The leader of the Georgia Republican Party decried marriage equality in a newspaper interview as a pathway for heterosexual people to scam their way into getting tax breaks.

“I believe a husband and a wife should be a man and a woman, the benefits should be for a man and a woman,” chairwoman Sue Everhart told the Marietta Daily Journal for a story published on Saturday. “There is no way that this is about equality. To me, it’s all about a free ride.”

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Everhart described a scenario where two friends who were “straight as an arrow” could enter into a fake marriage if one of them had a job with a “wonderful health plan.”

The story focused on various residents’ reaction to the Supreme Court’s discussion of both California’s Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act, and a subsequent social-media campaign in support of allowing LGBT couples the right to marry.

“Lord, I’m going to get in trouble over this, but it is not natural for two women or two men to be married,” Everhart said. “If it was natural, they would have the equipment to have a sexual relationship.”

Everhart also said she would be leery of letting gay parents near a young child of her own out of fear they could influence the child’s sexual orientation.

“You’re creating with this child that it’s a lifestyle, don’t go out and marry someone else of a different sex because this is natural,” she said. “But if I had a next door neighbor who was in a gay relationship, I could be just as friendly to them as I could be to you and your wife or anybody else. I’m not saying that we ostracize them or anything like that. I’m just saying I’m against marriage because once you get the gay marriage you get everything else.”

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According to GOP.com, Everhart was elected to her current position in 2007, after serving as the state party’s first vice chairperson.

[Image by Fulton County Republican Party, via Flickr Creative Commons]

[h/t Talking Points Memo]