Phony public school teacher in Maine ad has no problem with distorting studies

As the fallout from the second Maine anti-gay marriage ad continues, we are learning more about the misrepresented public school teacher, Charla Bansley.

These are the facts about Bansley via Goodasyou.org:

Bansley serves as the Maine state director of Concerned Women for America, an anti-gay group I have talked about numerous times on this blog.

In 2005, she joined anti-gay spokespeople such as Peter LaBarbera, Diane Gramley, Gary Glenn, Scott Lively, and Brian Camnker (among many others) on a group letter to the Southern Baptist Convention, which called on them to pass a ‘Resolution on Homosexuality in Public Schools.' And in that letter, she's not credited as a teacher. She's one of the "leaders of almost 50 statewide pro-family organizations from around the country" who are "involved in public policy on a daily basis.

The letter criticized steps schools were taking to ensure the safety of lgbt students under false claim of "indoctrination."

But the thing that caught my attention was the words she delivered at delivered at the recent, media-closed Stand For Marriage event in Augusta. The speech was the usual nonsense about "marriage is needed to rear children, etc. etc." Then she makes this statement:

A study in the Netherlands found that the average duration of a homosexual marriage was just one and a half years certainly nothing to build a society upon. The same study found that committed homosexual couples were also intimate with an average of eight extra marital partners per year . . .

That statement is a lie.

The study Bansley was speaking of was conducted by one Maria Xiridou of the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service. Her study did not look at gay marriage but was to "access the relative contribution of steady and casual partnerships to the incidence of HIV infection among homosexual men in Amsterdam and to determine the effect of increasing sexually risky behaviours among both types of partnerships in the era of highly active antiretroviral therapy."

For this study, Dr. Xiridou received her information from the Amsterdam Cohort Study of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and AIDS Among Homosexual Men. To gain this information, researchers studied 1,800 gay men between the years of 1984- 2001. Same sex marriage was legalized in the Netherlands in 2001. More about the study from Box Turtle Bulletin here.

But basically this means that it is impossible for any gay man in the study Barnley mentioned to have been married at the time the study was conducted.

This means Bansley, whether intentionally or unintentionally, misrepresented the study.

So far, the Maine anti-marriage equality folks have lied about "homosexual marriage being taught to children," misrepresented studies, and misrepesented the professions of their spokespeople.

Okay, who is on God's side again?

Huge hat tip to Goodasyou.org and Box Turtle Bulletin.