Earlier in the week Iowa GOP Congressional candidate Jeremy Walters apologized for remarks written on his Facebook page saying that AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality.
Republican Party of Iowa Chairman Matt Strawn denounced Walters.
Yesterday, Dave Leach, a GOP candidate for the state senate there, came to Walters' defense, the Iowa Independent reports:
Leach, who is running against Democratic state Sen. Matt McCoy in Senate District 31, said Walters statement was 'theologically clumsy, but it seemed close enough to Biblical truth to not merit a censure from the Republican Party.' … 'GOP head Matt Strawn is right in saying HIV does not discriminate; in other words, the fact that someone has HIV by no means proves they got it through sodomy,' Leach said in an e-mail to Strawn and The Iowa Independent. 'But I don’t see that that is what Jeremy said.'
Whether the Bible says there is a connection shouldn’t matter, he said, since, 'everyone knows there is this connection.'"
"Everyone knows sodomites suffer [HIV/AIDS] far more than the rest of the population, and that sodomy’s practices, which are so embarrassingly unsanitary that you dare not detail them in one of your articles, would inevitably create such a disease if it did not already exist. It seems 'inappropriate,' to use Strawn’s word, to apologize for saying what the Bible says, with which everyone agrees. It is 'inappropriate' for anyone to ask such a thing. I am sorry that Jeremy gave up his ground, although at least he stood it for awhile, which is more than most will do."
And on a side note — that hat. Seriously?
