A lead religious right “research” group has concluded that Dr. Sally Ride’s pancreatic cancer may be due to her being a lesbian. They deduced this from looking at the obituaries of lesbians in San Francisco papers. Seriously.

Dr. Ride was the first US woman astronaut. She recently died of pancreatic cancer.

The attack comes from a well-known hate group, the Family Research Institute, that’s been promoted by all the lead groups of the religious right, including the Family Research Council, the American Family Association and the Concerned Women for America.

Even John Boehner’s lawyer Paul Clement has indirectly helped this hate group spread its venom.

Exterminate all homosexuals

Possibly my two favorite quotes from the Family Research Institute’s leader, Paul Cameron, are these (this is a site I set up years ago):

“At the 1985 Conservative Political Action Conference, Cameron announced to the attendees, ‘Unless we get medically lucky, in three or four years, one of the options discussed will be the extermination of homosexuals.’ According to an interview with former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, Cameron was recommending the extermination option as early as 1983.” – Mark E. Pietrzyk, News-Telegraph, March 10, 1995. “At least twice Cameron has advocated the tattooing of AIDS patients on the face, so that people would know when they were meeting with an infected person. The penalty for trying to hide the tattoo would be banishment to the Hawaiian island of Molokai, a former leper colony. In the event that a vaccine were developed to prevent AIDS, Cameron has proposed that homosexuals be castrated to prevent them from ‘cheating’ on nature.” – Mark E. Pietrzyk, News-Telegraph, March 10, 1995.

So now you have a sense of who these folks are, and just who the top religious right groups, who are all in bed with Mitt Romney are promoting.

Sally Ride’s death due to lesbianism?

Here’s what the Family Research Institute had to say about Sally Ride, via RightWingWatch:

Sally Ride, the first U.S. female astronaut, died this year at 61 of pancreatic cancer. Most women live until their 80s. Something strange afoot? Ride was married to a fellow astronaut from 1982 to 1987. But it was just revealed she had a ‘long time lesbian relationship’ of 27 years. Do the math: her 27 year relationship with a professor of school psychology (and co-founder of Sally Ride’s company) means that she got into that relationship in 1985, smack in the middle of her marriage. It would appear that her childhood friend broke up her marriage. And Sally may have paid with some of her lifespan. Our latest research into recent homosexual obituaries from San Francisco indicates that lesbians are dying on average around 60ish. Ride fits the pattern of lesbian deaths, but not that of married women’s deaths, which usually extend into the early-to-mid 80s. Is this proof that homosexual activity leads to an early death? No, of course not. Had she stayed married, Sally Ride might have died at the same age and of the same malady. But, on average, her death fits a consistent pattern suggesting that homosexuality is associated with an early demise.

This “gays die early” thing is a common theme from the hate groups. Basically, they look at the obits in gay papers and average them out, then claim that this is when gays die. Uh huh. Forget about the fact that when the study was done, twenty years ago, a lot of gay men were dying of AIDS, and they were dying young, so yes, the ones who were dying were dying by age 40. But that’s not when gay men usually die.

Well now they’re trying the same thing with lesbians. I mean, seriously, they call it “research,” looking at gay obits in SF newspapers. That’s some “research” all right. I also love who the guy saying OH MY GOD THEY ALL DIE YOUNG! Then he says, that’s not proof that gays die young (even though I’ve just spent 3 paragraphs suggesting it is), but then he says, but maybe it is!

This is the kind of garbage gays have to deal with on a regular basis. But what’s most important is that these are the kind of people influencing the Republican party, and now foreign countries, on gay issues.