AMF Media Release: Jim Wallace right to warn of ‘gay sex’ risks

MEDIA RELEASE Thursday 6th September 2012

ACL’s Jim Wallace right to warn of health risks of normalising gay marriage

“There is no dispute that homosexual behaviour does carry grave health risks, including the fact that over 80% of new cases of AIDS in Australia are in ‘men who have sex with men’” said Dr David van Gend, a GP in Toowoomba and President of the Australian Marriage Forum, referring to the Kirby Institute Annual Surveillance Reports 2011.

“This has been the case in Australia since the start of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. When AIDS was first discovered in the US it was called ‘gay bowel disease’, and for most Australians with AIDS it remains ‘gay bowel disease’,” he said.

“Jim Wallace did well to compare the dangers of smoking with the dangers of homosexual acts: inhaling cigarette smoke is dangerous, but – to speak frankly - so is engaging in anal intercourse. Why then do some policy makers attempt to normalise this type of sexual behaviour, when it is so medically and morally problematic? For that is exactly what a policy for homosexual ‘marriage’ will achieve: it will normalise homosexual behaviour with the full force of anti-discrimination law and so normalise intrinsically unhealthy sexual acts in the minds of our children.

“Once homosexual marriage is normalised in law, all school children will have to be taught that homosexual acts are no different to the natural relations of their mother and father. We have seen this happen in overseas jurisdictions like Massachusetts after gay marriage was legalised. I don’t think Australian parents realize that legalising gay marriage would mean compulsory gay sex-education for their children”, Dr van Gend said.

“And this normalization will have health consequences for the most vulnerable Australians: young, sexually-confused adolescents – because using the authority of the state and the school to tell confused adolescents that homosexual behaviour is ‘normal’ is likely to make some young men ‘come out’ at school when, left alone, they might have got over their confusion and avoided the harms of a homosexual lifestyle.

“We know that confusion over sexual feelings is quite common among teens but it is usually a passing phase. The extensive National Health and Social Life Survey across the USA in 1994 found that 8% of sixteen year olds thought they might be gay – but, significantly, the number halved by age eighteen to 4%, and halved again by age twenty-five, so that only 2% still thought they were gay. What that means is that most sexual confusion in adolescents clears away if left to itself. Now it is obviously harmful to encourage a young person into a sexual identity that might have been just a passing confusion, when that sexual identity is associated with inherently dangerous sexual behaviour”, Dr van Gend said.

“Our policy makers should be discouraging dangerous sexual behaviour, just like they discourage other dangerous behaviour like smoking. That means turning away from the folly of normalising ‘gay marriage’, because if homosexual marriage is ever normalised in law, it will become compulsory to normalise homosexual behaviour in the school curriculum, with all the associated harm to our children’s moral and physical health”, Dr van Gend concluded.