Earlier this month, the California state Senate passed a bill that would require health care plans to cover infertility treatments, stipulating that “coverage for the treatment of infertility and fertility services shall be provided without discrimination on the basis of age, ancestry, color, disability, domestic partner status, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, national origin, race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation.”
Anti-LGBTQ activists have seized on this nondiscrimination language to insist that the legislation force healthcare providers to “cover surrogacy for gay males,” which prompted far-right broadcaster Stew Peters to unleash a vehemently bigoted anti-LGTBQ rant on his program last Friday night in which he repeatedly used the slur “fa**ots” while simultaneously censoring it from his own show.
Peters—a virulently anti-LGBTQ bigot who regularly uses his nightly program, speeches, and social media accounts to spread wild conspiracy theories, bigotry, and calls for violence yet nevertheless regularly manages to get Republican leaders, elected officials, and candidates for office to appear on his program—declared that California’s proposed law will lead to an “an incredibly high suicide rate” among surrogates who eventually realize that “fa**ots” are “molesting and raping” their children.
“[Surrogacy], I’m going to predict, is going to be something that’s trendy, because everybody wants to be a fa**ot sympathizer,” Peters said. “They want to be able to say, ‘See, I love everyone, even fa**ots. I love fa**ots.’ They want to be able to say that out loud.”
“I predict that there will be an incredibly high suicide rate among these women who know that they grew a child inside of them … and then they just give this baby away,” Peters declared. “Prove me wrong; most homos are pedos. They’re pedophiles. … I bet you 9 out of 10 of them for homosexual men will be boys that they want to create because they want to look at them and they want to touch them and they want to molest them. Prove me wrong. And then that woman, that young woman, is going to have to live knowing that that is the life that she introduced to that innocent child.”
Peters is lying, of course, about gay people and gay parents. A 2015 Cornell University review of scholarly research on gay parenting identified “an overwhelming scholarly consensus, based on over three decades of peer-reviewed research, that having a gay or lesbian parent does not harm children.” That buttresses the American Psychological Association’s conclusion that “lesbian and gay parents are as likely as heterosexual parents to provide supportive and healthy environments for their children.” Forbes reported earlier this year on new research that concluded, “Children with gay, lesbian, transgender or other sexual minority parents fare as well as, or better than, children with parents of the opposite sex.”
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