The wisest man ever to have lived, King Solomon, once observed “what has been done, will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Such is the case for some liberal political arguments. Regardless of past failed attempts, some myths seem to appear, float around unsuccessfully, only to reappear a decade later. (It is kind of like the notion that although socialism has failed on every continent in which it is tried, it will somehow work here because we Americans can do it better.)
The Indianapolis City-County Council has received an invitation to attend a July 25th briefing co-hosted by Planned Parenthood, The Peace Learning Center, Citizens Energy, Indiana Internal Medicine Consultants, and Lilly. The purpose of the briefing is to promote the passage of Proposed Ordinance #213. This ordinance creates a new taxpayer funded entitlement, ignores a $47 million budget shortfall, and takes a swipe at our marriage laws by giving marital benefits to homosexual partners of city employees.
(There are actually two Republican co-authors, Lutz and Hunter, who seem to think that they are consistent conservatives according to their constituent responses. Let’s see, massive budget deficits, attacking marriage, mocking traditional values, new unfunded government entitlement programs. . . that sounds a whole lot like the last three years of Barack Obama, not the legacy of Ronald Reagan.)
The driving force behind this briefing is a doctor who believes that homosexuality is actually a safe and normal behavior. He thinks that such practices carry higher rates of suicide, mental health disorders, substance abuse, domestic violence and disease not because of the intrinsic risks of unnatural sex acts, but because of the moral values of people like you! According to him, if Hoosiers would embrace homosexuality and begin to undefine marriage in our laws and public policies, then all would be well for homosexuals.
This narrative has been around before, but it has never been very successful. One reason for this is due to the mountain of medical and psychological evidence showing that such lifestyles are simply dangerous. The bigger problem is that the premise is so obviously flawed.
Were this fantasy that it is the fault of traditional values, conservative resistance or religious institutions actually true, then places like San Francisco would have the healthiest homosexual populations. Such is not the case.
This is also true in the Netherlands, where there is no religious, moral, legal, or cultural opposition left to virtually any behavior. In fact, same-sex marriage has been legal there for more than a decade. A large study of 5,998 Dutch adults appearing in the Archives of General Psychology titled, Same-Sex Sexual Behavior: Findings from the Netherlands Mental Health Survey and Incidence still finds that homosexual behavior dramatically increases the risks of psychiatric, and emotional disorders even in a very pro-gay culture.
The government study found that, compared to their heterosexual peers, “[Dutch homosexual] youth are four times as likely to suffer major depression, almost three times as likely to suffer generalized anxiety disorder, nearly four times as likely to experience conduct disorder, four times as likely to commit suicide, five times as likely to have nicotine dependence, six times as likely to suffer multiple disorders, and more than six times as likely to have attempted suicide.”
One of the results of a society that is discarding its moral foundations is that no one wants to believe that their contemporary enlightened decisions still have those ancient consequences. Such has always been the human condition, but there is still something childish about people shaking their fist at nature (God) and blaming others because they don’t like the consequences connected to their choices.
