Coburn staffer: Porn makes you gay

Dave Weigel, the intrepid Washington Independent reporter, was at the Omni Shoreham last week for the Value Voters conference, when Tom Coburn's chief of staff, Michael Schwartz embarked on a rambling explanation of the perils of homosexuality.

Schwartz, a longtime conservative activist who has been with Oklahoma Republican for 15 years, first claimed that homosexuality is wrong because most 10-year-old boys have an innate hatred for it.

Then he began discoursing on the evils of pornography, echoing a friend who once told him that all porn was gay porn because it turned men "inwards."

His conclusion: If you told 10-year-old boys that looking at naked pictures of women would make them gay, then they wouldn't be buying Playboy.

“Pornography is a blight... It is a disaster. It is one of those silent diseases in our society that we haven’t been able to overcome very well. Now, I may be getting politically incorrect here. And it’s been a few years, but not that many, since I was closely associated with pre-adolescent boys, boys around 10 years of age. But it is my observation that boys of that age have less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people. They speak badly about homosexuality. And that’s because they don’t want to be that way. They don’t want to fall into it.” Schwartz told the crowd about Jim Johnson, a friend of his who turned an old hotel into a hospice for gay men dying of AIDS. “One of the things he said to me,” said Schwartz, “that I think is an astonishingly insightful remark… he said ‘All pornography is homosexual pornography, because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards.” There were murmurs and gasps from the crowd. “Now, think about that,” said Schwartz. “And if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s going to want to get a copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants! You know, that’s a good comment, it’s a good point, and it’s a good thing to teach young people.”

h/t Josh Marshall

Glenn Thrush is senior staff writer at Politico Magazine.