I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed but when the southern religious right is talking about gay people, homosexual suddenly has about ten syllables.

ho-mo-sex-you-aaaahl-ssss.  Or sod-dum-might-ssss.  There’s a very distinct hissing sound involved.

It’s like they love to linger on the word.

Which brings us to Rick Perry.

Rick Perry is not gay, of course.  Not gay.  And we now know that because he’s also not a drunk.  Which is kinda like being gay.  No, wait.  It’s exactly like being gay, at least according to Rick Perry.

From his book about the Boy Scouts, On My Honor.

Time magazine has discovered that in his first book, Perry compared being gay to being an alcoholic:

in a little-noticed passage in his first book, “On My Honor,” a encomium on the Boy Scouts published in 2008, Perry also drew a parallel between homosexuality and alcoholism. “Even if an alcoholic is powerless over alcohol once it enters his body, he still makes a choice to drink,” he wrote. “And, even if someone is attracted to a person of the same sex, he or she still makes a choice to engage in sexual activity with someone of the same gender.”In “On My Honor,” Perry also punted on the exact origins of homosexuality. He wrote that he is “no expert on the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate,” but that gays should simply choose abstinence. Perry’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on whether he maintains this view.

I’ve said it once and now I’ll say it again, there should be a law that if you write a book you ought to have to read it.