Audacity is always rooted in what someone feels he or she can get away with.
In other words, if no one calls you out for lying then you are mostly likely going to do it again.
It's helpful to keep this in mind while perusing a Family Research Council's website directed solely at Defending DOMA.
One has to hand it to the organization for not letting a moment - in this case, the Justice Department saying that it will no longer defend DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) in court cases - go by without using it as an opportunity to fund raise.
But in attacking the decision not to defend DOMA - and gay marriage in general - FRC uses the page to push incredibly ridiculous arguments having nothing to do with gay marriage.
And when it does attack gay marriage head in, the organization uses tactics which led to its being called out several times in the past (most recently by the Southern Poverty Law Center) for deliberately passing along awful anti-gay propaganda and distorting legitimate science to quantify this propaganda.
Two sections of the webpage (Ten Arguments From Social Science Against Same-Sex 'Marriage, and Q&A What's Wrong With Letting Same-Sex Couples Marry?) are rife with deception.
For today, let's look at Q&A: What's Wrong with Letting Same-Sex Couples Marry?
A following passage in this piece is a perfect example of the low road FRC has chosen to travel in order to defend DOMA:
That's right. FRC is pulling the homosexuality = pedophilia lie and distorting legitimate work prove this point.
According to the religious right watchdog site Box Turtle Bulletin:
This is not the first time FRC distorted the Erickson study. Last year, FRC head Tony Perkins cited it on MSNBC's Hardball as proof that the organization was not unfairly linking homosexuality to pedophilia. However, more credible sources, i.e. the American Psychological Association, the National Association of Social Workers, the American Academy of Child Psychiatrists and the Child Welfare League of America, all say that gay men are not more likely to molest children than heterosexual men.
But I guess according to FRC, all of these organizations have been "infiltrated" by the gay community.
FRC should really know better than to link pedophilia to homosexuality seeing that it got the organization into trouble in the past.
In 1992, A. Nicholas Groth, former director of the Sex Offender Program at the Connecticut Department of Corrections, complained that his work was being distorted by a member of FRC, Timothy Dailey, to quantify this theory. His letter to Dailey reads in part:
And the homoexuality = pedophilia lie isn't the only distortion that FRC is pushing in Q&A What's Wrong With Letting Same-Sex Couples Marry.
The organization is also making the claim that gay men are not monogamous and therefore cannot handle the concept of marriage:
It has been pointed out on numerous occasions that Xiridou's study cannot be used to gauge a correct interpretation of gay marriage.
Her study did not look at gay marriage but was designed 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- 2000.
Same sex marriage was legalized in the Netherlands in 2001, thus making the information irrelevant to points about gay marriage. Information for the Amsterdam Cohort Study is found here.
Furthermore, lesbians were not included in the study. FRC's other proof of the supposed promiscuity of gay married men is a National Health and Social Life Survey published in 1994.
But the most baffling passage in FRC's piece is the following:
Here is the thing though. If you click on those links, you won't find any of the work. In 2008, the Family Research Council actually removed those studies from its webpage claiming that they used "outdated source."
The entire piece in general reeks of desperation. FRC even has the nerve to even cite the "gay men are inflicted with gay bowel syndrome" lie. "Gay bowel syndrome" is an archaic medical term which no physician uses anymore.
Does FRC really want someone to defend DOMA in court with this mess?
The organization probably does because short of SPLC and a few intrepid bloggers (myself included) very few have yet to call the organization out for its continued pushing of propaganda and distortion of legitimate scientific work.
This means that they are able to continue pushing this nonsense. FRC head Tony Perkins is able to appear on news programs like Fox and in publications such as the Daily Caller where he freely repeats this propaganda. And FRC spokesman Tony Perkins is freely able to repeat the same propaganda unchallenged in front of state legislative bodies.
It shouldn't be any surprise that FRC creates a website repeating the same propaganda. No one really challenges them on it.
And don't be surprised if you hear these lies repeated by a Congressman like Mike Pence or a presidential candidate like Mike Huckabee. Or even in court should a defense of DOMA be taken up by Congress, FRC, or any other so-called "pro-family" organization.
The media won't challenge these lies. And in all fairness and honesty, the lead lgbt organizations don't. So why those who repeat them (i.e. FRC, etc.) fear being called out?
No one has the audacity to challenge their audacity.
