'MN business hopes to discriminate against gay couples' & other Wed. midday news briefs

Editor's note - When I began this blog a little over 10 years ago, it was a labor of love which I didn't expect to make money from. On that score, it has been very successful. I felt that the lgbt community wasn't getting proper education or guidance when it came to anti-lgbt propaganda. I am proud of how successful my efforts have been in THAT particular regard. 

However, things have changed. 

The proliferation of fake news sites make it very difficult for me to maintain my credibility.  Not impossible, but difficult. And then there are some in the insular world of lgbt news who have gone out of their way to make sure that I know they don't regard me as an equal in spite of my two GLAAD Media Award nominations, over four million readers, and mentions in Newsweek, The Advocate, etc. To make a long story short, I have been contemplating shutting this blog down.

But I won't for two reasons. 1. I'm a stubborn person and when I start something I feel is very important, I don't like to finish it until I feel the job is done. 2. With the Trump administration coming in next year, the lgbt community will need as many folks as possible who can uphold our rights, stand for our equality, and basically battle those who oppose us while utilizing innovation and unrelenting forcefulness. Therefore, instead of quitting, I will work even harder to gain more credibility ,make sure everything I post on this blog is accurate without fault, and continue to call anti-lgbt groups to the carpet for their homophobia, junk science, and outright lies.

 You have stuck with me these 10 years. I hope you will continue to do so.

Minnesota Business Owners Sue For Right To Discriminate Against Gay Couples - Here we go again. And it's about filming same-sex marriages. Unfortunately, while there is a good reason for folks to stand on the side of this business, what they fail to realize and acknowledge is that allowing businesses  to discriminate against marriage equality is a gateway to allow them to discriminate against lgbts period. First it's marriage. What else is next? Apartment complexes? Restaurants? We have not done a good job to explain this. 

 Minnesota’s nondiscrimination protections are the latest target for anti-LGBT law firm - More detail on this situation. 

Trump's religious dealmaking pays dividends - And we had better start quickly as possible based on THIS particular article. Trump is maintaining a very close relationship with the religious right.  

Linda Harvey Calls On HHS Nominee Tom Price To Crack Down On Homosexuality - Harvey is irrelevant. She has no idea what she is talking about (as usual). It is what Price will attempt should he become HHS secretary. Any anti-lgbt move he makes will be met by us. And we won't be smiling with crumpets and tea.

Family Research Council has yet to address article claiming that it uses anti-lgbt junk science

FRC president Tony Perkins

The Family Research Council is an organization which doesn't like to be publicly criticized about its agenda or tactics. The group generally likes to frame any public criticism it receives as an attack on "Christian values" and generally exploits said criticism as such in its emails and fundraising to its supporters

But not a recent public criticism.

Last week, the online magazine Wired called out FRC for using junk science to denigrate the lgbt community. The article was extremely scathing. Part of it reads as follows:

That the FRC has found its way back into a position of influence over the presidency shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. The group has been making political moves since the early 1980s. Since then, it’s grown to become the most successful progeny of an effort among social conservatives to move the basis of their policy recommendations away from Scripture and toward sociology. Not that legitimate sociology is where the FRC has arrived. Rather, the group is to homophobia what the National Policy Institute is to the alt-right—a bland, respectable-sounding, quasi-academic front for a hateful, regressive ideology. It comes packaged in a way that looks like real science but is really just cherrypicked data stitched together to serve its agenda.

“A whole slew of real scientists who have demanded that the Family Research Council stop using their data,” says Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has designated the FRC an extremist group.

 . . .  The papers the FRC produces often purport to be meta-analyses—studies of studies. Rather than compiling an accurate synthesis of mainstream scientific inquiry, however, the group mis-contextualizes data to arrive at a desired conclusion. This technique is how the FRC manages to link homosexuality to, among other things, pedophilia and shortened lifespans, despite strong scientific consensus to the contrary. When the group is not twisting mainstream scientists’ numbers, it’s citing organizations such as the American College of Pediatricians, which sure sounds like the American Academy of Pediatrics but is actually a far-right breakaway group with only 200 members.

The article was significant for two reasons. 1. It avoided the "religious angle" FRC generally uses to cover up its anti-lgbt bias. 2 Since its publication, no one from FRC, including its president, Tony Perkins, has made any comment on it.

And that last point is highly striking.  A high level Washington beltway organization, albeit one thought of as a hate group by a large number of people, not answering the charges that it relies on junk science is a major deal.

Maybe FRC is hoping that whatever controversy the article may bring will pass without generating any significant discussion or look into its doings. If this is the case, it sounds like there does need to be a serious degree of discussion on this issue.

I hope folks are paying attention.