An American Christian radio host who last week said that same-sex marriage encourages children to have gay sex has now said that as she believes humans aren’t naturaly homosexual, gays aren’t ‘people’ and shouldn’t be protected under the definition of a person.

Linda Harvey, a radio host with an Ohio based Christian radio station WRFD asked her Mission America listeners: “Why should the equal protection argument be made in favour of homosexual behavior, which is changeable? People are not naturally homosexual, so the definition of ‘person’ in the Fourteenth Amendment is being twisted to make this assumption.

“‘Person’ should be understood based on historic, beneficial, or at least neutral and fact-based traits; it should not be twisted to incorporate behavior that most religions and most cultures have said a firm ‘no’ to.

“It’s also behaviour for which there’s no recognised science demonstrating a genetic or hormonal origin. And it’s also not beneficial and does not stand the definition of marriage, used for millennia – that is, the act of consummation. It’s another sad fact of homosexual behavior that two men or two women can never consummate a marriage; they can never conceive children together.”

The right winger continued: “This should still have some standing and it remains a fact that there are only two types of human in the world: male and female. Any other distinctions made are appearance, custom, and construction. So marriage is the lawful, orderly confirmation of what we already see in nature.”

Pointing ahead to the Supreme Court’s decision to consider California’s ban on same-sex marriage and the Defense of Marriage Act, Mrs Harvey said: “The Supreme Court says they will give their decision in June. Pray, friends, for truth to prevail.”

Last week Mrs Harvey claimed: “Homosexual marriage is wrong because two men together or two women is intrinsically disordered, the behavior is unnatural.

These aren’t activities that are beneficial or healthy. Homosexual marriage is wrong because homosexuality is wrong.”

The evangelical Christian host said that there were “significant dangers to our youth” from American states making same-sex marriage legal.

“One thing our culture does not want if it wants to survive is to have its youth corrupted and this is happening in oh so many ways now, and homosexuality is one more. And here’s how it works with homosexuality: since no pregnancy threat exists, some people think there’s no reason to prohibit behaviour in the young, even the very young.”

Unlike in Britain, under ‘free speech’ constitutional amendments, radio stations are given the right to broadcast discriminatory and homophobic content. In Britain, such a broadcast would unlikely have been allowed under the Broadcast Code. Just last month, the regulator Ofcom fined an Asian radio station for broadcasting that gay people are ‘evil” and “shameful”.