COLUMBUS, OH (WordNews.org) April 25, 2013— Dr. Paul Cameron, the first scientist to document the harms of secondhand smoke, went to Ohio’s capital to call upon U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-OH, (pictured left) to reconsider his recently announced support for gay marriage.

”Sen. Portman, gay marriage is hazardous to one’s health.  For the sake of the son you love, urge him to marry a woman,” Cameron said.

Cameron, considered a controversial scientist, referred to studies to back his call for Portman to change his him.

“Danish government statistics show that wedded gays and lesbians die 10 to 20 years earlier than the conventionally married,”said Cameron, citing a study of gay marriage by pro-LGBT researchers Morten Frisch and Jacob Simonsen, which appeared in the March, 2013 issue of Oxford’s International Journal of Epidemiology.

Examining Denmark, which in 1989 became the first country with gay marriage, they found that the average age of death for homosexually married men and women was around 60; for the conventionally married, about 80 years.

“Sen. Portman’s son Will, a college junior who has revealed his homosexuality, recently wrote in the Yale Daily News, ‘We’re all the products of our backgrounds and environments, and….We should think twice before using terms like ‘bigoted’ to describe the position of those opposed to same-sex marriage.”

Cameron, who is chairman of the Family Research Institute, said: “Will Portman is right. Many decent people, even at fine schools like Yale and Ohio State, are simply unaware that the science has long indicated the Senator’s son and others were not born gay.  Now, Denmark’s government statistics show Will Portman would likely die much earlier if he marries a man, while heterosexual marriage would probably add years to his lifespan.”

“I have consistently challenged those I call ‘junk science junkies,’ in the universities and politically-driven professional groups like the American Psychological Association, with unpopular empirical data on sexuality. The Danish study by pro-gay scientists, as well as my own research, offers answers to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elana Kagan’s question to gay marriage opponents in recent oral arguments, ‘What harm [do] you see happening and when and how?’”

Cameron added: “For the same reason society is concerned about the health effects of secondhand smoke, Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court should oppose the rush to nationalize same-sex marriage. Litigating for ‘marriage equality’is like suing to suspend gravity; as a matter of science, gay marriage is very clearly unequal in terms of procreative and mortality prospects.”

Cameron said he conducted his own study as well, looking at 2,428 obituaries from The San Francisco Chronicle and The Boston Globe.  He said the median age of death for conventionally married men was 82, women 85, similar to Denmark. Of 1,400 obituaries in San Francisco’s gay press, the median age of death was 54 for gays who died without a listed partner, 51 with. For lesbians, the median age of death was 56 for those without a listed partner, but 54 with.  For transsexuals, the corresponding figures were 46 and 42.5. “Whether informal, as in San Francisco, or formal, as in Denmark, homosexual partnerships were associated with lessened lifespan,” said Cameron, “just the opposite of man-woman marriage.”

“Bad science is bipartisan,” he said. “An April NBC News – Wall Street Journal poll found that 50 percent of Americans imagine with Rob Portman, against the empirical evidence, that people are born gay. Ted Olson, the GOP lawyer who argued for gay marriage in the Supreme Court is sworn to tell the truth, falsely wrote in the Journal that homosexual orientation is ‘a characteristic with which they were born and which they cannot change.’”

But Cameron said twin studies show that homosexual interests are not DNA-determined like race, gender and eye color.

“So gay analogies to the Civil Rights struggles of the last century are inapt,” Cameron said. ”How else does one explain how Ellen DeGeneres’ first ‘lifetime partner’ could abandon homosexuality for traditional marriage? Senator Portman’s son was no more ‘born with’ homosexual preferences than anyone is ‘born with’ a sexual taste for children — both are acquired and can be controlled.”

Cameron said he came to Columbus to plead with Portman because he understands that the nation’s most powerful Republican, U.S. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH 8), Ohio Gov. John Kasich and pro-gay marriage Sen. Portman are seeking to install a former Ohio lobbyist for homosexual marriage, Matt Borges, as state party chairman this Friday – a move opposed by 84 Tea Party, Christian, pro-life, and GOP conservatives led by former State Rep. Seth Morgan of Dayton, in a recent public letter that made headlines statewide.

“No responsible leader of any party, and certainly no conservative with any integrity, would be supporting same-sex marriage if he actually understood the empirical science that associates homosexuality with early death and disproportionately high rates of pedophilia, pederasty, molestation and predatory recruitment,” Cameron said. “As national leader of the Republican Party and a man of Roman Catholic roots, John Boehner should cut-off all US borrowing to finance gay marriage and LGBT and propaganda in the nation’s K-12 schools, colleges, and non-profits.  It’s a scandal of enormous scale that Boehner’s House Republicans are financing the gay and pro-abortion agenda by adding to the national debt at $50,000 per second.”