Topic: WorldNetDaily
Bob Unruh begins a June 9 WorldNetDaily article touting the rantings of anti-gay activist Peter LaBarbera this way:
The chief of a watchdog organization working to combat the spread of HIV and AIDS has launched a campaign to demand a government investigation of – and action over – the homosexual behavior that has been linked to more than 25 million deaths over the last 30 years, likening the problem to smoking, which was blamed for 100 million deaths in the 20th century.
Although statistics on the diseases linked to homosexual activity notoriously are hard to obtain, a report from the International Journal of Epidemiology estimated from a review of the "gay" population of Vancouver, B.C., that HIV/AIDS costs homosexuals up to 20 years of their lives on average.
In fact, as we detailed when WND allowed Molotov Mitchell and Bryan Fischer to make the same claim, the study published by the International Journal of Epidemiology is irrelevant to today; it examined data "obtained for a large Canadian urban centre from 1987 to 1992," and the life expectancy differential was specifically attributed to losses "due to HIV/AIDS," for which treatments were in their infancy and not widely available. The Southern Poverty Law Center notes that the authors of the study updated it in 2001, pointing out that advances in treatment of HIV-AIDS even at that point had significantly improved the expected longevity of those infected, which would inevitably narrow any gap between gay and straight life spans caused by the disease. The authors also rejected the attempts of anti-gay organizations to construe the 1997 observations to justify denigration of gays.
This reliance on obsolete data completely undermines the thesis Unruh and LaBarbera have based their article on: that "homosexual behavior" be treated as a public health threat like smoking. Further, as is typical WND behavior, Unruh forbids anyone from responding to LaBarbera's anti-gay hatred.
