North Carolina State Senator James
Forrester on Tuesday said his opposition to gay marriage was based on
facts he found in Frank Turek's 2008 book.
Forrester has tried over the past eight
years to get his constitutional amendment that would ban gay and
lesbian couples from marrying through the General Assembly. Earlier
this month, lawmakers
decided to put the question up for a vote in May.
During an interview on Sirius XM's The
Michelangelo Signorile Show, host Michelangelo Signorile asked
Forrester, also a medical doctor, where he heard that gay people's
lives are shortened by 20 years, a claim he made during a town hall
meeting held before lawmakers approved his bill.
“At least 20 years is taken off a
homosexual's life, if they practice homosexuality, due to the
increased death rate from AIDS, and hepatitis, and all of the other
related factors to that. That doesn't seem to discourage them from
practicing this unhealthy lifestyle,” he told the crowd.
“We need to reach out to them and try
to get them to change their lifestyle back to the normal lifestyle
which we can accept,” he added.
Forrester said he had read the claim in
motivational speaker Frank Turek's 143-page anti-gay marriage book
Correct, Not Politically Correct: How Same-Sex Marriage Hurts
Everyone.
(Related: Frank
Turek stars in first ad for NOM's new anti-gay marriage project.)
When Signorile pushed Forrester on how
gay marriage hurts the marriages of heterosexual couples and why
hasn't he filed a bill to outlaw divorce, the senator said: “I
think I'm going to end this conversation right now because I see
you're completely negative, on the other side, trying to set me up.”
(The audio is embedded in the right panel of this page.)
(Related: James
Forrester tells lesbian mom to move to New York.)