A note from your PFLAG Phoenix webmaster:

The following is an editorial from the April 17, 2008 issue of Echo Magazine.  I just happened across it this morning, and I find it quite shocking!  I had no idea some people who are pro-life (i.e., anti-abortion) have linked GLBT people as part of the cause of abortions.  I'm sure not everyone who is pro-life shares this view, but it's alarming to me that this documentary apparently shows that some have connected those two issues.  Anyway, just thought I'd share this with you all so you can be aware.

You may think that the anti-abortion movement has nothing to do with GLBT life. But make no mistake — it absolutely does, according to pro-lifers.

In a riveting new documentary about abortion, Tony Kaye, best known for the controversial Edward Norton film American History X, interviews people on both sides of the issue for two-and-a-half hours in grainy black and white. The result — Lake of Fire — is a grueling, if not eye-opening account of how fervently frightening most adamant pro-lifers are. It’s no surprise they think people who have abortions and the doctors that carry them out are going to hell, but what was surprising was how many of them tie GLBT people into the whole debate.

In interview after interview, the pro-lifers go on and on about the evils of abortion and blame GLBT people as the cause for the abortion movement. This is an interesting argument since most GLBT people in relationships don’t procreate, so it’s not like we’re making babies and then aborting them. Generally the GLBT people who do decide to have babies have to use surrogate mothers, get pregnant by in vitro fertilization or adopt. So again, it’s not like we’re creating unwanted babies! Rather, we are saving many of the unwanted ones!

Sure, maybe GLBT people tend to fall on the more liberal side, so they may tend to be pro-choice; but the great thing about our community is that we all have differing opinions. So lumping us all into a category of crazy sodomite baby killers seems a bit extreme.

One man highlighted in the movie bombed several abortion clinics and a gay bar. In another scene, a pro-lifer refers to lesbians as sodomites and says all sodomites are going to hell. Every single pro-lifer interviewed weaves gay people into their argument somehow. Does it surprise you that none of the pro-choice people resort to name-calling or hell-baiting?

Several people on the pro-choice side ask why these pro-lifers don’t do more to help these down-on-their-luck mothers out, like take them in, or adopt their babies for them. The answer is that most often these mothers are poor and black, and the almost 100 percent privileged Caucasian pro-lifers want nothing to do with that.

So while all these people are saying mothers who have abortions will die in a lake of fire (the most horrific part of hell), they really aren’t offering any solutions to curb abortion. They are against sex education, since that, in their argument, just leads to sex (and homosexuality!). But they do think that killing the doctors who perform abortions and bombing the clinics where they take place is a solution. One man who gets the death penalty for killing several abortion doctors calls himself a hero. Another cuts off his hand in solidarity to the pro-life movement.

The argument here isn’t pro-life or pro-choice; but there should be something done to stop these people from spewing their hate-filled (and often misguided) anti-gay rhetoric when they are talking about abortion. The two just really don’t go together.