This morning, I visited the website of Southeast Christian Church. (Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, is the fifth-largest church in the country, with 22,000 attending on a typical weekend.) I was curious as to what they're up to these days. Usually, what I find there is innocuous (vanilla evangelical messages). But I was surprised that the sermon message for this week was on a hot-button issue: "Same-Sex Attraction." (This was a video of a sermon by their senior minister David Stone, given on June 30.) I watched it; it was 36 minutes long.
In the message, Stone repeatedly emphasized that the church must be loving and accepting to gay people and that homosexuality is no worse than other sins. He appeared to be genuinely caring about gay people, and he wants to help them. Unfortunately, I was surprised and distressed that Stone repeated certain statistics about gay men that are flat-out incorrect as well as highly derogatory. These include the claim that the life expectancy of gay men is 43 while for straight men, it is 78; he also claimed that only 3% of gay men are older than 55, and only 1% of gay men die of old age. (These claims are at 16:58 in the video.)
Here is the truth about these statistics: They derive from work done by a discredited psychologist named Paul Cameron. Cameron derived the life expectancy number of 43 years for gay males by looking at obituaries in gay newspapers. The error is that he determined not the life expectancy of gay males but instead the life expectancy of a relatively-young readership of the newspapers. Cameron's claim is still widely seen on religious anti-gay websites, often coupled with references to a 1997 study that showed gay men live 20 years less than straight men. It turns out that study (by researchers in Vancouver BC) studied the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on gay men between 1987 and 1992, before the appearance of effective antiviral drugs for that illness.
Stone took pains to say that he wants to help gay people. But I am sorry to say he isn't helping anyone by uncritically repeating bogus statistics of this kind. (Some of the more prominent pro-family, anti-gay groups have dropped all references to Cameron and his work.)
By the way, I noticed something curious in Stone's message. He quoted 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, a familiar verse in the debate on this issue. The version he showed (in a PowerPoint slide) referred to "men who have sex with men" as being among those who would not inherit the Kingdom of God. This was from the NIV translation of the Bible, a popular translation among evangelicals. What was curious was that I found that my own copy of the NIV renders the phrase as "homosexual offenders." I wondered why Stone took the liberty of changing that language, but it turns out that apparently the current version of the NIV uses the phrase Stone showed. (The NIV and other translations are available in searchable form at BibleGateway.com.) It's also curious that the new version uses the neutral term favored by public health researchers to describe homosexual behavior. (They favor this phrase because many men who have sex with men do not self-identify as gay.) In any event, the translation is tendentious: the original Greek word used by Paul is arsenokoitai, and the meaning of this word isn't completely clear. It appears to be a portmanteau of the words for man and beds, and other translations of the Bible have rendered the passage in terms that do not refer to homosexual behavior. (See the website ReligiousTolerance.org for a detailed discussion about this verse. They have a great deal of other information about this and many other subjects, from a liberal point of view.)