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During the late 50′s and early 60′s when our country was finally confronting Jim Crow and it’s attendant brutality, those resistant to integration did EXACTLY what the anti gay are doing to connect black sexuality to immorality, immaturity and lack of respect for marriage.
Marriage records, and birth records were the only statistical information that could be obtained about blacks. But marriage rates were very low, compared to whites. And out of wedlock births quite high.
And still are to this day among blacks.

This information was used as a means of ‘proving’ that blacks didn’t care for, and had no respect for marriage. And slave records, were also put before law makers as a way of also proving that blacks birth and marriage situation hadn’t improved or changed, even though marriage was available to them.

The legislators in Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and Alabama, tried to institute a marriage ban on blacks who had EVER had children out of wedlock and/or cohabited without being married.

Of course, they are leaving out a big, gaping context to why such disparity in marriage and non married births exist among such a small minority of people.

Discrimination and it’s effect on economic equality played a big part in the disruption of the black nuclear family. Economic injustice made black men, and whole ghettoized communities, vulnerable to criminal behavior and it’s attendant risks and results.
Black people, AS a minority, couldn’t and didn’t have the economic and social justice support and integration NEEDED to keep a viable enterprise zone viable. In other words, blacks could not maintain an economic system healthy all on their own. And no one would work with blacks, further creating a profound separation other groups didn’t have.

Abuses by the medical establishment and lack of being able to afford better medical care, created a tragic confluence to this day where infection rates, addiction and preventable disease disable or kill blacks at higher rates than whites.

This is all familiar territory for another marginalized minority that are gay folks and parallels the black experience in America.

This is where legitimate discussion on how the effects of social injustice can take generations to heal, or may never heal, unless that injustice is acknowledged and done away with.
Gays are not the new blacks in such simple terms.
But gay people have been TREATED like blacks (or Jews and women) in similar ways enough to show that the results of their treatment have similar consequences.

It doesn’t have to be EXACTLY the same. But laws against gay people having any similarity to Jim Crow is a shame on our nation and a drag on it’s progress and a contradiction of it’s own moral creed of equality for otherwise productive citizens.

How perfectly logical!

I think the loading is something like this: a “way of life” has an ethos, a ‘morality’, a creed. In short, traditional religion. It has rigid forms people conform to and specific kinds of suffering they accept on a cost/benefit rationale and specific measures of success. And specific, unadmitted, limitations.

A “lifestyle” is perceived to be a negation of the whole concept and worldview. Life lived in transgression of the established “way of life”.

It’s not just gay-ness per se that makes the “gay lifestyle” such a bugaboo. It’s that gay people largely have to live in Modern forms while they themselves live lives tacitly and often unknowingly constructed around Agrarian Age tenets that are incompatible with real respectability in our times. Such as fertility cultism, Biblical literalism, sacred materialism of other kinds, supernaturalism, etc. Gay people involuntarily manifest a critique of the ordering of their lives they find hard to bear.

The term “lifestyle” was used and misused by everyone in the ’70s and ’80s, especially in those new-fangled singles ads in newspapers.

George Carlin once observed that a barbarian warlord (I can’t recall if it was Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun) had an “active, outdoor lifestyle.”

Well, I have no doubt about what they intend to imply when they use the term “lifestyle” and it is just as you say. But once you get beyond their attempts to imply certain things or evoke certain images and you call them on what the actual definition is, what do they say?

The other thing I have wondered about is who first came up with this odious term. I think, but am not certain, that it was actually 1970s gays who asserted that being gay was a “legitimate alternative lifestyle”, perhaps hoping to tap into the ethos of the early 1970s. But by 1977, Anita Bryant was using it and we opposed its usage. Seems to me that someone – whether Ms. Bryant or some gay hippy – should be held to account for birthing this atrocity.