Saturday, April 24, 2010

When defending anti-gay lunacy, personal attacks are the order of the day

In my post earlier this week regarding the Traditional Values Coalition's Andrea Lafferty expressing pride with TVC being designated as an anti-gay hate group, I failed to detail what precipitated Lafferty's bizarre joy.

Earlier in the week, she penned a piece for Washington D.C.'s Roll Call about ENDA (the Employment Non-Discrimination Act), including mentioning negative anecdotes about transgender teachers in the school system- anecdotes which were fully refuted.

Lafferty's piece caught the attention of Dr. Jillian T. Weiss, an associate professor of law and society at Ramapo College of New Jersey and associate editor at the Bilerico Project, an LGBT political blog.

Weiss wrote Roll Call and was invited to pen a response, which she did. And it was an excellent response:

The Traditional Values Coalition is an anti-gay hate group on the watch list of the Southern Poverty Law Center. TVC raises money by scaring people about gruesome but unlikely events that will result from prohibiting discrimination. Its claims demean gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people and our lives and do nothing to help this Congress address the high level of job discrimination that puts many of us in the unemployment line.

ENDA is designed to redress the persistent job discrimination levied against people in this country based on their sexual orientation and gender identity, problems demonstrated by the many studies cited by experts in their fields at Congressional hearings on ENDA. Further, both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association support passage of ENDA because ending discrimination is such an important goal.

So with the ball in Lafferty's court, so to speak, what do you think she would do - write a detailed refutation of Dr. Weiss's piece or attack her personally?

Let the headline of her answer piece on the TVC web page be your guide:


'Transgender' Man Attacks TVC

That's right. Lafferty chose to make a personal attack on Dr. Weiss instead of refuting her piece on ENDA:

Dr. Jillian Weiss is a man who has lived as a woman since 1997. This is a truly troubled individual. Whether he has actually gone through a complete surgical procedure to remove his genitals is a mystery. He may be living as a she-male hybrid. However, readers would never know he is a transgender based on his published bio. 

Lafferty's piece continues the offensive attack, making special note to use the incorrect pronoun of "he" when referring to Dr. Weiss.

So the irony is that in the same piece where Lafferty expresses pride in being called an anti-gay hate group, she demonstrates why the designation is right on the mark. Her comments were filthy, immature, and totally un-Christian.

I've never met Dr Weiss but her credentials and writing speak for themselves and frankly if she is the example that Lafferty wants to push as to why parents should be afraid of ENDA, then Lafferty should be careful.

Folks on her side of the argument are going to think that she is working for the lgbt community.



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Video: Gays are too promiscuous and disease-ridden to be 'worthy' of marriage



A Facebook  buddy of mine brought this video to my attention.

The video is homophobia under the guise of "being scientific" in reasoning why gays and lesbians are not deserving of marriage. To summarize, it says gays and lesbians are not worthy to be allowed to legally married because we are too concentrated on promiscuity and are therefore consistently disease-afflicted.

Watch if you want but here are the major problems with it:

The statistics are cited in it are irrelevant because none of the gays mentioned are married.

Also, many of the statistics are highly outdated, some coming from the 1970s. The most recent statistic seems to come from 2001.

And a major problem with this video: much of the research is taken from statistics about gay men afflicted with AIDS/HIV. This means that a huge segment of gays (those who don't AIDS) and lesbian are omitted.

The video is cherry picking at its worse and is the equivalent of racists using FBI crime statistics to denigrate African-Americans.

Now some have reported this video but I say let's not just do that just yet. The underhanded use of statistics is a tactic employed by a myriad of religious right groups and spokespeople.

Instead of allowing our anger or need to ridicule ignorance to rule, let's study and remember.

Chinese general Sun Tzu said in his book, The Art of War:

It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.


And if anyone thinks that the cause for lgbt equality isn't a war, they need to think again.


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