Headless monsters citings courtesy of Box Turtle Bulletin

It's been a slow day that picked up when I logged onto Box Turtle Bulletin.

Box Turtle Bulletin is a site that creates reports detailing anti-gay industry deceptions. It has been very useful to me in writing my book.

The newest study is yet another excellent report. The Family Research Council (yet another so-called "pro family" group) has filed an amicus brief in a Maryland case involving same sex marriage. One guess as to who said they aren't on.

According to Box Turtle Bulletin, FRC's brief is filled with distortions, including out-of-date citations and convenience sample study manipulations such as:

As the FRC describes heterosexual married couples, they are using research that really is probability sampled and statistically representative of married couples. (Notice, too, that the data that they have presented so far excludes all cohabiting couples.)

Now the FRC is ready to contrast heterosexual marriage to gay male relationships. This is where their arguments get really dicey, as they carefully cherry-pick poorly-constructed and out-dated studies based on convenience samples and other non-representative populations.
First, the FRC turns to a 1984 book by Joseph Harry, Gay Couples to claim that 66% of gay men in relationships had sex with someone other than their partner within the first year, and that 90% had sex outside the relationship if it lasted five years. But Gay Couples is based on a casual survey that was printed in a Chicago gay newspaper, with the response rate being well below 10%. With a response rate so low, it is important to ask why so few chose to participate. No reasonable public opinion pollster would rely in a survey with such a low response rate. Response rates below 50% raise eyebrows; 10% is pathetic.

The FRC also turns to Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen’s After The Ball: How American Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s for this juicy quote: “the cheating ratio of ‘married’ gay males, given enough time, approaches 100%.”4 It’s a very pithy statement, but it’s not based on a single shred of evidence — no surveys, no samples, no studies. It’s just the authors’ own opinions offered more for amusement than enlightenment. This is hyperbole, not science.

FRC and other anti-gay industry groups just don't stop. They continue to lie about the gay community. And they are able to do this because hardly anyone calls them on it.

That has got to stop.