Tomorrow I will talk about FRC's Ten Arguments From Social Science Against Same-Sex 'Marriage, showcasing the same pattern of distortion .
In other words, if no one calls you out for lying then you are mostly likely going to do it again.
It's helpful to keep this in mind while perusing a Family Research Council's website directed solely at Defending DOMA.
One has to hand it to the organization for not letting a moment - in this case, the Justice Department saying that it will no longer defend DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) in court cases - go by without using it as an opportunity to fund raise.
But in attacking the decision not to defend DOMA - and gay marriage in general - FRC uses the page to push incredibly ridiculous arguments having nothing to do with gay marriage.
And when it does attack gay marriage head in, the organization uses tactics which led to its being called out several times in the past (most recently by the Southern Poverty Law Center) for deliberately passing along awful anti-gay propaganda and distorting legitimate science to quantify this propaganda.
Two sections of the webpage (Ten Arguments From Social Science Against Same-Sex 'Marriage, and Q&A What's Wrong With Letting Same-Sex Couples Marry?) are rife with deception.
For today, let's look at Q&A: What's Wrong with Letting Same-Sex Couples Marry?
A following passage in this piece is a perfect example of the low road FRC has chosen to travel in order to defend DOMA:
Do homosexuals pose a threat to children?
Homosexual men are far more likely to engage in child sexual abuse than are heterosexuals. The evidence for this lies in the findings that:
· Almost all child sexual abuse is committed by men; and· Less than three percent of American men identify themselves as homosexual; yet· Nearly a third of all cases of child sexual abuse are homosexual in nature (that is, they involve men molesting boys). This is a rate of homosexual child abuse about ten times higher than one would expect based on the first two facts.These figures are essentially undisputed. However, pro-homosexual activists seek to explain them away by claiming that men who molest boys are not usually homosexual in their adult sexual orientation. Yet a study of convicted child molesters, published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, found that "86 percent of offenders against males described themselves as homosexual or bisexual" (W. D. Erickson, M.D., et al., in Archives of Sexual Behavior 17:1, 1988).
This does not mean that all, or even most, homosexual men are child molesters--but it does prove that homosexuality is a significant risk factor for this horrible crime.
That's right. FRC is pulling the homosexuality = pedophilia lie and distorting legitimate work prove this point.
According to the religious right watchdog site Box Turtle Bulletin:
The study, “Behavior patterns of child molesters” by W.D. Erickson, N.H. Walbek, and R.K. Seely which appeared more than twenty years ago (1988, to be exact), didn’t set out to determine the sexual orientation of child molesters. The study, of 229 convicted child molesters in Minnesota, (which, by the way, was never intended to be nationally representative in any way) was focused on the types of sexual contact the men engaged in with their victims — vaginal or anal penetration, oral contact, and so forth. In this particular sample, 63 victims were male, and 166 victims were female. But the ”finding” . . . is encapsulated in just one sentence: “Eighty-six percent of offenders against males described themselves as homosexual or bisexual.”
This is not the first time FRC distorted the Erickson study. Last year, FRC head Tony Perkins cited it on MSNBC's Hardball as proof that the organization was not unfairly linking homosexuality to pedophilia. However, more credible sources, i.e. the American Psychological Association, the National Association of Social Workers, the American Academy of Child Psychiatrists and the Child Welfare League of America, all say that gay men are not more likely to molest children than heterosexual men.
But I guess according to FRC, all of these organizations have been "infiltrated" by the gay community.
FRC should really know better than to link pedophilia to homosexuality seeing that it got the organization into trouble in the past.
In 1992, A. Nicholas Groth, former director of the Sex Offender Program at the Connecticut Department of Corrections, complained that his work was being distorted by a member of FRC, Timothy Dailey, to quantify this theory. His letter to Dailey reads in part:
If you are, in fact, familiar with my research, you must realize that my studies have indicated that homosexual males pose less risk of sexual harm to children (both male and female)--from both an absolute and a percentage incidence rate--than heterosexual males. Your statement that "the evidence indicates that disproportionate numbers of gay men seek adolescent males or boys as sexual partners" appears to come from the assumption that if an adult male is attracted to a male child, this adult male's sexual orientation is ipso facto homosexual.
