After reaching many, many new lows throughout his long and sick career as American Family Association spokesbigot, Bryan Fischer seems to be furiously trying to find yet a new low.
This time, his mouth is foaming over a new study which suggests there may be an "epigenetic" explanation for homosexuality. The study links fathers to lesbian daughters and mothers to gay sons. In case you missed the story, here's the gist from US News:
Long thought to have some sort of hereditary link, a group of scientists suggested Tuesday that homosexuality is linked to epi-marks — extra layers of information that control how certain genes are expressed. These epi-marks are usually, but not always, "erased" between generations. In homosexuals, these epi-marks aren't erased — they're passed from father-to-daughter or mother-to-son, explains William Rice, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California Santa Barbara and lead author of the study.
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Rice and his team created a mathematical model that explains why homosexuality is passed through epi-marks, not genetics. Evolutionarily speaking, if homosexuality was solely a genetic trait, scientists would expect the trait to eventually disappear because homosexuals wouldn't be expected to reproduce. But because these epi-marks provide an evolutionary advantage for the parents of homosexuals: They protect fathers of homosexuals from underexposure to testosterone and mothers of homosexuals from overexposure to testosterone while they are in gestation.
"These epi-marks protect fathers and mothers from excess or underexposure to testosterone — when they carry over to opposite-sex offspring, it can cause the masculinization of females or the feminization of males," Rice says, which can lead to a child becoming gay. Rice notes that these markers are "highly variable" and that only strong epi-marks will result in a homosexual offspring.
This study has launched Fischer into rabid-dog mode. For a man who has built an anti-gay career on the notion that homosexuality is a "lifestyle choice," he seems quite eager to accept the new study. Of course, he is also eager to distort it and to assign the label of "birth defect" to homosexuality. See, it's a disease after all! Of course, he's full of shit, and that's not what the researchers are trying to get across at all, but don't tell that to Fischer, who is just positively thrilled about the notion that gay people have some kind of defect.
Writing for the AFA's website, Fischer takes it a step further and explains how this "birth defect" he's so obviously excited about could lead parents to choose abortion to avoid having gay children.
The scientists in Koebler’s article, in my view, are now resorting to genetic subterfuge and are coming dangerously close to saying that homosexuality is the result of a genetic defect, a genetic abnormality. In other words, read from one angle, these same scientists are saying that homosexuality is the result of a birth defect.
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Now these researchers are quite at pains to avoid saying anything like this, but the logic to me seems inescapable: Homosexual children, on this theory, are born evolutionarily and genetically disadvantaged. They have been overexposed or underexposed to testosterone because something has gone wrong in the process of genetic transmission. In other words, they are the product of a genetic abnormality at best, a birth defect at worst.
...I expect many abortion-minded parents will want to know exactly how strong this epi-marker is in their unborn children so they can decide whether or not to exercise reproductive choice.
In fact, I expect that if this theory gains some currency, it will not be long before we have legislation from the homoexual lobby prohibiting “sex-selection” abortions on any child carrying this epi-marker.
He
repeated these points on his radio show today. You can just hear the excitement in his voice at the idea that gay people are defective and could possibly be aborted by prospective parents.
There are no words for how sick and disturbed Bryan Fischer is. And I would ask if he could go any lower, but he has proven time and again that he can and most certainly will.