Point-of-View

Smoking is hazardous to your health. Who doesn’t know that by now? Thanks to a massive anti-smoking campaign by dedicated activists, you’d have to live on another planet not to realize that smoking can shorten your life expectancy by years. The media, the government, the schools, and many other institutions in our society are stigmatizing smoking as the dangerous practice that it is.

But homosexual behavior is also hazardous to your health. More dangerous than smoking, it lowers the life expectancy dramatically. And yet we celebrate it—all part of so-called diversity. And now activists want to legalize same-sex "marriage," which is sanctioning behavior known to be dangerous. Many of the same people who are the most vigorous in the campaign against smoking are celebrating homosexual practices.

During our series on Marriage Protection Week, I’ve talked about the health benefits provided by marriage. The truth is that same-sex relationships have just the opposite effect. We know that AIDS is one of the worst threats to homosexuals, but it’s far from the only one. Sexually transmitted diseases are running rampant in the homosexual community. According to the International Journal of Epidemiology, the life expectancy of a homosexual male is twenty years less than that of a heterosexual male. Homosexual acts are inherently unhealthy, and when you add the fact that promiscuity is widespread among homosexuals, you have a recipe for disaster.

Some commentators have claimed that same-sex "marriage" will lower the disease rate by leading to higher levels of commitment. But studies show that most homosexual couples, even supposedly "committed" ones, are unfaithful to each other. In a well-known study of homosexual couples, only seven out of 156 couples surveyed—4.5 percent-had been faithful to one another. And a recent study done in The Netherlands, which already has same-sex "marriage," showed that the average homosexual relationship lasts about a year and a half. So same-sex "marriage" so-called offers little hope for improving the health of homosexuals.

In addition, homosexuals have higher rates of drug abuse, alcoholism, and domestic violence than heterosexuals. Homosexual activists David Island and Patrick Letellier have written, "The probability of violence occurring in a gay couple is mathematically double the probability of that in a heterosexual couple."

Nevertheless, homosexual activists continue to call for the United States government to sanction unhealthy behavior by legalizing same-sex "marriage." The fact is that when we label such a relationship a "marriage," we’re giving state sanction to something that is devastating to health. To ask the government to crack down on smoking and at the same time promote homosexual behavior is lunacy. Both practices damage people’s health, although there is an important difference: Homosexual practices shorten a person’s life expectancy far more than smoking.

Of course, the hazard is also to the nation’s health. Every society has given preferred status to marriage because it propagates the human race. Calling gay relations "marriage" and giving it the same benefits undermines traditional marriage. It defies good sense.

Copyright © 2003 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Used with permission.