Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, took to the airwaves and complained about President Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s “evolving” views on marriage equality. According to Right Wing Watch, one listener decided to point out that Perkins doesn’t believe in evolution anyway. Perkins agreed with the caller, and then went on a rant about how evolution (if it exists, of course) disproves the idea that homosexuality is biological.
Specifically, he said:
If you logically game this out, the idea that somehow same-sex marriage or same-sex attraction, homosexuality, could be the advancement of evolution, well, it would be the end of the road. It is a dead-end street. You’re certainly not going to reproduce.
Perkins is completely clueless, because nobody has said that homosexuality is an advancement of evolution. Scientists have been looking at possible evolutionary reasons behind it, because despite what the religious right believes, homosexual behavior does, in fact, occur all over the animal kingdom. However, they haven’t suggested that it’s a new step in any species’ evolution.
Perkins also clearly has a problem with someone changing their position on an issue because public opinion on that issue is changing. That won’t always be a good thing; there are times when public opinion on something is (actually) harmful in some way, and lawmakers have to do what is unpopular in order to do what’s right. That isn’t the case here; marriage equality harms absolutely no one. So public opinion can hold sway over lawmakers’ own positions.
Lawmakers might also change their positions on things because new (real) evidence shows their previous position to be a bad one. In other words, changing positions on issues, when it’s for the right reasons, does not mean a politician is wishy-washy. It means that they’re flexible and capable of understanding that times, and things, change and they must sometimes change too. It’s a good quality to have, not a bad one.
Of course, the religious right thinks standing firm on everything forever and ever is the only way to be strong. The people who do that inevitably find themselves in the minority, and then extinct.
But wait! There’s more idiocy. Perkins also said:
And the evidence [for creationism] is overwhelming. I don’t believe it on a whim, I believe it based on the science.
It’s not hard to conclude, then, just from that, that he’s off his rocker. What science is he talking about here? The “science” from places like the Institute of Creation Research? They don’t do science. They go in with their conclusions already formed, and look for evidence that supports those conclusions. They also go through all sorts of convolutions, or flat-out make stuff up, to “prove” their conclusions are valid. Then they call it science and call real science a sham.
In other words, anything Perkins says should be taken with a huge bag of salt, if it’s taken even remotely seriously. The only thing he knows is his religion. He literally doesn’t seem to know anything else, which is, quite frankly, very sad.
Featured image male and female symbols by Kurious. Licensed under Public Domain via Pixabay. Images merged by Rika Christensen/Liberalistics
