Oh, Russy boy, thou must stop trying to indoctrinate the SMU community through The Daily Campus by using poorly researched arguments. After reading the article entitled, “Celebrate Recovery: Ted Haggard,” I, as a straight male, felt compelled to address Allsup’s misuse of seemingly factual information and statistics used to sway the opinions of our community toward what he believes to be the “right side.”
One startling statistic used by Allsup was the “fact” that individuals involved in a homosexual lifestyle “have a life expectancy 33 years shorter than heterosexuals.”
A little digging around revealed that this assertion, taken from the study “The Homosexual Lifespan,” conducted by the Cameron Group, is completely flawed. The study involved counting obituaries reported in gay community publications. Does that make any sense to you? Yeah, me neither. I mean, of course, every person living in a gay community is obviously gay, and is going to die at some point; therefore by obtaining information from such an isolated setting is bound to be skewed.
Dr. Gregory Herek, an esteemed professor of psychology at UC-Davis and the author of more than 80 scholarly articles concerning prejudices against homosexuals, makes this point crystal clear when he concludes “The Cameron Group’s gay obituary study reports many numbers and statistics.”
However, they are absolutely worthless for estimating the life expectancy of gay men and lesbians.” So now that we have completely debunked this first point, let’s move on.
In his article, Allsup argues that homosexuals are three times more likely to commit suicide than heterosexuals, so what? According to the Vital Statistics of the United States, dentists are 6.64 percent more likely to commit suicide than the rest of the working age population. In reality how valuable is this “cocktail party” statistic? Not important at all, just like the statistic about gays committing suicide.
It proves absolutely nothing and if someone based his judgments off of such notions, then I sure wouldn’t want to be a gay dentist.
How extreme are the views represented in this article? Extreme to the point that my friend, a Christian Fundamentalist, was completely appalled by the nonsense written. Mr. Allsup considers homosexuality to be one of the worst sins in the eyes of God. Sadly for Mr. Allsup, lay the Bible verse Matthew 12:31-37 which states, “every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven.”
As believed by many Christians the only unforgivable sin, according to God is not accepting his son Jesus Christ as your personal savior. Therefore, judging homosexuals violates Christ’s belief of non-judgment.
I am not a Christian, but if I recall, wasn’t Jesus Christ believed to have resurrected from his death on the cross to save humanity from sin? My question to all those offended by homosexuality is: what did any homosexual ever do to you?
Allsup argues that homosexuality is “damaging to the individual’s physical and psychological health.” I’m not sure how an individual could possibly arrive at this conclusion, but let me offer that the reason some homosexuals feel dejected because of the people that continually condemn homosexuality.
Who wouldn’t feel oppressed living in a society in which people continuously show their hatred for gays, preaching “I hate homosexual behavior.”
It is fine not to believe something is right, but hating someone for who they are is just not moral.
Tisk Tisk, Mr. Allsup, tisk tisk.
About the writer:
Harrison Kaufman is a first-year business and politicial science major. He can be reached at [email protected].
