Tony Garland’s Jan. 24 commentary, “End conspiracy of silence,” is a continuation of the nearly nonstop pro-homosexual propaganda that the Bangor Daily News has presented on this issue of societal acceptance, or rejection, of homosexuality as a “protected lifestyle.” How about a balance?

When Maine voters threw out the homosexual rights law in 1998, the cry was “it only happened because it was an off-year election with little turnout, and the anti-gay bigots ambushed the state, blah, blah, blah.” Then, in 2000, with a huge turnout of voters, voters again withheld granting legal protection to homosexuality. Did the pro-homosexual apologists get the message? Of course not. All we have heard since the election is more of the same propaganda claiming that the voters of Maine “didn’t really mean” what the results indicate.

Outside of the state’s urban centers, the vast majority of voters have a very different perspective from your pro-homosexual one; a perspective that rarely, if ever, is allowed to surface in the major newspapers of the state. In my town, Patten, approximately 80 percent of the voters rejected the idea of providing legal protection against discrimination for homosexuals. Why? How could that be? Are we all a bunch of bigoted, idiotic, unenlightened hicks? Or is it possible that there is a different, common sense perspective on this issue?

Garland presented the pro-homosexual position in the typical fashion that appears ad nauseam in your paper; a combination of false statements, ridiculous logic, and wrong-headed sentimentality under the guise of “tolerance” and “love.”

He claims that “there are as many gay people in the United States as there are African-Americans.” This is false. The black population is approximately 14 percent, or one in seven. The typical homosexual propaganda number used is the famous “1 in 10.” This mythical “1 in 10” figure for homosexuality, taken from a study done by Kinsey many decades ago, has been totally discredited. The common figure arrived at by more recent, and more scientific studies, is that around 2 percent of people, or one in 50, engage in homosexual activity.

Garland then makes the following statement:

“Gayness is an involuntary human quality, like blue eyes or freckles or being left-handed: these are all-natural kids who didn’t choose to be gay… I say all natural, because every human society that researchers have studied has had gay people. If gayness occurs in every human culture, that means it occurs by nature, which means it’s natural-just like those freckles. What is not natural (or moral) is when a society tries to stifle gay people and make them into something they are not, or worse.”

This may sound reasonable, but in reality, Garland’s statement here is ludicrous. Every human society also has child molesters. Just because child molestation occurs in every human culture, must we conclude that it is therefore “all natural,” like freckles? Must we therefore stop being evil and intolerant, and provide legal protection to child molesters rather than trying to “stifle” them, and “make them into something they are not?”

There is an incessant drumbeat of propaganda that is trying to convince us all that homosexuality is “normal” and “natural” and “not a choice” for those who engage in it. In spite of this, most of the citizens of Maine have more sense. Most of us believe that using the anus as a sex organ is a profoundly unnatural act; what used to be called, a “crime against nature.” The very thought of it is repulsive, and it’s practice leads to all sorts of unnatural diseases.

Most of us know, deep down, that unnatural acts can come to feel very natural, even necessary, for those who habitually engage in them. Take smoking, an unnatural act if ever there was one. I still remember the first time I smoked, at age 7, how my body revolted against it. But I persevered, and the time came when inhaling smoke deep into my lungs felt better than normal breathing. But did that perversion and misuse of my lungs, to the point where they craved the evil, make smoking “natural?” Of course not.

Homosexual behavior is a perversion of the natural order; it is something that involves a moral choice. It may come to feel natural to those who engage in it, as smoking does, but that does not make it natural. To compare it to freckles, or the color of one’s skin, denies the reality that human beings choose to engage in this activity, just as thieves, dog-rapists and pedophiles choose to engage in their preferred abnormal activity that has come to feel normal to them.

The vast majority of human cultures and religions throughout history have condemned homosexuality. The scriptures of the Jews, Muslims and Christians all condemn it, as well as the historic traditions of all three faiths. It is only in the last generation that secularists, and some who claim roots in these traditions, have tried to cast off the wisdom of ages, and pretend that homosexuality is acceptable. But the fact is, for many of us, this new found pro-homosexual “wisdom” is nothing but a fashionable lie that we believe endangers our children, our nation and our future.

You see, to many of us, the most loving thing we can do for our kids is to give them real standards, grounded in eternal truths. To us, it is obvious and real that man was made for woman, and woman for man, and anything outside of that simple, common-sense reality is a temptation to be spurned, not another “natural” alternative to be considered and explored.

To many of us, the most hateful thing we could do for our kids who have given themselves over to things that are wrong, would be to give them the false comfort of pretending that they are normal. We would rather stand firm on eternal common sense standards of right and wrong, and pray that the day will come when our straying loved ones will turn around, and return to living within the boundaries of the laws of God and nature. That is real love, grounded in truth. Unfortunately, this perspective rarely gets a hearing in your paper.

David Alexander lives in Patten.