NEWS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:  February 15, 2008

CONTACT:  Diane Gramley   1.814.437.5355 or 1.814.271.9078

National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Executive Director Admits HIV is A ‘Gay Disease’

(Harrisburg)  — For years conservative groups like the American Family Association of Pennsylvania (AFA of PA) have looked at data from the Centers for Disease Control and concluded that the vast majority of those with HIV are men who have sex with men.  Such statements have been ridiculed by homosexual activists saying that we were ‘misinterpreting’ the information.  In an address Friday February 8th to the National Conference on Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender Equality in Detroit – Matt Forman, Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce, shocked attendees by calling HIV “a gay disease.”

Foreman further shocked attendees by himself referring to CDC data, saying that “with 70 percent of the people in this country living with HIV being gay or bi(-sexual), we cannot deny that HIV is a gay disease. We have to own that and face up to that.”

Click here for Foreman’s formal remarks, last paragraph, page 3.

These were the very statistics that AFA of PA President Diane Gramley used in her October testimony before the House State Government Committee opposing H.B. 1400.  After that hearing openly homosexual PA Human Relations Chairman Stephen Glassman approached Gramley and told her that she had ‘misinterpreted’ the CDC statistics.  How does Mr. Glassman respond to Matt Foreman’s remarks?

“The AFA of PA welcomes Matt Foreman’s remarks and is calling on Pennsylvania legislative leaders to block pending legislation that would give special “protected class” status to individuals simply because of the dangerous sexual practices in which they engage.  Adding ‘sexual orientation and gender identity or expression’ to the PA Human Relations Act would give the state’s stamp of approval upon a lifestyle that creates a public health risk,” Gramley stated.

For years the AFA of PA and other traditional values groups have compassionately warned of the dangers of engaging in homosexual acts.  Such compassion has drawn stiff criticism from homosexual activists.

“We are now calling on Matt Forman and other national and state homosexual leaders to publicly accept responsibility for professionally promoting a lifestyle that’s medically associated with a dramatically higher risk of domestic violence, mental illness, substance abuse, eating disorders, life-threatening diseases such as AIDS, cancer, and hepatitis, and premature death by up to twenty years,” further commented Gramley.

Gramley said that in light of homosexual activists’ typical response to such medical findings, Foreman’s “startling new party line of admitting rather than denying medical fact about the health hazards of homosexual behavior — at least regarding HIV — has apparently left some homosexual activists in a quandary, and in shock.”

She pointed to comments by Todd Heywood, a Lansing homosexual activist who writes for Between the Lines, a homosexual advocacy newsmagazine published in metro Detroit, who told the Lansing State Journal:

“This story is likely to gain political traction in the coming days, weeks and months. When leaders of the right wing claim HIV AIDS as a gay disease, we all balk at that claim. But what happens when a national gay leader says it?”

Foreman’s comment “rocked the American gay community,” Heywood wrote in an article for the Michigan Messenger, an alternative online news site.

“The push to get homosexual ‘special rights bills – H.B. 1400 and S. B 761 – passed in Harrisburg is simply another effort to normalize a lifestyle that kills many who engage in it.  Legislators like Senator Patrick Browne, State Representatives Dan Frankel and Babette Josephs need to take a hard look at the ramifications of passing such special rights bills – civil rights protections should n ever be based on the sexual activity in which one engages,” Gramley noted.

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