Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council this week hosted Republican National Committeeman Dave Agema, and the pair both agreed on their opposition to the homosexual “lifestyle”, which they said should be treated like drug or alcohol addiction.

Agema, of Michigan, took to Washington Watch to air his views, and urged listeners to “speak up” against the “choice” of living the homosexual “lifestyle”, claiming that it would be damaging to allow loved ones to be gay without opposing it.

He and Perkins claimed that people had “self-censored” themselves because of the “intimidation” of the gay community, and said that was beginning to “backfire” as more people opposed to gay rights were now speaking out.

Agema started by claiming that he was not anti-gay, and that he was speaking out of love, in order to prevent people from getting “diseases” from living life as an openly gay person, reports RightWingWatch.

“There’s definitely hate, they call you every name in the book. What I’d like to have the homosexual community know is I don’t hate them, as a matter of fact when Jesus caught the woman in the act of adultery when they brought her to him he said I don’t condemn you but go and sin don’t more”, he said

“That ought to be the church’s goal here. We ought to be saying to these people: hey, we don’t agree with your lifestyle and we’ll help you get out of it, but we want you to know the facts of what’s going to happen to you if you stay in this lifestyle.”

He went on to say that if listeners had loved ones who were gay, they should speak up about it, and

“Study after study after study talks about all the diseases you get, how it gets you into drugs, gets you into all these other things that you don’t want to be in. So if you really love someone, if you really were concerned about someone, if you saw your friend for example dying of alcoholism would you just stand quietly by and watch it happen? Or would you speak up and say hey I want to help you.”

He went on to say that people should be speaking up against the “homosexual community”, claiming that because gay people on average have more disposable income and a higher level of education, they have the upper hand.

“That’s what we should be doing. But the problem is the homosexual community is very organized, they got a lot of money behind them, as a matter of fact the average homosexual makes more than the average person does, has better education and they are very good at shutting anybody down and embarrassing him so they will shut up. So when this happened to me this time just like when it happened to me before I thought, I’m not going to keep quiet on them. It’s starting to backfire on them,” he said.

The show’s host, Tony Perkins, said he agreed with Agema’s views, and claimed that it would be hateful to not speak out against the “destructive” nature of being gay.

He said: “I could not agree with you more. I think probably the most profound display of hate would be silence in the face of people making choices that are personally destructive and harmful to the society as well.

“I want to thank you for standing up because you are absolutely right, a lot of people have self-censored themselves because of the intimidation, they’ve simply backed away and said I don’t want people saying that stuff about me because that’s not who I am, and we’re not haters.”

Fox News presenters Megyn Kelly and Bill O’Reilly recently surprised viewers by arguing that those opposed to equal marriage, including Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, had no strong arguments against it.

Ahead of the start of the US Supreme Court hearings around two equal marriage cases, Tony Perkins, the president of the anti-gay Family Research Council claimed that the court ruling in favour of equal marriage could lead to “revolution”.