As much as libs frown on smoking for its risk to health and longevity, you'd think they'd pay a little attention to homosexual behavior.
Jesse Jackson, President of the Rainbow-Push Coalition, was speaking to the same audience of progressives that the author of "God's Politics" on cspan2 June 3rd. Jackson said that second-hand smoke kills 65,000 people a year AND he also said that allowing gays to marry is a civil right.
Liberals don't really care about the health consequences of behavior. The thing that matters most to them is being fashionable.
Smoking was once considered to be cool and hip. Watch an old movie and you'll see sophisticated ladies and leading men casually puffing away. But in later years smoking fell out of fashion among the upper class. As fewer and fewer upscale people smoked, smoking was left as mostly a working class vice. Once that happened, the left turned against smoking and eventually began crusading against it. The Republicans were accused of being the tobacco party, even though it was FDR who started subsidizing tobacco and liberals like Al Gore Sr. who kept the tobacco subsidy running for years (back in the era when it was still fashionable to smoke).
Unlike smoking, homosexuality is today a highly fashionable vice. All the "beautiful people" in Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Nantucket are "tolerant" of the gay lifestyle. They all take pride in having gay friends, gay relatives, or whatever. Gay is the latest craze. Madonna tried to revive her sagging career not by smoking, but by kissing Britney Spears. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is all the rage, as Red Sox fans found out this past weekend. Gay is highly fashionable among the elite segment. The fact that middle and working class folks, particularly Christians, find homosexuality revolting makes it all the more in vogue among the media and academic elite.
It doesn't make a bit of difference to elite liberals that homosexual acts are potentially deadlier than smoking. Smoking is gauche and gay is chic. So gay gets peddled to kids in our public schools even as we lecture those same kids against smoking.