Monday, November 29, 2010

Family Research Council's Tony Perkins pushes George Rekers flavored falsehoods on Hardball

And the lies continue

Today on the news show Hardball, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council sought to defend his organization's claim that gay men molest children at a higher rate than heterosexuals.

In attempting to do this, Perkins cited research by the American College of Pediatricians. However, there are several things about this group that Perkins omitted:

The American College of Pediatricians is not a legitimate medical group. It is a sham organization dedicated to the laundering of junk science about the lgbt community, i.e. the kind of "science" which demonizes the lgbt community. One of its chief researchers was George Rekers, that is before he got caught coming from a European trip with a "rentboy."

Earlier this year, it tried to push a webpage, Facts About Youth, to American schools.

Among other things, this site made the following claims about gay men:

Some gay men sexualize human waste, including the medically dangerous practice of coprophilia, which means sexual contact with highly infectious fecal wastes

In addition, it also contained several errors in regards to research and other claims about the lgbt community.

But these things are irrelevant because the big story is how the American College of Pediatricians benefits people like Perkins.

Just as he did on Hardball, Perkins can cite the ACP without going into details about its errors. The official sounding name of the organization obscures all of that, and thus makes Perkins's position sound accurate.

The sad thing is that I think Perkins knows this.

And apparently this was not the only distortion Perkins committed during his Hardball appearance. Perkins said the following:

If you go back to the Archives of Sexual Behavior, a peer-reviewed reviewed journal, that stated that in self-identified… 86% of men, homosexual men, or who engage… or men who engage in molestation of children, 86% of them identified as homosexual or bisexual. That study has not been refuted.

However, according to the site Box Turtle Bulletin:

The study was not “refuted,” in Perkins’ terminology, simply because the finding was not considered to be significant, not even by its authors. The study, “Behavior patterns of child molesters” by W.D. Erickson, N.H. Walbek, and R.K. Seely which appeared more than twenty years ago (1988, to be exact), didn’t set out to determine the sexual orientation of child molesters. The study, of 229 convicted child molesters in Minnesota, (which, by the way, was never intended to be nationally representative in any way) was focused on the types of sexual contact the men engaged in with their victims — vaginal or anal penetration, oral contact, and so forth. In this particular sample, 63 victims were male, and 166 victims were female. The “finding” that Perkins and company found so exciting is encapsulated in just one sentence: “Eighty-six percent of offenders against males described themselves as homosexual or bisexual.”

That’s right, one lone sentence out of a ten page document, buried deeply within the text. In other words, the authors themselves didn’t see it as a significant finding. And it may be because the authors didn’t delve into the adult relationship makeup of these offenders, or what criteria the offenders used in their self-labeling. Nor did they attempt to investigate whether there was any validity to their self-labeling.


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7 comments:

ColdCountry said...

So, 28% of the molestation victims were boys, and 86% of those who molested them identified as gay or bi. That means that of the total molesters, 24.5% identified as gay or bi. Huh. That's not what he said. Is it?

And why did he bring DADT into it? (Other than as a red herring.) Still, for those who don't know - and don't want to know - he sounded more or less credible.

Not that any of it had anything to do with why they were designated a hate group. He certainly is a flim-flam man.

BlackTsunami said...

True. But those are the folks we can't reach. Too many folks, however are people that we can reach. And I don't think Perkins did himself any favors tonight.

Patrick Hogan said...

I was a big fan of the way he blatantly refused to answer the question: "Do you think homosexuality should be illegal?" He repeatedly sidestepped, talking about how FRC's not currently working to make gay sex illegal, but never stated a simple yes or no -- apparently, he's bright enough to figure out that doing so would have been rather obvious and public proof of SPLC's report.

Anonymous said...

It's not just family and religious organizations that say homosexuality is bad and is not genetic. Look at these sites

AIDS
http://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/docs/FastFacts-MSM-FINAL508COMP.pdf

Syphilis
http://www.cdc.gov/std/Syphilis/STDFact-MSM-Syphilis.htm

Lesbians and domestic violence
http://www.musc.edu/vawprevention/lesbianrx/factsheet.shtml

Lesbians and vaginosis

http://www.urotoday.com/50/browse_categories/female_urology/bacterial_vaginosis_common_in_lesbian_women.html

serial killers

http://www.practicalhomicide.com/Research/homoserial.htm

Anonymous said...

This explains it all
http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/militant_gay_movement.htm

BlackTsunami said...

Nice try with the Michael Swift post, anonymous. But that link forgot one crucial part - "This essay is an outré, madness, a tragic, cruel fantasy, an eruption of inner rage, on how the oppressed desperately dream of being the oppressor."

In other word, it wasn't really my friend.

BlackTsunami said...

Anonymous, your first set of links are sad:

Neither of those first two links talking about the lgbt community and disease says that "homosexuality is bad."

What you did was to take studies talking about occurrences of AIDS and other diseases in the lgbt community and use them to smear the lgbt community in general.

It's no different than a racist taking the occurrences of diseases in the African-American community to smear that community.

Now your last two links are really funny. The Suzanna Rose fact sheet that you quoted clearly said:

"The research usually has been done with mostly white, middle-class lesbians who are sufficiently open about their sexual orientation to have met researchers seeking participants in the lesbian community. Subsequently, these findings may not apply to women who are less open, less educated, or of other ethnic backgrounds."

Lastly, that study on serial killers is HIGHLY laughable. It looked at the crimes of only a few serial killers - one of whom - Wayne Williams - was convicted of only two murders. Also, as I recall, Williams was never identified as gay.

What about Ted Bundy or - if you really want to be stupid - H. H. Holmes? Both of those men killed women. What about the other serial killers who solely target women?

What you have done is illustrate how easy it is for someone with a bias to manipulate legitimate work.