Creep of the Week: Linda Harvey

Calling all homos: Do you live near anyone facing foreclosure? Well, the least you can do is help them move — because it turns out that losing their home is all your fault.

Or at least that’s where the twisted logic of Mission America’s Linda Harvey leads.

In a recent article titled “The Sin-Based Family” published on the Mission America website, Harvey makes the case that tolerating homosexuality leads people to make bad financial decisions. Or, as she put it: “The weak foundations of American homes guarantee disintegrating lives and a crumbling economy.”

Harvey takes issue with the GOP’s supposed preference for fiscal matters over social ones (though, seriously, I have to wonder if she’s been paying attention to things like, oh, the whole defense of DOMA fiasco) and thus seeks a connection between the two. And by “seeks” I mean “invents.”

She writes: “The GOP can claim all day long that they need to stick to the ‘pressing’ issue of the economy in preference to the ‘divisive’ issues of abortion and homosexuality. But such cowardice ends up treating the symptoms and not the disease, and mis-understands that these weakened structures need the repairs first and foremost.”

Got that, GOP? Family is the basis of any solid foundation, and the gays are destroying family.

As Harvey explains, when the “[family] structure is sin-based, other sins are more likely to scurry in through the cracks. Substance abuse and self-destruction accompany sexual deviance. And some of this means poor decisions about finances.”

She adds, “Sexual and material covetousness are usually sin siblings.” In other words, butt sex and bad checks go hand in hand.

Harvey then goes on to make some rather sweeping and insulting generalizations about people who are losing their homes to foreclosure.

“It would be interesting to study the families who have defaulted on mortgages for the correlations between structural and/or functional weaknesses like infidelity, divorce, gambling or porn addictions, job instability, credit-card default, domestic abuse, sexual deviance and criminality,” she writes. “There is also a high likelihood that poor or no church attendance would show up as a factor as well.”

Well gosh, that would be interesting. In fact, we should mandate that intensive background checks be run on all of the deadbeat families being kicked to the curb right now and make public what God already knows about how much they suck. I especially appreciate how Harvey includes “job instability” in her list of “weaknesses,” because it’s about time people started treating unemployment as a sin and making clear that if you’ve lost your job, it’s because you don’t love Jesus enough.

To be clear, the foreclosure families aren’t even the worst of the worst. Harvey explains that “probably few such households are homosexually headed, because few homosexuals want to settle down to any kind of permanence, despite the plea for the honor of the marital designation. Many unmarried mothers of children born out of wedlock are on public assistance, which means they are unlikely to have had a mortgage. So when we look at the mortgage crisis, we could analyze it as a shift in the American family, but these families would not begin to reflect where the greatest structural weaknesses already exist.”

Yeah, you know how there aren’t any gays or lesbians losing their homes right now, or any single moms. Because they’re all too busy sinning in their apartments or something.

“Like the home inspector who focuses on a leaky faucet and ignores termites, we need to see the reality before us,” Harvey writes, with unintended irony.

“Reality” is clearly a very subjective term, and to say that gay people are the problem here demonstrates a pretty deep disconnect on Harvey’s part. But then again, maybe if more Americans stopped tolerating their gay neighbors and chose to stone them instead, we could stem the tide of foreclosures. And then we could give those homes to people who actually go to church.

So long as Harvey approves of the way they live the rest of their lives, too.

D’Anne Witkowski has been gay for pay since 2003. She’s a freelance writer and poet (believe it!). When she’s not taking on the creeps of the world, she reviews rock ’n’ roll shows in Detroit with her twin sister.

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