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Steve Hickey is a member of the South Dakota State House and a religious leader and the sort of person who will send letters to newspaper editors calling for doctors to declare that being gay is dangerous, with a "list of side effects would read far longer than anything we hear on a Cialis commercial." The letter was titled, "A One Way Alley for the Garbage Truck."

Get it? Hickey, who is a pastor at the Church at the Gate in Sioux Falls, is drawing an analogy between that alley and anal sex. He fleshes the idea out a bit more in the letter. "Pardon a crude comparison but regarding men with men, we are talking about a one-way alley meant only for the garbage truck to go down." Pastor Hickey means the anus! So, depending on the proclivities of those being discussed, sometimes we are also talking about a one-way alley lined with teeth that is meant for food-delivery trucks. But this is beside the point, both for us and for Hickey.

On Monday, Hickey, who represents the 9th District, proudly posted the full letter to his Facebook page. "Sent this letter to the Editor off to the Argus Leader," he wrote. "We'll see if they reprint it." (His wife, he said, "hates the title.") His main point is this:

South Dakota docs, it’s time for you to come out of the closet and give your professional opinion on this matter like you capably and responsibly do on all the others. Somehow the message we are presently getting from the medical community is that eating at McDonalds will kill us but the gay lifestyle has no side effects. Truth be told it seems self-evident the list of side effects would read far longer than anything we hear on a Cialis commercial.

His other arguments are not much less confused or confusing. "This indeed is a matter of being on the wrong side of history," Hickey writes, "considering that historically, homosexuality has been a notable marker of the downfall of past civilizations, not their rise." Because, see, there is an apocryphal understanging that homosexual sex was rampant in ancient Greece and then ancient Greece collapsed. (As has every other ancient culture, which is how "ancient" works.) This, he suggests, proves that homosexuality is "harmful to human health."