Christine O'Donnell said gays suffer from `identity disorder,' reporter says

Christine O'Donnell claimed in a 2006 interview that homosexuals are psychologically defective, arguing that they suffer from "identity disorder," the reporter who conducted the interview tells me.

On Friday I noted here that the Wilmington News Journal ran a 2006 profile of O'Donnell which paraphrased her views, claiming she "considers homosexuality an identity disorder." But the paper didn't include any direct quote supporting that.

Now the reporter on the story, Victor Greto, who's now a professor at Wesley College in Delaware, emails over her full quote from his notes on the interview. Here's what she said:

"People are created in God's image. Homosexuality is an identity adopted through societal factors. It's an identity disorder."

O'Donnell's suggestion that gays suffer from a psychological disorder is far worse than other comments about gays that have already gotten media attention, such as her claim that the government spent too much on AIDS and her insistence that "gays get away with so much."

Also: Last week O'Donnell insisted that her rigid moralistic views represent long-ago youthful excesses. But as late as 2006, she was apparently still suggesting that gays are suffering from some sort of mental illness that has caused them to stray from God's "image."

Indeed, this would appear to put O'Donnell squarely in the camp of those who liken homsexuality to pedophilia and bestiality.

