Last week was not a good week for the Republican re-branding experiment, as more and more Republican leaders made their true feelings known. The week brought us comments from Alaska’s Republican Representative Don Young, who called immigrants “wetbacks,” and comments from a rising Republican star Dr. Ben Carson, compared gays to pedophilia and bestiality.
And now this. A Republican National Committee member from Michigan went on his Facebook page and called homosexuals “filthy,” and responsible for a majority of suicides and syphilis cases in America.
Dave Agema posted remarks on Wednesday that said the “homosexual lifestyle” is “filthy” and that it will reduce your lifespan. He posted statistics, will little backing evidence, that gays are responsible for over half of suicides, and 60% of all syphilis cases.
Agema told a local Michigan TV station that he didn’t agree with everything in the article he posted but that he was interested in many of the statistics in the article.
Several Michigan Republicans have called on him to step down from his post over the comments. One operative told the Detroit Free Press that you can’t “insult a wide swath of the electorate” and hope to win elections.
Agema told WWMT that he had no plans to resign from office over the controversial remarks and that he was standing his ground. “If the party doesn’t stand on its principle, we’ll lose our base.”
