A former Baptist pastor has figured out the answer to ridding the world of those pesky gays once and for all: just sue ’em.

Tea Party organizer Rick Scarborough and conservative activist Peter LaBarbera reportedly spoke last week about how to strengthen the Christian anti-gay movement (no, seriously). LaBarbera is the president of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, an organization that seeks to counter the “homosexual activist agenda” and definitely doesn’t sound like a bunch of closeted gay men trying to make themselves feel better. Nope. Not at all.

Their brilliant solution? A class-action lawsuit tantamount to those filed against tobacco companies, because apparently the two groups are guilty of equally heinous harms against society.

“Obviously, statistically now even the Centers for Disease Control verifies that homosexuality much more likely leads to AIDS than smoking leads to cancer. And yet the entire nation has rejected smoking, billions of dollars are put into a trust fund to help cancer victims and the tobacco industry was held accountable for that,” Scarborough said.

Obviously? Statistically? Scarborough won’t be happy to see what the Huffington Post wrote to contradict him:

The CDC reported in 2008 that “more deaths are caused each year by tobacco use than by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murders combined.”

Facts and figures be damned, LaBarbera clearly agreed with Scarborough’s sentiment and took the argument a step further, suggesting we stop “glamorizing” the “gay lifestyle” at all:

But LaBarbera agreed with Scarborough, Raw Story reported, and added, “We need to work on our conservative, alternate media and say, ‘look, don’t do the pro-gay thing, why don’t you rather step out and support these ex-gays?’ We should encourage Fox News to tell these stories … these wonderful stories of happy men and women who have left the homosexual lifestyle.”

Granted, Scarborough also finds it deeply offensive that we use the word “gay” to describe people with same-sex attractions, though his suggested vocabulary changes probably wouldn’t be very constructive:

Earlier this year, Scarborough expressed anti-gay sentiments, declaring the word “gay” an “abuse of the language” during a guest sermon in New Jersey. “They’re not gay … that’s a twist into the words,” Scarborough argued. “It won’t be long until we’ll be calling pedophiles ‘happy people.'”

I so, so desperately wish this were The Onion, but it doesn’t appear to be. Who’s excited to testify on behalf of pissed-off gays everywhere?



