Wednesday, November 27, 2013

'British Supreme Court tanks 'religious liberty' argument in ruling' and other Wednesday midday news briefs

British Supreme Court Rules Against Discriminating Bed & Breakfast Owners - Boom! The phony "religious liberty" argument fails in Great Britain. 

INDIANA: Mary Cheney To Host Fundraiser To Fight Proposed Gay Marriage Ban - Oh snap! Dick Cheney's little girl is catching an attitude. Personally I totally approve. Now I know there are some lgbts who will be "where the hell was she when . . ." but I disagree. There is a time to talk about that sort of thing but now isn't the time. In a war, you don't read potential allies the riot act . . . at least not yet.  

Texas National Guard to allow same-sex couples to register for benefits - Score one for the good guys. 

Oregon Family Council Compares Gays to Neo-Nazis - Oh come on! No gay man alive would be caught dead in those tacky uniforms.

Family Research Council continues to post inaccurately bad studies on lgbt community

Last week, I wrote about how the Family Research Council was posting an outdated and flawed study, Comparing the Lifestyles of Homosexual Couples to Married Couples to denigrate same-sex couples.

This week, I am now reporting that the organization has done even worse by posting yet another flawed study. However, this study denigrates the lgbt community as a whole

The study, The Negative Effects of Homosexuality,  was actually removed from FRC's webpage in 2008. An employee of the organization, Kathy Athearn, told me that the study was one of a few removed because it contained outdated sources.

But it has now returned to FRC's webpage and it has not been updated.

The study is supposed to show the so-called “dangers of homosexuality" and all of the religious right talking points about lgbts are touched on including:


Gays have a short life span,
Gays and lesbians don’t know how to be monogamous,
Gays and lesbians have high rate of domestic violence.

But strangely enough, this study includes the same inaccurate information as the study I talked about last week:

- A citation of the book Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women by Alan Bell and Martin Weinberg as a correct generalization of lgbt sexual habits despite the fact that it was published in 1978 and was not meant by the authors to be a correct assessment of the lgbt community in general.  A passage from Homosexualities clearly says:

“. . . given the variety of circumstances which discourage homosexuals from participating in research studies, it is unlikely that any investigator will ever be in a position to say that this or that is true of a given percentage of all homosexuals.”

- A citation of the book The Male Couple: How Relationships Develop by David P. McWhirter and Andrew M. Mattison despite the fact that the book was written 1984 and was not meant to be a correct assessment of the lgbt community in general.  A passage from The Male Couple says:

“We always have been very careful to explain that the very nature of our research sample, its size (156 couples), its narrow geographic location, and the natural selectiveness of the participants prevents the findings from being applicable and generalizable to the entire gay
male community.” 

But there is more:

Gay Bowel Syndrome (GBS): The Journal of the American Medical Association refers to GBS problems such as proctitis, proctocolitis, and enteritis as "sexually transmitted gastrointestinal syndromes." Many of the bacterial and protozoa pathogens that cause gbs are found in feces and transmitted to the digestive system: According to the pro-homosexual text Anal Pleasure and Health, "[s]exual activities provide many opportunities for tiny amounts of contaminated feces to find their way into the mouth of a sexual partner . . . The most direct route is oral-anal contact."

"Gay bowel syndrome" is a term no longer used because it is considered outdated and many physicians  no longer use it.

Then there is this citation:

Reduced Life Span. A study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology on the mortality rates of homosexuals concluded that they have a significantly reduced life expectancy:

In a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age twenty for gay and bisexual men is eight to twenty years less than for all men. If the same pattern of mortality were to continue, we estimate that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged twenty years will not reach their sixty-fifth birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871.

In 2001, the researchers of this study complained that religious right groups were distorting their work. As a matter of fact, as recent at last year, one of the researcher, Julio Montaner, was still complaining about how the study was being distorted:

"To use my report to support the notion that gay and bisexual sex is somehow the reason why people die early is misusing the data," Montaner said.

Montaner noted that his group’s original report was conducted at a time when the HIV epidemic was poorly controlled and treatments were ineffective. Since then, there have have been great strides in treating the disease and preventing its spread, Montaner said. In British Columbia, annual diagnoses of new infections have dropped from 900 in the mid-1990s to 300 in recent years, he said. Deaths from HIV also have fallen sharply, he said.

Let me take a guess. It's all about "religious liberty," isn't it, FRC?