Last week, I wrote about how the Family Research Council was posting an outdated and flawed study,
Comparing the Lifestyles of Homosexual Couples to Married Couples to denigrate same-sex couples.
This week, I am now reporting that the organization has done even worse by posting yet another flawed study. However, this study denigrates the lgbt community as a whole
The study,
The Negative Effects of Homosexuality, was actually
removed from FRC's webpage in 2008. An employee of the organization, Kathy Athearn,
told me that the study was one of a few removed because it contained outdated sources.
But it has now returned to FRC's webpage and it has not been updated.
The study is supposed to show the so-called “dangers of
homosexuality" and all of the religious right talking points about lgbts
are touched on including:
Gays have a short life span,
Gays and lesbians don’t know how to be monogamous,
Gays and lesbians have high rate of domestic violence.
But strangely enough, this study includes the same inaccurate information as the study I talked about last week:
- A citation of the book
Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women
by Alan Bell and Martin Weinberg as a correct generalization of lgbt
sexual habits despite the fact that it was published in 1978 and was not
meant by the authors to be a correct assessment of the lgbt community in
general. A passage from
Homosexualities clearly says:
“. . . given the variety of circumstances which discourage
homosexuals from participating in research studies, it is unlikely that
any investigator will ever be in a position to say that this or that is
true of a given percentage of all homosexuals.”
- A citation of the book
The Male Couple: How Relationships Develop
by David P. McWhirter and Andrew M. Mattison despite the fact that the
book was written 1984 and was not meant to be a correct assessment of
the lgbt community in general.
A passage from
The Male Couple says:
“We always have been very careful to explain that the very
nature of our research sample, its size (156 couples), its narrow
geographic location, and the natural selectiveness of the participants
prevents the findings from being applicable and generalizable to the
entire gay
male community.”
But there is more:
Gay Bowel Syndrome (GBS): The Journal of
the American Medical Association refers to GBS problems such as
proctitis, proctocolitis, and enteritis as "sexually transmitted
gastrointestinal syndromes." Many of the
bacterial and protozoa pathogens that cause gbs are found in feces and
transmitted to the digestive system: According to the pro-homosexual
text Anal Pleasure and Health, "[s]exual activities provide many
opportunities for tiny amounts of contaminated feces to find their way
into the mouth of a sexual partner . . . The most direct route is oral-anal contact."
"Gay bowel syndrome" is a term no longer used because it is considered outdated and many physicians
no longer use it.
Then there is this citation:
Reduced Life Span. A study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology on the mortality rates of homosexuals concluded that they have a significantly reduced life expectancy:
In a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age twenty for
gay and bisexual men is eight to twenty years less than for all men. If
the same pattern of mortality were to continue, we estimate that nearly
half of gay and bisexual men currently aged twenty years will not reach
their sixty-fifth birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions,
gay and bisexual men in this urban centre are now experiencing a life
expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year
1871.
In 2001, the researchers of this study
complained that religious right groups were distorting their work. As a matter of fact, as recent at last year, one of the researcher, Julio Montaner, was still
complaining about how the study was being distorted:
"To use my report to support the notion that gay and bisexual sex is
somehow the reason why people die early is misusing the data," Montaner
said.
Montaner noted that his group’s original report was conducted at a time
when the HIV epidemic was poorly controlled and treatments were
ineffective. Since then, there have have been great strides in treating
the disease and preventing its spread, Montaner said. In British
Columbia, annual diagnoses of new infections have dropped from 900 in
the mid-1990s to 300 in recent years, he said. Deaths from HIV also have
fallen sharply, he said.
Let me take a guess. It's all about "religious liberty," isn't it, FRC?
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