New Mexico’s Steve Pearce Also Suggested Same-Sex Marriage Was All About ‘Access to Benefits’
U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce’s office isn’t distancing him from comments he made a decade ago about LGBT people, people living with HIV/AIDS, and same-sex marriage.
“What’s going on with gay marriage is … the redefining of a social institution,” Pearce, a Republican from New Mexico, said in an unearthed 2008 video, as HuffPost reports. “And the redefinition has serious downside results.”
Rep. Pearce said making marriage for same-sex couples legal would lead to rampant fraud.
“Where this all gets headed is toward the access to benefits, and so you can imagine that a person would say, ‘Oh all these people in California don’t have access to AIDS treatments.’ … They might say this to themselves: ‘I’m gonna marry everybody in California with AIDS,’ and suddenly they’ve got access to the, maybe the benefit program, the health insurance that a single person has.”
It’s unclear if Rep. Pearce is also against people living with HIV/AIDS having access to health care.
Pearce is running unopposed for the Republican nomination for governor of New Mexico. There are four Democrats battling for the Democratic nomination.
In the video Pearce also claimed there are children across the United States suing their parents for marrying a person of the same-sex.
“Congressman Pearce believes the government should not be involved in redefining marriage. He personally believes marriage is between a man and a woman,” Pearce spokesperson Keeley Christensen told HuffPost. “The issue, however, is settled law.”
HuffPost notes that Christensen “mostly did not distance the seven-term congressman from the remarks.”
In 2004 Pearce said “same-sex marriages do not advance our culture at all.”
In his 2013 memoir, Just Fly The Plane, Stupid!, Pearce wrote that the “wife is to voluntarily submit, just as the husband is to lovingly lead and sacrifice.”
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license