Analyzing and refuting the inaccuracies lodged against the lgbt community by religious conservative organizations. Lies in the name of God are still lies.
Ellen DeGeneres Ad: One Million Moms Angry Over JC Penney Christmas Commercial - For those who pretend to don't know a thing about anti-gay bigotry, I present to you Exhibit A. The anti-gay group One Million Moms is angry at Ellen DeGeneres for a perfectly innocent commercial she filmed for JC Penney. And why? Simply because she is a lesbian. It's no different than racists getting angry at an African-American for filming a commercial with white people.
Gay Paternity Leave: How To Do It - In spite of the ugly claims to the contrary organizations like the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council, same-sex families are NORMAL families and thus should have as much positive how-to information as possible.
Through this flyer, the right-wing Liberty Counsel (home of arch-homophobe Matt Barber) is channeling the "homosexuality is more dangerous than smoking" lie:
The Liberty Counsel is the latest religious right group to push that lie and it has been a mistake of the gay community to not challenge it aggressively.
Not to refute this lie, mind you, because the notion is ridiculous.
Rather, all the gay community has to do is reveal where this "homosexuality is more dangerous than smoking" lie came from. And then watch members of the religious right stumble over each other in an effort to retreat from the charge.
It was a 2007 study published by discredited researcher Paul Cameron.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who has designated Cameron's group The Family Research Institute as a hate group because of his history of deliberately putting out fraudulent information on the gay community, Cameron created his study via the following specious means:
First, Cameron presents it as a given that the average gay life span is
43 years, citing his own 1995 study as evidence. Then he compares 43
years to the average life span of smokers to conclude that having gay
sex is far more dangerous that cigarettes.
Every time the gay community allows this lie to be repeated without saying where it comes from is a missed opportunity to connect the religious right groups to their tendency to rely on junk science in order smear us.
As for the Liberty Counsel, it's rather brazen for the organization to talk about Jesus and God's love while at the same time breaking one of the Ten Commandments by "bearing false witness" against the gay community.
There is an old saying in the African-American community that's very appropriate here.
When members of the Liberty Counsel die, they are going to bust Hell wide open.
From Right-Wing Watch comes this interesting blurb which shows that the National Organization for Marriage is still catching grief from the right over it's election day losses:
After four defeats on the issue of marriage equality at the ballot
box and a failed attempt to remove an Iowa justice who favors same-sex
marriage, right-wing activists are starting to panic and offering their
advice to the GOP and groups like the National Organization for Marriage
and Focus on the Family: you’renotanti-gayenough. Yesterday, Matthew Cullinan Hoffman of LifeSiteNews similarly argued that organizations that oppose same-sex marriage need to get nastier.
According to Hoffman, who is also a correspondent for the National Catholic Register,
“the very fact that” gay marriage is even up for debate “is an
indication of a level of moral confusion and decadence that borders on
the apocalyptic.”
He went on to maintain that same-sex unions are a “narcissistic
parody” of opposite-sex relationships as “homosexual relationships do
not represent an authentic intimacy, but rather involve mutual
exploitation for the sake of satisfying an unnatural lust” and lead to
suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, violence along with other “destructive
consequences.” “Homosexuals themselves, who are the greatest victims of
the ‘gay lifestyle,’ and are in desperate need of the truth,” he writes.
“Until and unless pro-family activists adopt a comprehensive and
coherent answer to the ideology of the culture of death,” Hoffman
concludes, “we will continue to suffer defeat after defeat, until the
institution of marriage is completely destroyed.”
It sounds like to me that Hoffman wants NOM to go from this:
You remember this commercial that MSNBC would not run:
According to Equality Matters, it got worse in terms of Perkins' invitation on news programs:
During
their coverage of the 2012 GOP primary, cable news networks regularly
called upon Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council
(FRC), to provide commentary on behalf of social conservatives. Perkins
made 56 appearances on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC over the course of the
primary, but never once was identified as the leader of an anti-gay hate
group.
Tony Perkins Made 56 Television Appearances Over The Course Of The GOP Primary. According to an Equality Matters analysis,
during the period between the first Republican presidential debate on
May 5, 2011 and the Republican nomination in August, Tony Perkins
appeared on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC a total of 56 times to discuss the
GOP primary:
The Equality Matters report is an indictment of a lazy, overpaid media.
In spite of all he and FRC has said and done to demean the gay community, Perkins is seen as an expert/analyst on news programs. And no one seems to be interested in debating him about the rhetoric put forth by his organization to demean our community.
But I can't help but thinking that it's our fault. We aren't pressing hard enough. We have several magazines, prominent journalists, and even television network, but none of those entities has even done one expose on not just the hate pushed by FRC and other religious right groups but the shoddy way they create their homophobic memes.
In the past, we didn't have the means, so we had to work with what we had, i.e. street politics created by a community united by word of mouth.
Now, we have the means to take these groups on and we just won't do it.
Let me rephrase that. Those who have some power in our community won't do it.
Those of us considered nonexistent, i.e. bloggers like myself, do it every day.
And with that, allow me to segue into announcing an upcoming project sure to place the much deserved onus on organizations like FRC.
I am in the process of creating an free online booklet/brochure which offers an old interpretation on the lies of the religious right, but with a new spin designed to create controversy and a bit of righteous indignation, which I hope will be used - not in a negative fashion - put positively to ask questions and demand answers from not only Perkins and the FRC but also from the media who is supposed to represent us.
Provisionally, it is titled How They See Us: Unmasking the Religious Right War on Gay America.
Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council has a huge problem with the World AIDS Day coverage of last week:
December 1 is “World AIDS Day,” so both of Washington’s newspapers—the liberal Washington Post and the conservative Washington Times—featured stories on the worldwide AIDS epidemic.
The Post report focused on the promise of the latest generation of antiretroviral therapy. The Times article dealt with the efforts to expand circumcision of men, in the wake of scientific findings that this, too, can help reduce spread of the disease.
But what was missing?
In both articles, there was not a word about men who have sex with men (MSM).
And in neither article did the word “condom” appear a single time.
In the United States, men who have sex with men continue to be the group at highest risk for infection with HIV (overseas, heterosexual transmission is relatively more common). Yet the idea of fighting AIDS by discouraging the sexual conduct most likely to transmit it is completely taboo.
For the record, AIDS is a scourge which goes beyond the gay community.
But Sprigg is inaccurate with his attack on the Post and the Times. And that's because he only focused on one article in both publications.
The Washington Post featured several articles talking about prevention in the days leading up to and after World AIDS Day. And several of these articles focused on the problems faced by gays dealing with the disease.
What Sprigg says about condoms is irrelevant because later in his article, he creates a straw man argument:
And at one time, condoms were considered to be THE answer to the AIDS epidemic. If we could just get men to use a condom every time, for every act of sexual intercourse (vaginal, oral, or anal), then we would beat the disease. This has proved easier said than done.
No one at any time has ever said that condoms was the answer to the AIDS epidemic. Condoms was and is considered as one solution, but not the only solution.
It sounds like to me that Sprigg is creating a false meme that
"political correctness is keeping people from fully talking about AIDS
in terms of the dangers of catching it." Basically Sprigg sounds like he is disappointed that neither publication used World AIDS Day as an opportunity to stigmatize gay men.
And that is Sprigg's problem.
World AIDS Day is an occasion in which we reflect on how this awful disease has hurt the world and what we can do to stop it.
It's not about finger pointing. It's about basic human kindness and compassion.
i
