What the heck does Glenn Stanton know about gays and lesbians anyway?

I must be on a tear when it comes to responding to anti-gay ignorance today.

This morning it was Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America and her sad attempt to demonize lgbt households by using data having nothing to do with them.

This afternoon, it's Glenn Stanton of Focus on the Family.

The point of annoyance for me is an article in today's USA Today talking about how Hollywood is  showing more lgbt characters and families.

Stanton, along with the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer, is quoted as the voices who disagree with this increased visibility.

Now Fischer has a history of making asinine anti-gay comments (which unfortunately the article did not talk about) so there is a paper trail which destroys his credibility as a rational voice on the matter.

But Stanton is a bit more problematic. He tries to make himself sound reasonable but comes across as insulting:

"When actual gay and lesbian weddings are shown on TV (as in news coverage), we win. When they're shown through the lens and creativity and artifice of Hollywood, we don't. Hollywood is succeeding, but they're doing so by not representing reality."

First of all, Stanton's statement is gibberish. Secondly, as far as I know, Stanton is not gay so the question has to be just who is he to decide what is reality when it comes to the lgbt community.

Furthermore, I really don't understand the USA Today can push him as an expert when he has clearly gone on record saying the following:

I don't know of anyone who has referred to me as an "expert" on homosexuality. I have never referred to myself on this, simply because I am not. But I would describe myself as an expert on the issue of same-sex marriage. I have published a book and had many of my articles on the subject republished in numerous mainstream volumes.

I don't mind being critiqued, but at least get it right.

Apparently part of Stanton's "expertise" on same sex marriage is to push inaccurate data on the lgbt community like he did in his piece Why Homosexuality Falls Short of the Ideal.

This piece,  Stanton not only cites the work of the discredited Paul Cameron (via secondhand through Thomas Schmidt) but he also says the following:

In addition, because of the extremely high rate of incidence among homosexuals, a group of rare intestinal diseases have been grouped together under the title "gay bowel syndrome."

There is no such thing as "gay bowel sydrome." In the late 70s, there was a belief that there a series of intestinal disorders which was supposedly related to male sexual activity. However as time went on, it was discovered that the problems that made up "gay bowel syndrome" were not specific to homosexuals, not confined to just the bowels, nor did the term itself meet the medical definition of a syndrome.

There are a myriad of cases where this term has been expunged from usage in various places from the New York Times to the National Institutes of Health.

However, people like Stanton, i.e. phony religious right experts, continue to push the term to the ignorant and unassuming.

But that is the crux of the religious right's war on lgbt America. It's not enough for them to have a negative view of the lgbt community. They seek to force that view on society, even if it means beating back the voices of the lgbt community.

It's pretty much the equivalent of allowing a Klansman to dictate the public images of the African-American community.

Hat tip to People for the American Way.

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Black males aren't graduating like they should? Blame the gays

A column I read this morning in the American Spectator by Concerned Women for America "senior analyst" Janice Crouse had me reeling due to its audacity to deceive.

The goal of Crouse's piece was probably to demonstrate just how the recent Proposition 8 decision and gay marriage in general is hurting the black community.

However, what she accomplished was showing yet again how some on the right, especially the religious right, dishonestly manipulate facts and figures.

In her piece, Why Young Black Males Are Not Graduating High School, Crouse seems to be trying make a correlation between a recent report by the Schott Foundation (in which the overall 2007-08 graduation rate for Black males in the U.S. was only 47 percent) and the recent Prop 8 ruling:

Nancy Pearcey, in an article on American Thinker, identified certain "facts that Judge Walker claims are now established by the 'evidence' presented in his courtroom." Those "facts" presumably will be deemed as "truth" far beyond the courtroom. Among those "facts," the following three are especially relevant for young black boys' futures:

• "Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage."

• "The gender of a child's parent is not a factor in a child's adjustment."

• "Having both a male and a female parent does not increase the likelihood that a child will be well-adjusted."

Those three general false principles that Judge Walker supposedly established in his arguments in favor of so-called "same-sex marriage" are equally faulty when applied to the more than 40 percent of today's children who are born to single mothers. They are doubly relevant when the majority of those children are black.

What Crouse is doing is a tactic done by many on the right after the Prop 8 ruling went down - cherry picking parts of Judge Walker's statements to imply that he said "fathers don't matter" and then using data having absolutely nothing to do with his decision or same sex marriage in general to make an unfair correlation.

It's a diversionary tactic designed to take attention away from the fact that the Prop 8 folks lost because their case was poor.

To a bigger extent, Crouse sad piece is a part of a grander tactic by the religious right to unfairly brand same-sex parents as selfish or to imply that lgbts who seek to parent children are causing these children to be "denied" something vital and important despite the fact that studies have shown just the opposite.

Crouse lists a number of problems facing black youth including poverty, bad schools, and family breakdown. Same-sex marriage and equality didn't make the list, but it doesn't stop Crouse from trying to push it in as best as she can.

The irony is that Crouse actually does provide an excellent solution:

Common sense tells us that there is no surer recipe for the child to lag behind in learning than having to contend with the strain and disruption of a broken, dysfunctional family, where the parent or parents are so focused on themselves and their needs that they have little emotional energy to spare for the child's needs. Before we can address the problems of public education, we have to address the problems of marriage and family. Only then can we begin the massive overhaul of cultural values that will be necessary to close the educational gaps in America.

Too that good point got obscured by a bunch of anti-gay garbage.