Thursday, October 19, 2006

Liberty Sunday: Garbage in, Garbage out

"They want to silence, and they will silence, Christians. If we don’t win this battle, the day will come when they’ll walk into your church if you say one thing wrong [or] bad about homosexuality; they’ll walk in your church and they’ll shut you up and you’ll be arrested for a hate crime. That sounds far, far removed but it’s the truth."

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, "there they go again."

By now, the anti-gay industry's whinefest, or as they call it, "Liberty Sunday" is over and done. And it was the same mess they always perpetrate.

Blah, blah, blah, homosexuals are out to get us. Blah, blah, blah, it's an agenda to hurt Christians.

I don't know what's worse: the fact that they always conveniently forgetting how many of us gay folks have a deep faith in God or the fact that they are trivializing Christianity by reducing it to a Tammany Hall voting machine.

But lying on the gay community is a usual occurrence for Wildmon.

According to the website, Media Matters for America, Wildmon repeated a lie about gay income during a March 2006 radio broadcast (http://mediamatters.org/items/200603160008):

"You know, I saw yesterday how much - - how much money the homosexual community has. I mean, good gracious, the average homosexual makes four times more than I do"

Not only did Media Matters call this claim a lie, but also it had the facts to back up its claim:

"Though Wildmon did not state specifically ‘how much money the homosexual community has,’ according to the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, the AFA has, for many years, based its statements on average gay incomes on a discredited 1988 survey by the Simmons Market Research Bureau, which listed the average gay income as $55,430 . . ."

Media Matters for America went on to say that the survey was discredited because it did not reflect a representative sample of the gay population. Apparently, the survey only questioned readers of popular gay-oriented magazines and those who filled out sign-up sheets for the 1993 Gay March on Washington:

"As the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals, Inc. (NOGLSTP) noted, ‘ People who buy and read newspapers and magazines tend to have more education and higher incomes. Gay events attract people who can afford to travel or pay an entry fee.’"

As a further example of this, Media Matters for America said, the NOGLSTP also demonstrated that a 1989 survey by the Simmons Bureau showed that readers of African-American-oriented magazines earned 41 to 82 percent more than average African-Americans.

Media Matters for America added this coda that shed even more light on Wildmon’s exaggeration about gay and lesbian income:

" . . . even if the Simmons survey was accurate, Wildmon’s assertion that ‘the average homosexual earns four times more than I do,’ would not be. According to the AFA’s 2004 990 filing - -the Internal Revenue Service’s return for organizations exempt from income tax – Wildmon paid himself $58,010 plus $31, 787 in benefits and a housing allowance of $39,200. He paid his son, Tim, who is president of AFA, $79,000"

We are not the problem. Obviously, Wildmon has gay on the brain.