Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank's announcement that he will not seek a 17th term in 2012 has prompted Bryan Fisher to declare that the congressman should not be admired because he promoted a “deathstyle” that sent men to an early grave, media watchdog RightWingWatch.org reported.

Frank said at a press conference on Monday that redistricting was behind his decision to retire.

President Barack Obama thanked Frank for his decades of service and said that he would be missed in Washington.

On his AFA-sponsored radio show Focal Point, Fischer told listeners that Frank does not deserve to be honored or admired.

“Barney Frank served seventeen terms in Congress and this is some of the stuff in his background: he was the first openly gay member of Congress,” Fischer said.

“I just saw a deal, according to the Centers for Disease Control, sixty-one percent of all of the new HIV/AIDS cases are among men who have sex with men. This is a dangerous, risky, immoral, unhealthy lifestyle, and Barney Frank has been an open practitioner of a lifestyle that is condemning one young man after another to an early grave. This is not somebody to admire, this is not somebody to honor – you've got all these left-wing media outlets out there talking about what a colorful figure he was and how important a legislator he was and how he's going to be missed on the American political scene. And yet he modeled a lifestyle which is really a deathstyle. People imitate that. You have got to know that people are influenced toward that behavior, if they have any kind of inclination in that direction, if there are very prominent people that are engaging in it, they're doing it openly, they are praised by the press rather than criticized for flaunting this kind of behavior, you've got to know that has got an impact. So who knows how many people were sort of drawn or encouraged in some way by Barney Frank's example to dabble in a lifestyle that eventually cost them their health and maybe even cost them their lives.” (The video is embedded in the right panel of this page. Visit our video library for more videos.)