Former Baptist pastor and Tea Party Unity founder Rick Scarborough spoke with conservative activist Peter LaBarbera on Thursday about potential anti-gay strategies, including a class action lawsuit against homosexuality.
“The whole issue of a class action lawsuit, you and I have talked about this a little bit,” Scarborough told LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, in a conversation at a Tea Party Unity gathering Thursday. People For the American Way’s Right Wing Watch, a progressive advocacy group that monitors and reports on conservative political organizations, posted a partial transcript and audio recording of the discussion.
Scarborough said he believes homosexuality and tobacco companies should be equally vulnerable to class action lawsuits.
"Obviously, statistically now even the Centers for Disease Control verifies that homosexuality much more likely leads to AIDS than smoking leads to cancer. And yet the entire nation has rejected smoking, billions of dollars are put into a trust fund to help cancer victims and the tobacco industry was held accountable for that," Scarborough said.
The CDC reported in 2008 that “more deaths are caused each year by tobacco use than by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murders combined.”
But LaBarbera agreed with Scarborough, Raw Story reported, and added, “We need to work on our conservative, alternate media and say, ‘look, don’t do the pro-gay thing, why don’t you rather step out and support these ex-gays?’ We should encourage Fox News to tell these stories ... these wonderful stories of happy men and women who have left the homosexual lifestyle.”
Earlier this year, Scarborough expressed anti-gay sentiments, declaring the word “gay” an “abuse of the language” during a guest sermon in New Jersey.
"They're not gay ... that's a twist into the words," Scarborough argued. "It won't be long until we'll be calling pedophiles 'happy people.'"
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