A Swiss politician has blamed incontinence due to weakened anal muscles as the reason for an increase in suicide among gay people.
Zurich City Council member Daniel Regli made the statement during a budget debate on funding for sex education.
Regli criticized a sex ed website, Lust and Frust (Pleasure and Pain). He claimed the site, supported by the city’s education department, promotes homosexuality and promiscuity but doesn’t say anything about “homosexuals with multiple partners take their lives between the ages of 30 and 40…because their anal muscle is not holding up as it should.”
His remarks brought laughter and chaos in the hall, until Mayor Corine Mauch, an out lesbian, called for order.
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Even his own party criticized him, with Marco Denoth, Swiss People’s Party (SVP) co-president, saying, “I do not want to see him anymore.”
The Young Socialists party is calling on him to resign, which he is refusing to do, and has said that if the country’s hate crime law included anti-gay statements he would be in trouble.
“Someone who is able, in a homophobic tirade, to make the link between the anal muscle of homosexuals and suicide is beyond any conception that I can have of a politician,” said René Schegg, director of the LGBTQ organization Pink Cross.
Regli remains defiant.
“I said Saturday what nobody wants to hear,” he claimed, failing to grasp that no one wants to hear it because it’s asinine.
As Schegg noted, the real culprit for a higher than average suicide rate among the LGBTQ community is the discrimination prevalent in society today.
“They are still not sufficiently accepted in society,” Schegg said.
