In two weeks Arizona voters could elect a Trump-endorsed Republican and former TV news reporter who just approved an ad featuring what many would assume is a mild-mannered small business owner who apparently was thinking of voting for Democrat Katie Hobbs for governor but says she’s just “too liberal” so he has to vote for Kari Lake because of “President Biden’s” inflation.
Lake is a far-right extremist who says Democrats are pushing a “demonic agenda.” She is also anti-immigrant, an election denier, and an anti-science Christian nationalist who opposes mask or vaccine mandates, claims she has not been vaccinated, and promoted hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as “lifesaving drugs” in the fight against COVID-19. Lake opposes legal protections for LGBTQ people.
In reality, as Mother Jones‘ David Corn reveals, the man in the ad who describes himself as “a husband and father of five” and runs “a small business in Phoenix” is a viciously anti-LGBTQ pastor who as far back as 2014 has preached outrageous and dangerous lies about gay men.
Justin Erickson is the head of Hard Wired Coaching, but he is also a “homophobic bigot” who “has spread vicious falsehoods about gay and lesbian people, casting them as depraved, wicked, and criminally-inclined. He has vilified Islam. And his church, which holds services in the gym of a charter school, demands the subservience of women.”
He does all this as the “pastor at the fundamentalist Desert Bible Church in Scottsdale.”
According to Mother Jones, Pastor Erickson – most gay men will be surprised to learn – claims that three in ten gay men have had over 1000 different sexual partners, and some have over 300 different sexual partners every year, which means on average they have sex once a day six days a week 52 weeks a year.
If you’re math-inclined you’ll find the next statistic even more startling.
According to Erickson, most gay men, including those who have over 1000 sexual partners in their lives, don’t even live to be 40.
And half of them have AIDS, Erickson falsely claimed.
In fact, it’s all false, and according to Mother Jones, “reckless.”
“In a 2014 sermon on homosexuality,” Mother Jones reports, “Erickson proclaimed that ‘fifty percent of the homosexual LGBT-Now-Q community, 50 percent have AIDS. One in twenty are child molesters, on the sex offender registry.’ These numbers were way off. In 2014, Gallup found that about 9 million Americans self-identified as LGBT, and a different study concluded that about 700,000 gay and bisexual men were living with HIV, far fewer than half the gay and lesbian population. Moreover, Erickson’s stats about LGBT child molesters were dangerously false.”
“Under his math, about half of the 800,000 or so people on sex offender registries would have to be gay, yet according to one study, heterosexual pedophiles outnumbers homosexual pedophiles by 11-to-1. He was recklessly and inaccurately depicting LGBT people as threats to children.”
There’s more.
The man in the Kari Lake-approved ad has also claimed that “80 percent of homosexuals have STDs, and—how sad is this?—2 percent, 2 percent of homosexuals in the LGBT community make it to the age of 65. The average lifespan for an average person in our world is 75. Those is the LGBT community, most of them don’t make it to 39.”
All of these claims are false.
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Mother Jones reports there “seems to be no scientific basis for these claims. Though HIV still presented a health risk for gay men, the American Journal of Public Health in 2016 noted, ‘no general population-based survey, to the best of our knowledge, has examined whether self-identified lesbians, bisexuals, or gay men are more likely than are heterosexuals to experience early mortality.'”
“Erickson claimed that the ‘average homosexual has had in a lifetime over 500 sexual partners. Eighty percent admit that half of them are absolute total strangers. Thirty percent of those who commit homosexuality, 30 percent, have had over 1000 partners. Three hundred different people a year.’ A 2013 study found that the mean number of male sexual partners for gay and bisexual in the preceding year men was 2.3—which indicates the ‘average’ gay man does not have hundreds of sexual partners.”
What about that “homosexual love quarrel” claim?
Erickson says that in Los Angeles, the LAPD assume when they see a vicious, brutal murder, it’s the result of a “homosexual love quarrel.”
“The LAPD has a statistic,” Erickson claimed, “when they, when the officers come on to a crime scene and there is a murder and the murder itself has been an absolute bludgeoning, multiple stab wounds, multiple gunshot wounds, they immediately begin with the premise that this is a homosexual love quarrel.”
Lake has been highly criticized for her associations with other far-right extremists and extremism.
In August Lake was slammed for endorsing an antisemitic Oklahoma Republican candidate who supports a “white nationalist and neo-Nazi conspiracy theory that is a variation on the so-called ‘great replacement’ theory,” the Arizona Mirror reported.
“The theory, also known as the Kalergi Plan, posits that global elites — especially Jewish people — are trying to rid the world of white people through immigration and interracial breeding,” the Mirror explained. “The idea has led to deadly violence.”
Last week a Lake campaign aide tweeted an image of a bloody human sacrifice and wished everyone a “Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”
This week Lake threatened to shut down the Super Bowl in a rant with lies about immigrants.
“You want to tell me, that a bunch of football teams, owned by billionaires, are okay with fentanyl pouring across our border at a record level, killing young people? The No. 1 killer is fentanyl. 18-45. It’s killing a generation of people,” she said, calling for U.S. Military to go after immigrants crossing the border unlawfully.
One of the problems with Lake’s comments is fentanyl is not “pouring across our border at a record level” because of immigrants.
The vast majority of fentanyl being brought across the border into the U.S. is being trafficked for personal use and for illegal sales by U.S. citizens, not asylum-seeking immigrants.
Watch the Lake-approved ad below or at this link.