The president of a major Roman Catholic advocacy organisation has published a bizarre warning about the “mass production” of LGBT+ people in America.
Bill Donohue is an anti-LGBT+ extremist who heads the Catholic League, an American Catholic anti-defamation and civil rights organisation.
His previous claims to fame include telling gay people they can’t celebrate Christmas, and stating that Catholic priests’ molestation of children is actually down to homosexuality, not paedophilia.
He recently took to the Catholic League blog to lay out his argument for the origins of queer people in an article titled ‘MASS PRODUCING LGBT PEOPLE‘.
His inspiration came from the Public Religion Research Institute’s survey on the demographics of LGBT+ Americans, which revealed that five per cent of the population do not identify as heterosexual.
Extrapolating from the survey’s results which show that Americans who openly identify as LGBT+ are disproportionately young, white, non-religious Democrats, Donohue decides that sexuality must therefore be a “cultural phenomenon”.
“How else to explain the disparities?” he asks.
Schools ‘indoctrinate’ children into being LGBT+, Catholic leader says.
He then theorises: “Young people have been indoctrinated into thinking that being a member of the LGBT+ community is at least a value-neutral attribute, and may even be cool.
“As Pope Francis has said, there is a ‘nasty’ tendency in schools to ‘indoctrinate’ children, teaching that our sex can be chosen and changed.
“This is doing a disservice to young people and it shows up in high rates of depression and suicide in this segment of the population.”
Demonstrating a shocking lack of critical thinking, Donohue seems to have confused correlation with causation, assuming that because LGBT+ people are overrepresented in certain demographics, the dominant culture of these demographics must be influencing their sexuality.
He doesn’t stop to consider if intolerances like his own might be why LGBT+ people in other groups are less likely to come out – or if this could be the very same reason why they experience higher rates of mental health problems.
If he did, he might not have continued with the same lack of self-awareness.
“Being an LGBT+ person is difficult enough (eg, they suffer from high rates of depression and suicide), and this is especially true of the sexually confused (a male who thinks he is female and vice versa),” he writes.
“That is why attempts to culturally mass produce them are pernicious.”
Perhaps the most pernicious thing here is a religious leader moralising about problems fed by his own prejudices.