Media: Washington Posts allows anti-gay insert filled with factual errors

Here's the PDF of the insert.

The Washington Post insert, which sought to dissuade readers of the links between the gay rights and civil rights movement, claimed homosexuality was proven to a choice, rather than genetic. It relied on a study by Paul Cameron, an anti-gay doctor who was thrown out the American Psychological Association in 1983 for misrepresenting the findings of studies, and has since been disowned by most of the evangelical right.

Like any newspaper, the Post has the right to reject advertisements. It has less latitude in rejecting advertisements on issues of race under the District’s civil rights ordinance, but this does not protect gays.

Using the same study, it also claims that gays with long-term partners and without AIDS live on average to be 41, and says that banning gay marriage would avert “an emerging public health crisis.”

The insert claims Dr. Martin Luther King as someone who would have opposed gay rights, even though his widow has said she believes the gay and lesbian rights movements are part of a broader civil rights movement.

Among other claims, Cameron purported that out of all the mass-murders in the US over the past seventeen years, homosexuals killed at least 68 percent of the victims, 29 percent of homosexuals urinate on their partners and 17 percent ingest human feces.

The average life span of a homosexual, Cameron wrote, is 39 years; fewer than 2 percent survive to the age of 65.

“If these statistics are even close to reliable,” writes Derek Grier, the pastor whose church paid for the insert, “this is not only a moral issue, but an emerging public health crisis.”

And my personal favorite part:

Grier also asserts that homosexuality is a choice.

“If homosexuality is a genetic trait and homosexuals were true to their orientation,” Grier adds, “the trait would die in the first generation.”

I love when people say this, because they demonstrate their absolute lack of knowledge of genetics. Since there aren't genetic diseases that are fatal and all, and those don't go away. Beyond the simple existence of recessive genes, trying to explain to an idiot like this anything about non-Mendelian inheritance makes their Punnett-square-filled brains explode.