In support of President Nice Job Browine’s Surgeon General nominee, the religious right web site Lifewatch (Your Life, Family and Culture Outpost), tells half a truth, and carefully hides the whole, so they and their readers can feel righteous…

Bush’s Choice for Surgeon Gen. Said Homosexual Practices “Unnatural and Unhealthy” 

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 8, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A doctor tapped by President George Bush for the position of Surgeon General has been attacked by homosexual activist groups for saying homosexual activity is unnatural and unhealthy.

…

Homosexual activists and their supporters have expressed outrage that a doctor who has warned of the physical dangers associated with homosexual activity would be considered for the position of Surgeon General. Holsinger’s article has been condemned as a scientifically outdated piece of political ideology expressing a “very narrow view” of homosexuality, according to an ABC News report.

Studies continue to emerge, however, showing the grave health risks of engaging in homosexual activity. A report in the February issue of the International Journal of STD & AIDS found that “HIV-positive men who have sex with men are up to 90 times more likely than the general population to develop anal cancer.”

A study released in 2005 in Psychological Reports confirmed earlier findings that homosexual men have on average a 20-year shortened life span.  “[U]nder even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men…are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871,” said the authors of the Canadian research team. The team was supportive of the homosexual lifestyle and conducted the study in order to assist health planners with estimating the impact of HIV infection on homosexual men.

(Emphasis mine)  Note that alarmist quote "[U]nder even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men…are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871…"  Psychological Reports, some of you may recall, is the outfit that uncritically published a bit of Paul Cameron’s razzle-dazzle and have yet to admit that they were bamboozled.  But this time the religious right is using another study by a different group to demonize homosexuals. 

In fact, they began bending this particular study to their own ends earlier in the year.  In an article that seems to have first surfaced on the right wing site World Net Daily, David N. Bass, a self-described 20 year old homeschool graduate, wrote:

A 1997 study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology found that even under “the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban center are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871.” The same study estimated that homosexual behavior reduces the lifespan of males by eight to 20 years. Comparatively, the CDC has found that male and female smokers lose an average of 13.2 to 14.5 years of life, respectively. 

As Jonathan Rowe over at Positive Liberty notes the article reads like a textbook example of how certain “pro-family” groups use false, unreliable, or misleading statistics to bash gays…

The problem with the IJE study is that while the researchers (unlike Cameron) may have been credible and while the number may have had some kind of original validity, it is no longer valid and citing as if it were is akin to lying.

The IJE figure was derived from one study, never replicated, taken from one Canadian urban enclave (so it probably never had a representative sample of gays, but rather disproportionately drew from sub-culture oriented urban gays). More importantly, the study was done during the worst of the AIDS crisis, just before the newer, groundbreaking meds were introduced. And those meds greatly impacted and reduced mortality rates within the gay community. In 2006, whatever validity the statistic originally may have had, it has not been valid for many years and the authors of the study attest to this. They wrote in 2001:

In our paper, we demonstrated that in a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 21 years less than for all men. If the same pattern of mortality continued, we estimated that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged 20 years would not reach their 65th birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre were experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by men in Canada in the year 1871. In contrast, if we were to repeat this analysis today the life expectancy of gay and bisexual men would be greatly improved. Deaths from HIV infection have declined dramatically in this population since 1996. As we have previously reported there has been a threefold decrease in mortality in Vancouver as well as in other parts of British Columbia.

(emphasis mine)  So these righteous, upstanding, so very very Moral men of God are deliberately citing a study whose own authors know was only representative of a single moment in the history of a single population of gay men, at a time when AIDS was claiming its greatest number of victims in that one particular population.  The quote they’re waving in everyone’s faces now, no longer applies, and never did in fact apply to all gay men in Canada, let alone all gay men everywhere. 

The authors of the study have protested the misuse of their work, but of course to no avail.  The operators of Lifewatch know that whatever their sins, God forgives them.