‘Homosexuality more dangerous than smoking’
The Christian conservative organization that says Terry Branstad is too liberal to be governor has now provided us with another great gem.
Homosexuality is worse for your health than smoking, their leader tells us.
The Iowa Family Policy Center’s Chuck Hurley offered up a Centers For Disease Control study on HIV and sexually contracted diseases and compared that with a one on cancer to come up with some interesting takes on smoking and homosexuality.
“The secondhand impacts of certain homosexual acts are arguably more destructive, and potentially more costly to society than smoking,” Hurley said in a press release. “Homosexual activity is certainly more dangerous for the individuals who engage in it than is smoking.”
Which gets us back to the central question in the discussion about homosexuality in America: Are people born gay or at some point in their lives do they become gay?
For the majority of us of certain generations (X and younger), that answer is obvious — which will over time render irrelevant this business.
Homosexuals seeking to go straight are sort of like the light-skinned African Americans of former generations who sought to pass for white by staying out of the sun, straightening their hair and taking other measures.
The results may be cosmetically effective. And some people may be fooled.
But in the end, it just isn’t real. And neither is Hurley’s absurd argument.
There is a way to make homosexuality safe, and it’s shockingly similar to the approach straight people take toward the same end: monogamy.
There’s really no way to smoke safely — even though I wish there were.
I’m not a heavy smoker or even an every day smoker. It’s a pack or maybe two a week of American Spirit Ultra Lights for me.
More than one fellow smoker tells me they envy my relatively light habit.
But there is no magic number with cigarettes, no threshold where they go from recreational vice to suicidal means.
Is it five smokes a day? Is it two packs? Do the filters really matter?
The choice to smoke is a risk. The fact of being gay isn’t — unless we live in a world in which the politics and philosophies of the Iowa Family Policy Center prevail, pushing more gays into masquerade-ball lives where they seek to closet their homosexuality instead of expressing it openly in marriages. And smoke-free ones at that.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, now promoting his book, has the top odds of Republicans being mentioned as potential contenders for the presidency in 2012, according to the English-bookmaking site Ladbrokes.
Romney is now at 8 to 1. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin comes in at 16-1 and Iowa Caucuses winner Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, another former governor, has 20 to 1 odds with Ladbrokes.
The betting lines are for winning the big show, the November 2012 general election for president.
For his part, President Obama is just over even odds at 11 to 10.
Instead of pinning their hopes on the health-care polls and the ephemeral nature of the American public on such matters, Republicans should be paying close attention to changing demographics, and numbers that could handicap the GOP for generations if it doesn’t do some fast public-relations work with the issue of immigration.
According to The New York Times, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that minorities will be a majority of the nation’s overall population in about three decades. What’s more, the majority of Americans 17 and under will be minorities in about one decade.
The Times story included this question:
“Will America’s older, largely white population — through the ballot box and collective self-interest — support young people who are now much different culturally from themselves and their own children? Will they vote, for example, to raise taxes for schools that serve young people of ethnic backgrounds different from theirs?” asked a study released last week by Professors Kenneth M. Johnson of the University of New Hampshire and Daniel Lichter of Cornell.
Evan Osnos has a brilliant profile of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley in the March 8 issue of The New Yorker magazine. In it he recounts one of my favorite Mayor Daley stories.
In March 2003, Daley, weary of debating the future of Meigs Field, a small airport by Lake Michigan, sent bulldozers in to gouge giant Xs on the runway in the middle of the night — under police escort.
Daley’s justification: that he had no time to warn anyone about the actions because terrorists might use the airport to attack Chicago. CV
Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa newspaperman who writes for The Carroll Daily Times Herald and offers columns for Cityview.
