Family Research Council Spokes Refuses To Say If Homosexuality Is ‘A Disease’

This morning, during an appearance on CSPAN’s Washington Journal, Family Research Council Action’s Vice President Tom McClusky refused to say if he thought homosexuality is “disease” and an “illness” saying only, “we’re all human beings here,” before condemning gay people for demanding “special rights”:

CALLER JOBE: I want to thank Mr. McClusky for his fight against this homosexual disease we’ve got in this country…It’s a sick perverted thing that they’re doing, they’re trying to legitimize.

HOST: Is it a disease?

MCCLUSKY: I think the first think we need to remember is that we’re all human beings here, especially in this debate and everybody deserves respect. It’s when others are asking for things and for special rights and for special definitions, sometimes just for validation. I think that’s when you start running into problems.

Watch it:

Earlier in the program, McClusky conceded that expanding marriage to gays and lesbians won’t affect “my marriage directly” but argued that “it helps defining marriage down where it gets defined into nothing.” “We’ve seen that in other countries who have allowed for gay marriage and have had civil unions for longer… it starts affecting the whole community,” he added.

McClusky’s claims are undermined by the experiences of Massachusetts and Iowa, both of which allow same-sex marriage but have some of the lowest divorce rates in the nation. Massachusetts— which extended marriage to same-sex couples in 2004– recorded the “the lowest divorce rates in the entire country”; Iowa has also posted the lowest number of divorces since 1970.

In fact as FiveThirtyEight.com pointed out last year, “states which have tended to take more liberal policies toward gay marriage have tended also to have larger declines in their divorce rates,” while the seven states with the highest rates “all had constitutional prohibitions on same-sex marriage in place throughout 2008.” And although the causation may still be unclear, it’s certainly not the case that same sex marriage results in the disintegration of the institution as a whole.

“The Family Research Council (FRC) bills itself as ‘the leading voice for the family in our nation’s halls of power,’ but its real specialty is defaming gays and lesbians,” SPLC says. Indeed, so-called FRC “experts” (who most recently lobbied to preserve Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) have argued that “gaining access to children” “has been a long-term goal of the homosexual movement” and claimed that “[o]ne of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets of a new sexual order.” FRC President Tony Perkins has even described pedophilia as a “homosexual problem.”

Earlier this week, Tony Perkins, the group’s president, argued that gay relationships are “harmful” and endanger “physical health.”