Keep it up, Peter, keep it up. Sink deeper into that hole

Peter LaBarbera continues try and whitewash his lie about the MRSA infection.

And he continues to step in his own mess. Let's talk about today's entry:

Here’s an e-mail I sent last Wednesday to one fellow who requested that AFTAH “correct our website”:

Richard, they [gay activists] created a straw man, and then tore it down. It’s ridiculous. I talked [in the AFTAH story] about other people getting MRSA at the hospital, etc. Now, I did say that this story had eerie reminders of the initial days of AIDS, and in saying that I was referring to the fact that BEHAVIORS were linked to that disease’s spread. I’m a pretty direct person, as you might have deduced (much more so than even many in the conservative, pro-family movement): if I wanted to call [MRSA] the [new] “gay plague,” I would have wrote a headline like this: ‘Is MRSA the Next Gay Plague?’ — which I didn’t.

Most of the media took the same interpretation as I did, minus the anti-gay-behavior editorializing, of course. I hope you’ll grant that we have the right to do that since, after all, we are opposed to homosexual BEHAVIOR. To read the actual MRSA [study] (have you read it?), you’d almost have to have the editorial instincts of an old Soviet Pravda editor to assert that it does not implicate reckless gay male behavior. Guess what: I’ll bet the researchers’ “sins” were grossly overstated, too! [homosexual activists have assailed researchers for overstating the MRSA-gay link]. As for Matt [Barber] and CWA, he’s a big boy and more than capable of defending himself. Best–pl

So now, he is clarifying what he said. But check out the semantics. No he did not call MRSA infection the new "gay plague" per se. But he did infer as much. Repeating what he said via a press release sent out by him on January 15, 2008:

Is this not an eerie reminder of the initial stories 25 years ago about AIDS -- then called GRID (Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Disease)? It is unfathomable that after that plague, disease specialists and the media are now surprised at the correlation of new infections with homosexual behavior;Wake up, medical and political establishment: homosexual behavior is unhealthy -- no matter how many secular sermons you preach against "homophobia." Due to liberal political correctness, which treats aberrant -- even deadly -- behaviors as a "civil right," we as a society don't seem to have learned much from the AIDS pandemic - LaBarbera: New MRSA Staph Risk Spread by Gay Men Shows Risks of 'Second-Hand Sodomy'

The words may not be exact but the connotation is there. Peter is weasling big time. And while he is talking about what the study said in order to prove his point, he omits the statements from the authors of the study and the CDC repudiating what he and Matt Barber (Concerned Women for America) said about the study.

By the way, I keep hearing from him and Barber as to how "homosexual pressure groups" bullied the researchers. But they have never produced proof. As Jeremy from Goodasyou.org pointed out, HRC wrote a letter castigating anti-gay industry groups for distorting the study. They never attacked the researchers.

And I just love this part:

Try this: do a quick Google search on syphills, gonorrhea, chlamydia, hepatitis, anal warts, anal cancer, etc. — combined with the word “gay” — and you’ll come up with a host of articles, some written by pro-homosexuality websites, that implicate homosexual behaviors in the disproportionately high incidence of said maladies among “gay” men.

What bullshit. I am sure that if I typed those words and combined with the word "women" or "African-American," I would find articles talking about how these diseases affect those population. To make a leap like Peter just did pretty much illustrates how the anti-gay industry finds data to distort.

Lastly, I noticed that Peter mentions John R. Diggs. Now unlike the article I talked about yesterday, Peter did mention that ridiculously fradulent paper Diggs wrote (The Health Risks of Gay Sex). For those who bought my book, you can read the long version of what I say about Diggs's paper.

But for those who have not read my book, let me give you an excerpt:

Twice, John R. Diggs includes the study done by Alan Bell and Martin Weinberg in their book, Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women, as indicative of the entire gay population. In one passage, he even refers to it as “a far ranging study of homosexual men . . .” But Bell and Weinberg never said that their findings were indicative of all gay men. They actually said “. . . given the variety of circumstances which discourage homosexuals from participating in research studies, it is unlikely that any investigator willever be in a position to say that this or that is true of a given percentage of all homosexuals.”

Diggs cites a Canadian study twice in order to claim that gays have a shorter lifespan than heterosexuals. But his citation of the study is a mischaracterization. In 2001, the six original researchers (Robert S. Hogg, Stefan A. Strathdee, Kevin J.P. Craib, Michael V. O’Shaughnessy, Julion Montaner, and Martin T. Schechter) who conducted that study have gone on record saying that religious conservatives (like Diggs) was distorting their work.

In another section entitled Physical Health, Diggs claims that gays are victims of “gay bowel syndrome.” The term is an obsolete medical term. exist and even the CDC does not use it. In fact, if one was to look at the endnotes of Diggs’ study, he would find that two of the sources he quoted concerning “gay bowel syndrome” were from articles in published in 1976 and 1983, which is consistent with the years that the term existed. One last source was a letter to the editor printed in 1994 but Diggs does not make it clear as to whatwere the circumstances surrounding it.

Diggs generalizes convenience sample studies as indicative of the gay population at large. Diggs takes studies done in foreign countries and claims that they are indicative of the gay population at large.

Diggs claims that there are five distinctions between heterosexual and homosexual populations including levels of promiscuity, physical health, mental health, lifespan, and monogamy. However, he spends very little time comparing the two dynamics. He uses all of his time castigating gay populations.

Diggs uses an out of date book, The Gay Report (published in 1979) to claim that gays are engaging in deviant sexual practices. Only once does he attempt to tie the alleged deviant practices of gays in 1979 to present day; and to do so, he cites two events that took place regarding bondage workshops. However, there is a strong indication that heterosexuals took part in these events as well as gays. Diggs ignores this dynamic.

In other words, it's anti-gay industry crap but in a different wrapper. What Diggs wrote is no different from what Timothy Dailey of the Family Research Council wrote, or Robert Knight wrote when he was with Concerned Women for America, or what Glenn Stanton from Focus on the Family wrote.

It is the same standard lies and distorted studies repeated over and over again. The big crime is that someone probably paid Diggs to write his hot mess when they could have easily slumped over to the Family Research Council's webpage and gotten it for free.

But back to Peter: it is apparent that he recognizes what mess he made. And even if it's not an apology, to see him flail is rather nice.