EX PASTOR TO SUE HOMOSEXUALITY

A founder of America’s right-wing Tea Party movement, which consists of various conservative groups, has proposed instituting a class action lawsuit against homosexuality.

Speaking at a Tea Party Unity event last week, Rick Scarborough, a former Baptist pastor from Texas, said that the suit would be similar to those instituted against the tobacco industry on behalf of smoking-related disease victims.

“Homosexuality much more likely leads to AIDS than smoking leads to cancer,” said Scarborough.

“And yet the entire nation has rejected smoking. Billions of dollars are put into a trust fund to help cancer victims and the tobacco industry was held accountable for that,” he argued.

Scarborough, who is committed to “restoring Judeo-Christian values in America,” has previously stated that the AIDS epidemic is God’s “judgement as a result of an immoral act” and called it “a homosexual disease”.

However, another founding organisation of the Tea Party, TeaParty365, was less than impressed with Scarborough’s outlandish class action suit idea.

“TeaParty365 would like to take this opportunity to once again, and once-and-for-all, distance ourselves – and the larger Tea Party Movement– from the self-serving antics of Rick Scarborough, and his ilk,” said TeaParty365’s David Webb in a statement.

“TeaParty365 does not support this idiotic notion [of suing homosexuality]. We feel it is counter-productive to the national conversation, and ultimately harmful to the Tea Party brand, and the country.”

The Tea Party movement has been blamed for being behind the Republican Party’s recent shutdown of the US government.