Since your report, in my view, misrepresents the facts of what we know about this matter from scientific investigation, and does not indicate that my studies on this topic reach conclusions diametrically opposed to yours, I would appreciate your removing any reference to my work in your paper lest it appear to the reader that my research supports your views.
And the homoexuality = pedophilia lie isn't the only distortion that FRC is pushing in Q&A What's Wrong With Letting Same-Sex Couples Marry.
The organization is also making the claim that gay men are not monogamous and therefore cannot handle the concept of marriage:
Among homosexual men in particular, casual sex, rather than committed relationships, is the rule and not the exception. And even when they do enter into a more committed relationship, it is usually of relatively short duration. For example, a study of homosexual men in the Netherlands (the first country in the world to legalize "marriage" for same-sex couples), published in the journal AIDS in 2003, found that the average length of "steady partnerships" was not more than 2 years (Maria Xiridou et al., in AIDS 2003, 17:1029-1038).
It has been pointed out on numerous occasions that Xiridou's study cannot be used to gauge a correct interpretation of gay marriage.
Her study did not look at gay marriage but was designed 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- 2000.
Same sex marriage was legalized in the Netherlands in 2001, thus making the information irrelevant to points about gay marriage. Information for the Amsterdam Cohort Study is found here.
Furthermore, lesbians were not included in the study. FRC's other proof of the supposed promiscuity of gay married men is a National Health and Social Life Survey published in 1994.
But the most baffling passage in FRC's piece is the following:
For more information on the harmful consequences of homosexual behavior, see the following publications by the Family Research Council's Senior Fellow for Marriage and Family Studies, Dr. Timothy J. Dailey:
· Dark Obsession: The Tragedy and Threat of the Homosexual Lifestyle (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2003); order online at: http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=BK03F01
· "Homosexuality and Child Sexual Abuse," Insight No. 247 (Washington, D.C.: Family Research Council), May 17, 2002 (online at: http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=IS02E3)
· "The Negative Health Effects of Homosexuality," Insight No. 232 (Washington, D.C.: Family Research Council), March 6, 2001 (online at: http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=IS01B1)
· "Homosexual Parenting: Placing Children at Risk," Insight No. 238 (Washington: Family Research Council) November 1, 2001 (online at: http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=IS01J3)
Here is the thing though. If you click on those links, you won't find any of the work. In 2008, the Family Research Council actually removed those studies from its webpage claiming that they used "outdated source."
The entire piece in general reeks of desperation. FRC even has the nerve to even cite the "gay men are inflicted with gay bowel syndrome" lie. "Gay bowel syndrome" is an archaic medical term which no physician uses anymore.
Does FRC really want someone to defend DOMA in court with this mess?
The organization probably does because short of SPLC and a few intrepid bloggers (myself included) very few have yet to call the organization out for its continued pushing of propaganda and distortion of legitimate scientific work.
This means that they are able to continue pushing this nonsense. FRC head Tony Perkins is able to appear on news programs like Fox and in publications such as the Daily Caller where he freely repeats this propaganda. And FRC spokesman Tony Perkins is freely able to repeat the same propaganda unchallenged in front of state legislative bodies.
It shouldn't be any surprise that FRC creates a website repeating the same propaganda. No one really challenges them on it.
And don't be surprised if you hear these lies repeated by a Congressman like Mike Pence or a presidential candidate like Mike Huckabee. Or even in court should a defense of DOMA be taken up by Congress, FRC, or any other so-called "pro-family" organization.
The media won't challenge these lies. And in all fairness and honesty, the lead lgbt organizations don't. So why those who repeat them (i.e. FRC, etc.) fear being called out?
No one has the audacity to challenge their audacity.
Tomorrow I will talk about FRC's Ten Arguments From Social Science Against Same-Sex 'Marriage, showcasing the same pattern of distortion .
I think Mike Huckabee will pounce on this and use it to exploit every campaign dollar he can manipulate out of the situation.
ReplyDeleteWait a minute. The FRC item you highlight used exactly the same quote you did. "86 percent of offenders against males described themselves as homosexual or bisexual"
ReplyDeleteThen you accuse them of something they did not assert. How are they distorting information differently than you?
Actually I wouldn't call it an attempt to distort rather than a paragraph I accidentally didn't delete from the final draft of this post. I wrote this post and edited a few times for clarity but apparently I missed deleting that paragraph.
ReplyDeleteThe change has been made. And thank you for pointing it out to me ;p