in a dress,’ and I said, ‘My boys will never, ever go in public in a dress.’ I rang up the headmaster of the school, and he more or less told me, ‘It’s the orders of the education department, and you’ll send your kid to school in a dress.'”
And then there’s this disgusting claim about HIV/AIDS:
“I think 72 children were injected with AIDS from the blood that was given. It was hushed up. It was amazing to me that it never got any publicity at all. I actually had to ring up to verify whether the newspaper report I’d read was correct. There were 724 AIDS cases in this country, and no-one ever brought up the fact all of those AIDS cases, apart from the poor little children who got it through blood transfusion – whatever figure it was –were either intravenous drug users or men participating in homosexual behavior.”
Buzzfeed calls it “unclear” where this information Katter claims to be true came from.
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