Earlier on Thursday, the Washington Post ran a huge article exposing a right-wing organization masquerading as legitimate medical group.
According to The Daily Beast:
Internal documents from a conservative group of doctors shows how the organization has lobbied to limit transgender rights and restrict access to abortion, according to a report. A review of the American College of Pediatricians’ records from The Washington Post showed how the organization has lobbied in at least eight states to ban puberty blockers and and hormone therapies for transgender minors, and sought new recruits with mailers targeting Christian MDs and pediatricians in “red states.” The group has also successfully pushed its message in conservative media, with the American College of Pediatricians being mentioned in more than 200 articles on right-wing news sites since 2016. Jill Simons, the organization’s executive director, told the Post that the group’s “recommendations are based on the medical research and what is best for children.”
I'm happy that the American College of Pediatricians is finally getting some mainstream scrutiny even if it is long time coming. The Southern Poverty Law Center had already listed the organization as a hate group.
But even before then in 2009, I called the group out in a blog post.
Back then, the American College of Pediatricians was targeting gays. Below is the published post. If anything, it should serve as a reminder that all of the LGBTQ community are in this together because we are targets of the same haters:
The American College of Pediatricians and the Laundering of Junk Science, July 6, 2009
Two weekends ago, I was embroiled in an intense discussion about gay parenting on the webpage Truthwinsout.org
Comments had gone back and forth, spurred by someone who spouted what he thought was credible information proving that gay marriage was not a good idea.
The subject drifted to gay parenting. Naturally the person did not agree with the idea and he cited information by a group called the American College of Pediatricians (ACP) that supposedly proved his point.
I took a look at this group's webpage and from what I saw, it looked like a group masquerading as a legtimate medical organization while spouting religious right dogma about the lgbt community.
Mike Airhart, a writer employed by Truth Wins Out and a very good friend of mine, broke it down like this:
The “American College of Pediatricians” screens its membership according to a pro-life philosophy spelled out on its “Core Values” page and an anti-gay philosophy spelled out here. The organization’s Bible Belt charter members are listed here.
According to Concerned Women for America, ACP formed in retaliation against the American Academy of Pediatrics after AAP released scientific studies finding no significant harm to children in same-sex parenting. ACP accuses the AAP of “bad science” but does not say how AAP’s studies were flawed.
The ACP’s family resources page links primarily to religious-right organizations. In contrast to the scientific approach of the AAP, ACP employs what it considers a predetermined “moral” filter to pediatrics.
Translation: The American College of Pediatricians is a group masquerading as a legtimate medical organization while spouting religious right dogma about the lgbt community.
I pretty much said the same thing already, but didn't Mike say it much better than me?
Seriously though, I took a look at the work ACP put out about the lgbt community, particularly a piece called Homosexual Parenting: Is it Time for Change?
What I found was a hot mess of the usual lies put out by the religious right. I'm sure those who keep up with this blog have heard these before but I'm a stickler for consistency when it comes to religious right distortions, so bear with me.
The distortions of the ACP piece can be broken down in three brackets:
1. Outdated data
The paper says:
Homosexual partnerships are significantly more prone to dissolution than heterosexual marriages with the average homosexual relationship lasting only two to three years
As proof of this, the ACP paper cites sources from over 15 years ago:
David P. McWhirter and Andrew M. Mattison, The male couple: how relationships develop (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1984), pp. 252-253.
M. Saghir and E. Robins, Male and female homosexuality (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1973), p. 225; L.A. Peplau and H. Amaro, "Understanding lesbian relationships," in homosexuality: social, psychological, and biological issues, ed. J. Weinrich and W. Paul (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982).
M. Pollak, "Male homosexuality," in western sexuality: practice and precept in past and present times, ed. P. Aries and A. Bejin, translated by Anthony Forster (New York, NY: B. Blackwell, 1985), pp. 40-61, cited by Joseph Nicolosi in Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality (Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc., 1991), pp. 124, 125.
To make matters worse, the ACP is inaccurately using the data to generalize about all lgbt couples.
The authors of The Male Couple said their book could not be used to generalize about the lgbt community:
“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.”
Another outdated source the ACP piece uses is:
A. P. Bell and M. S. Weinberg, Homosexualities: a study of diversity among men and women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), pp. 308, 309
Homosexualities was published in 1978. And with it, the APC paper continues to inaccurately generalize about lgbt couples.
A passage in 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.”
