Glenn Beck's Expert Who Wants the Government to Regulate Homosexuality

Photo credit: david_shankborn

By Michael Jones-
   You know how Glenn Beck is always trying to tell you that the government is trying to take over everything, and that we're heading toward a Socialist society unless the masses rally and stir a revolution? Big government is no friend to the Glenn Beck crowd.
   Looks like one of Beck's go-to guys missed the message. Meet David Barton, an evangelical powerhouse who has immediate connections with a host of GOP powerhouses, including Newt Gingrich, Sen. John McCain, and Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio. Barton is a regular contributor on Glenn Beck's program, and even serves as a professor at "Beck University," Glenn Beck's online university charade.
   Turns out that Barton wants a massive government. Or, well, at least a government that regulates homosexuality. After all, Barton says, if we're letting government regulate school lunches, we should have government regulate homosexuality, which Barton views as unhealthy. Check out his comments on his radio show this week, courtesy of Right Wing Watch.
   "So if I go to the Centers for Disease Control and I’m concerned about health, I find some interesting stats there and this should tell me something about health. Homosexual/bi-sexual individuals are seven times to contemplate or commit suicide. Oooh, that doesn’t sound very healthy," Barton says. "Homosexuals die decades earlier than heterosexuals. That doesn’t sound healthy. Nearly one-half of practicing homosexuals admit to five hundred or more sex partners and nearly one-third admit to a thousand or more sex partners in a lifetime."
   Know what else doesn't sound very healthy? Listening to talk radio personalities who don't know their ass from their elbow.
   Barton goes to say that if we tell Kindergartners that salt is bad for them, we ought to tell them that homosexuality is bad for them, given his run down of the facts.
   No mention by Barton, of course, of the negative health effects brought on by a culture steeped in homophobia. You know, the fact that depression and anxiety are caused by an entire society telling you that you're a second class citizen. That suicide rates are sky high in countries that don't have good laws on the books making sure that openly LGBT people don't get fired from their jobs, bullied in school, denied access to the military, or told that they can't love the person they want to be with in life.
Barton conveniently leaves those facts out. But he does go on to read a treatise from 1814 on the sodomy.
1814. Huh, maybe Barton was going for some text that was reflective of the times in which his anti-gay politics are rooted?
   Memo to Glenn Beck: a few weeks ago you said that same-sex marriage wasn't really a big deal to you, and that you had bigger fish to fry. If that's the case, then maybe it's time to stop giving airtime and political play to a man like Barton, who would rather see the U.S. approach the subject of homosexuality as if it were the 19th century.

Michael Jones is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School. 

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