Bert Chapman is Scary

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” George Orwell

“For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” Thomas Jefferson

Purdue professor Bert Chapman posted a craptastic column on his personal blog called, “An Economic Case Against Homosexuality.”

Some on campus think Bert should resign or be fired.  I disagree.  Instead we should mock, scorn, and ridicule him for writing something so formidably stupid.  I’ll start.  (Jump to the end for the scary part.)

Read the column yourself, but here’s a summary.

• It’s possible to make a nonreligious, economic case against the homosexual lifestyle.
• AIDS costs lots of money which we could spend elsewhere.
• Prison rape is bad, and sexual offender registries cost money.
• It’s expensive for businesses to offer domestic partner benefits.
• Firms providing life insurance, estate planning, real estate, and divorce law services will find it more expensive to do business if gay marriage becomes law, and they will pass the cost of these services on to the general population.

Chapman is a library sciences professor.

Problem 1: There is no one homosexual lifestyle.

Homosexual are rural and urban, devout and disbelieving, monogamous and not.  They’re also male and female.

Problem 2:  Homosexuality does not cause AIDS.

A virus causes AIDS, and it’s spread by specific sexual practices common to gay men and heterosexuals of both genders (not so common among lesbians).  A monogamous gay male couple is no more at risk for contracting or spreading AIDS than a monogamous straight couple.

If Chapman really wants to stop the spread of AIDS among gay men, he should promote mechanisms for supporting long-term, monogamous gay relationships.  He should support gay marriage.  In fact, he’s just made a case that the state has a compelling interest in promoting marriage equality.  Somehow he doesn’t see that.

Problem 3:  Prison rape?? Really?

I’ve got news for Bert.  You can be 100% pro-gay and 100% anti-prison rape.  He says that 90% of prison rapes are from male-on-male sex.  Does he believe these rapes are committed by gangs of hardened prison gays pouncing on defenseless Aryan Brotherhood victims?   In reality, gay men are far more likely to be victims of prison rape than perpetrators.  So blame that one on the straights.

Chapman says,

The presence of sex offender registries, which require significant law enforcement staff time and expense to update and maintain, is another demonstration of the high economic costs of sexually deviant behavior.

Yeah, I’m sure it is.  Which has nothing to do with homosexuality.  It’s sickeningly dishonest the way Chapman dodges from homosexuality to sexually deviant behavior to expensive sex offender registries.  I doubt he’s being deliberately deceitful, though.  I suspect his double sucker punch of ignorance and bigotry makes it impossible for him not to make that unthinking connection.  But let me reassure him:  gay sex does not automatically land a man — or woman — on one of those registries.

Problem 4:  Chapman’s double standard

Bert says it’s expensive for businesses to offer domestic partner benefits.  Benefits to opposite-sex spouses are expensive, too, but he doesn’t mention that.  So the best strategy economically would be to offer no benefits to any sort of couple, right?  Bert wriggles out of that by saying,

The 2002 Corporate Resource Center’s study Do Domestic Partner Benefits Make Good Economic Sense? (available at their website) demonstrates  that such [domestic partner] investments are counterproductive to good business sense for most employers and that it’s more economical for employers to promote healthy employee marriages because married employees are generally more dependable and motivated workers.

Then the conclusion is obvious:  for economic reasons, Chapman opposes same-sex domestic partnerships and favors same-sex marriage.  Right, Bert?

Problem 5:  I don’t even know what he’s saying.

Here are Chapman’s words:

The homosexual lifestyle also affects areas such as life insurance, estate planning, real estate, divorce law if same-sex marriage occurs on a widespread basis, and investments as firms providing these services have to factor in how to treat same sex domestic partner issues into their cost calculations.   Guess who has to pay for these increased costs and potentially lower investment returns?  We do, regardless of whether or not we approve of the homosexual lifestyle.

Bert doesn’t seem to realize that these are services that people pay for on an individual basis.   I don’t know why it would cost the real estate broker more to sell me a house if I’m same-sex married rather than single or opposite-sex married.  Or why that cost would be passed on to anyone but me.

But let’s assume I’m missing something and Bert’s right.  Then we’re back to the double standard.  Apparently it’s just fine for me to pay for benefits that go to married couples but not to me.  Yet it’s a terrible injustice for gays and straights alike to pay benefits that they both receive.  That’s the weird song of the anti-gay chorus.

Problem 6:  What’s his scary point?

Bert says,

[T]here are plenty of economic reasons for being against this lifestyle and I think as conservatives we need to be able to articulate why our nation cannot afford the extremely high financial costs of this lifestyle at a time when we are confronting dangerously high budget deficits, national debt, and personal debt.

So, even if you accept his disordered thinking, where does Chapman want to take us now?  If he’s saying our nation can’t afford to have open and out gays, what does he we want the government to do about it?

Bert Chapman doesn’t say, and that’s the scariest part of his whole essay.