Generally speaking, if you looked at all of the sources in the ACP paper, you see that the majority of them are over 10 years old. And many of the ones that can be construed as current are misused.
But that is the next section.
2. Misusage of studies
Many of the studies the ACP uses to claim that children will suffer adverse effects in lgbt households in fact did not have anything to do with looking at children in lgbt homes at all. They include:
A. Marie Xiridoui, et al., "The contribution of steady and casual partnerships to the incidence of HIV infection among homosexual men in Amsterdam," AIDS 17 (2003): 1029-1038. [Note: one of the findings of this recent study is that those classified as being in "steady relationships" reported an average of 8 casual partners a year in addition to their partner (p. 1032)]
As pointed out in a post two weeks ago , this study only looked at casual relationships between gay men. It had nothing to do with the lesbian population and certainly nothing to do with children in lgbt households. The ironic thing is that this study has been used to also claim that lgbts have no concept of monogamy in marriage even though the data was compiled before marriage was even legalized in the Netherlands.
B. Joanne Hall, "Lesbians recovering from alcoholic problems: an ethnographic study of health care expectations," Nursing Research 43 (1994): 238-244.
In my 2007 book, Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters, I talk about how this article in Nursing Research was distorted. The author of the article, Joanne Hall, Ph.D. of the University of Tennessee’s College of Nursing, wrote me a letter outlining how it was being misused. She said that not only did the study have nothing to do with gay parenting but also:
“My study was an investigation of experiences of lesbians who ALREADY have self-identified as having ‘had an alcohol problem.’
They were not recruited as ‘alcoholics,’ ‘addicts’ or such terms, because I realized people have different understandings and preferences about ‘labels.’ These women were not necessarily under treatment at all, but living in the community. I did not ‘verify’ either their sexual orientation (that was also self-identification), nor a ‘diagnosis’ of substance abuse. They responded to a flyer. They all lived in the Bay Area. There were 35 women in the study. ONLY 35. They do not REPRESENT a population. My point was to try to get a handle on what they were experiencing—to UNDERSTAND their patterns . . . . "
C. Gwat Yong Lie and Sabrina Gentlewarrier, "Intimate violence in lesbian relationships: discussion of survey findings and practice implications," Journal of Social Service Research 15 (1991): 41-59.
Again a study having nothing to do with children in same sex households. The original study was conducted in 1985 at a Michigan Women’s Music Festival. It included only 1099 participants and all were lesbian.
According to a reviewer of the study, Suzana Rose, Ph.D., of the 1099 lesbians participants, most were white and between the ages of 20-45. - Intimate Violence in Lesbian Relationships: Discussion of Survey Findings and Practice Implications, Journal of Social Science Research, 1991
D. "Sex survey results," Genre (October 1996), quoted in "Survey finds 40 percent of gay men have had more than 40 sex partners," Lambda Report, January 1998, p. 20.
Not only did this Genre article have nothing to do with children in same sex households but check out the entire citation. The Lambda Report was an anti-gay publication put out by an old friend of ours - Peter LaBarbera - before he began Americans for Truth.
So in all honesty, it can be said that the ACP paper does not misuse Genre article because it does not cite the article at all, but what LaBarbera (a man with an anti-gay bias) claims the Genre article says.
3. Researcher complaints
A consistent factor of religious right studies is how they inaccurately use studies even after complaints by the work's original author. There are two in the ACP paper:
A. It cites the infamous 1997 study Canadian study as proof that lgbts have a short life span even though the study's authors complained in 2001 of its misusage by the religious right. (This is getting to be a favorite citation of mine. In almost every religious right paper I've talked about on this site, the distortion of the Canadian study is included.)
B. Judith Stacey and Timothy J. Biblarz, "(How) Does the sexual orientation of parents matter," American Sociological Review 66 (2001): 174, 179.
Judith Stacey has said repeatedly that nothing in her work says that same sex parenting is a bad idea.
Finally, the most interesting thing about the ACP paper is that it is not original. Some of the citations and passages in the paper are identical to a Family Research Council paper, The Negative Effects of Homosexuality.
This is the same paper is considered "outdated" by the Family Research Council.
So basically, the American College of Pediatricians is a puppet organization that can do damage if no one researches its background.
The folks who founded this organization are clearly sacrificing the integrity of their profession by laundering religious right propaganda as credible medical research.
And it makes one wonder as to how many other "groups" like ACP are out there. And also what can we do to bring attention to these groups.
