An economist and professor at San Diego State University says his blog posts, including one that called for a tax on gay sex and another that called women “whores” were satirical, and says he himself is gay.
“I am a gay man in a long-term, committed relationship and these charges of homophobia deeply hurt both me and my family,” Joseph Sabia says in an official statement released through the university.
Sabia’s appearance, at the invitation of Republicans before a House committee hearing against a $15 minimum wage, was canceled when his blog posts, written between 2001 and 2003 and since deleted, surfaced.
“I regret the hurtful and disrespectful language I used as a satirical college opinion writer 20 years ago,” Sabia now says, adding that his current work is “a more accurate representation of my more than 14-year career as an applied microeconomist.”
But the fact remains that even if his posts were satirical (as NCRM reported Wednesday), his conclusions were anything but funny.
For example, in his post “satirically” calling for a tax on gay sex, Sabia wrote – apparently not satirically – that people with HIV or heart disease bear sole responsibility for their plight, and “should not look to the public dole” for help.
Calling for a tax on gay sex was not the only troubling post Sabia wrote.
In “College Girls: Unpaid Whores,” Sabia “satirically” wrote: “The chant of Gen. Y college babes might as well be ‘We’re here, we’re whores, get used to it!'”
That 2002 post concluded – and apparently also not satirically – that “sexual activity has historically been more frequent among gay men than among heterosexuals.”
As a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Cornell at the time, Sabia did not cite any research to prove his claim.
But he continued, again with no supporting data:
This is because there is no civilizing female force in the gay community. Whenever men want to have sex, they just go ahead and do it. Neither of the partners has much of an incentive to refrain from sex since monogamous relationships and traditional familes are generally not the final goals of these partnerships. Recently, the behavior of young heterosexuals has begun to resemble that of gay men because young women are imitating men in their sexual promiscuity.
The result of young women’s abdication of responsibility has been significant moral decay on America’s college campuses. Can the moral high ground ever be reclaimed? Perhaps…one church pew at a time.
Sabia also wrote that “several verses in the Scriptures refer to the important role that women have in the moral uplift of men.”
His bio on his now-deleted blog includes this statement: “Joe first became interested in politics during the 1992 presidential campaign when his grandmother urged him to listen to Rush Limbaugh. From that moment, he became a proud right-winger.”
KPBS adds, “According to SDSU, Sabia had planned at the committee hearing to cite his research showing that minimum wage hikes do not lead to higher poverty rates but would lead to higher prices and ‘substantial’ job losses.”
This study appears to refute that claim.