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Also, many of the statistics are highly outdated, some coming from the 1970s.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.
Of course they cherry pick. That's the only way they can even try to justify their religious bigotry.
ReplyDeleteThink - they looked at San Francisco, a geographic region with a lot of gay men.
Then they proceeded to look at the stats from only those infected with HIV further narrowing the pool.
I had an accounting professor who said that numbers don't lie but figures do.
I didn't bother commenting on it, I merely flagged it. Whether YT will do anything about it I don't know but...
ReplyDeletetruthspew (Tony, is that you?)
Yep, cherrypicking is the only way they get anywhere. Cherrypick the Bible, statistics, and whatever else they can to form their own version of reality. Then they try to force us all to adhere to that version of reality--or else. It's a sick, sad world they want to make us all live in.
The name of the video (Stop Thinking About Yourselves) is an insult in and of itself. Whoever created this video was totally thinking about him/herself and his/her own vision of what it means to be married and have a family.
ReplyDeleteSome things not mentioned include:
1. There are plenty of promiscuous heterosexual people, too. There is no rule that says promiscuous people (or people with STIs) are not allowed to get married.
2. There are plenty of unmarried gay couples who live in monomagous relationships. And there is no one "gay lifestyle" as is often mentioned as there is no one "straight lifestyle."
3. Last time I checked, lesbians had lower rates of STIs than any other group. Should they get a break and be allowed to get married given the "logic" presented in this video? I would imagine the creators of this video would say no.
People who are into "protecting marriage" (as if it is a living being) act as though the current vision of heterosexual marriage in the US is the way marriage has always been. Nope. Marrying exclusively for love (as opposed to marrying for survival) is a relatively new concept. Marriage has changed radically over time.
I don't understand why some folks are focusing so much time, attention and resources to the relationships of other people.