Frank Turek has become a hero of sorts to the Religious Right after Cisco terminated his contract as a consultant when an employee complained about his work as an anti-gay activist. Turek, who was a motivational speaker for Cisco before he was canned, is a radio commentator on American Family Radio, the American Family Association’s far-right radio network, and is the author of Correct, Not Politically Correct: How Same-Sex Marriage Hurts Everyone. He also frequently appears on broadcasts from Rick Joyner’s the Oak Initiative and joined Joyner, Tony Perkins and Jerry Boykin to create the Religious Right’s own ‘300’ Spartan army. While a guest on Bryan Fischer’s AFR radio show in May, Turek warned that gay rights advocates and Islamic extremists are “in concert together” because “they both hate Western Civilization” and “hate Judeo-Christian natural law values that our Constitution and particularly our Declaration of Independence.”
Turek now writes columns for the American Family Association. In his latest piece, he claims that the people who truly love gay people are the ones like him, who believe they should become ‘ex-gays,’ while the people who hate gay people are those who affirm their sexual orientation. “If I have good reason to think you are on the road to destruction—if a truck is about to run over you,” Turek writes, “the only way to love you is to urge you to get out of the street”:
Everyone puts limits on marriage—if marriage had no definition it wouldn’t be anything. Recognizing that marriage is between a man and a woman is not bigotry, but common sense rooted in the biological facts of nature. That’s why the state recognizes marriage to begin with—not because two people love one another but because only heterosexual unions can procreate and best nurture the next generation.
Everyone also puts limits on behaviors. But opposing behavior is not the same as opposing or “hating” people. In fact, to really love people, we often have to oppose what they do! Parents know this, and all former children know it as well.
Celebrating behavior that leads to disease and an early death is closer to hate than love. According to the latest data from the Center for Disease Control, homosexual men comprise more than 80 percent of sexually transmitted HIV cases despite comprising less than 2 percent of the population. The FDA says that men who have sex with men have an HIV infection rate 60 times higher than the general population. Why should we be encouraging behavior that results in such tragic outcomes? If I have good reason to think you are on the road to destruction—if a truck is about to run over you—the only way to love you is to urge you to get out of the street. If I tell you to keep walking down that road—that I celebrate the road you’re on—how could I hate you more?
But isn’t homosexuality like race? No. Race has nothing to do with behavior, but homosexuality is a behavior! Skin color affects no one, but destructive behavior affects many. Moreover, sexual behavior is always a choice, race never is. You’ll find many former homosexuals, but you’ll never find a former African-American.
So if you don’t approve of a man because of his race, you are a bigot. But if you don’t approve of a man’s destructive behavior, you are wise.
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[B]eing born a certain way is irrelevant to what the law should be. Laws are concerned with behaviors not desires, and we all have desires we ought not act on. In fact, all of us were born with an “orientation” to bad behavior, but those desires don’t justify the behaviors. If you are born with a genetic predisposition to alcohol, does that mean you should be an alcoholic? If you have a genetic attraction to children does that mean you should be a pedophile? What homosexual activist would say that a genetic predisposition to anger justifies gay-bashing? (Don’t blame me—I was born with the anti-gay gene!) Certainly, those that oppose alcoholism, pedophilia and gay bashing are not “bigots”—they are wise.
