Unrepentant gays damned to eternal hellfire, testifies expert in MI same-sex marriage trial

Unrepentant homosexuals would be eternally damned to hell, testified the state’s final witness in a federal trial challenging the Michigan ban on marriage and adoption by same-sex couples.

Douglas Allen, of the anti-LGBT National Organization for Marriage, has authored critical examinations of studies on gay parenting that other researchers say were based onshoddy methodology.

He served as the state’s final witness, testifying as an expert that some scientists did not agree with research showing no significant differences between children raised by same-sex couples and those raised in by heterosexual parents.

A spokeswoman for the Michigan attorney general, a defendant in the case, told The Detroit News that Allen’s personal and religious beliefs have had “no impact on his research and the results it reaches.”

But the plaintiff’s attorney asked Allen, who is an economics professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada, if he thought homosexuals were eternally damned.

“Not repentant? Yes,” Allen testified.

The federal judge accepted Allen as an expert witness in the case, but rejected the state’s first scheduled expert witness, a Yale Law School student who planned to offer a historical defense of marriage between a man and a woman going back to ancient philosophers such as Cicero and Plato.

U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman said Sherif Girgis, who is also pursuing a doctorate in philosophy at Princeton University, was smart, articulate, and destined to become an expert in his field one day.

“But not quite yet,” the judge said.

Closing arguments were scheduled for Friday in the case, which stems from a lawsuit filed by April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse after individually adopting special needs children.

The women, who work as nurses, hope to marry and adopt one another’s children.

[Image: Man in hell via Shutterstock]