Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin - Three Faces In The Crowd?

This entire year, we have been inundated by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin claiming to stand for the common man against the so-called conspiracies of "those who want to remove what makes this country great." They claim to use simple folksy common sense to combat the intricate plans of "anti-Americanism."

From time to time, in the back of my mind, I knew I had heard something like this before. And today it struck me.

In 1957, there was a movie called A Face In The Crowd which told the story of how a backwoods con man (Andy Griffith), with the help of the media, became a popular national spokesman. He is loved by millions and his endorsement is sought by sponsors and Congressional seekers. That is until he gets consumed with his own power and destroys himself.

Is it just me or are do these two scenes look familiar when it comes to certain current right-wing spokespeople.

A con man manipulating the media to become a powerful national figure? In 1957, it was a motion picture. Today, it's a sad reality.

Related post:

Message to the Tea Party - What took you so long to get angry?

Friday, October 29, 2010

Know Your LGBT History - Maude

Maude was an excellent situation comedy created by Norman Lear (All in the Family, The Jeffersons) which starred the late Bea Arthur as a neurotic but likable liberal woman living with her fourth husband, Walter and sharing adventures with her daughter (Adrienne Barbeau), and screwy friends, played by Conrad Bain and the late Rue McClanahan.

The show, like All in the Family and The Jeffersons, also introduce some very controversial topics. Probably the most controversial was when Maude had an abortion.

But for the purpose of this blog, let's look at the episode in which Maude tries to stop Bain's character from picketing a gay bar in an attempt to close it down. I found the episode fresh, funny, and not dated in the least - okay maybe the reference to orange juice, but us lgbts will probably get it:

'Porno Pete' LaBarbera is mad at me, bigot will resign from school board, and other Friday midday news briefs

First, I have a confession to make. From time to time when I post something about the religious right, I send what I have written to subject of the post. The goal is to get them try to refute what I have written. I have been very unsuccessful when it comes to refutations, but sometimes, the answers I do receive are very interesting. This morning, I emailed Peter LaBarbera my post about him embracing the lies of the discredited Paul Cameron. He sent the following back to me:

You are one hateful dude, Alvin. If I called you a name like that you'd freak out. What a hypocrite you are. But you are formally invited to come to Chicago to hear Hutch at our banquet Nov 13 (you'll have to lay down $50). You need God's forgiveness and love, but that means leaving your homosexual sin and that awful pride behind. Yes, Jesus Christ can set you free, Alvin, and no, you cannot be a faithful Christian and celebrate sin like you do every day of your life thru that moronic blog. God bless you.

PS. Stop the Hate. :)

Of course I had to answer him back:

I find it sad that you have the temerity to talk about my supposed sins when on a daily basis you commit the sins of lying and bearing false witness.

Look at yourself, Peter. You are a sad, bloated excuse of a man who has made it his life work to demonize and harm a group of people who haven't done you a bit of harm. You sow the seeds of hate and help to create an atmosphere which causes vulnerable lgbt children to end up hating and harming themselves. Just in case you are wondering, yes I am blaming you in part for these lgbt children committing suicide. And then you talk to me about Jesus's love. You wouldn't know Jesus's love if you died of a heart attack and he raised you from the dead. "Porno Pete" is too nice of a monicker for you, but since I'm being polite, I will only tell you that you shouldn't worry about what I will do when I stand before God. You had better worry about the explanation you intend to give Him for your lifetime of needless hate.

And by the way, I will keep my $50 dollars.

Now on to news briefs:

Bigoted school board member resigns on television- Let the doorknob hit ya where the good Lord split ya:

God disowns gays, and other Knight tales - Another Paul Cameron enabler, Robert Knight says not everyone is a child of God. Funny, Knight doesn't look like God so how would he know.

Barber Wants Obama Investigated for "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" - Matt Barber continues to try and beat out Peter LaBarbera for the ignorance championship title.

Gays should pressure GOP lawmakers, Obama says - I'm inclined to agree with him here. We give our allies more hell than our enemies and I don't agree with that.

Most troops wouldn't oppose serving with gays - Some good news in the midst of the madness.

Porno Pete LaBarbera embraces Paul Cameron

I haven't written about Peter LaBarbera for a long time.

Luckily he has done something today which I couldn't resist to mention. He actually vouched for the discredited Paul (gays stuff gerbils up their rectums) Cameron:

Researcher Confirms Cameron Hypothesis: Children of ‘Gay’ Parents More Likely to Identify as ‘Gay’

No surprise here, except that an academic has the guts and integrity to report findings that challenge ”gay” activist propaganda. Parents are role models for their children. Homosexual parents are more likely to have children who identify as homosexuals (like their ”moms” or “dads”…). Duh. Note that try as he might, Schumm could not invalidate the hypothesis of Family Research Institute founder Paul Cameron — whom “gay’ activists and their fellow travelers have gone to considerable lengths to demonize.

LaBabera was prefacing a LifeSite news article which reached the exact same inaccurate conclusion - that researcher Walter Schumm proved Cameron's study to be accurate.

The irony is that this comes over a week after several folks concluded that Schumm's work was fraudulent. Of course Schumm's work validate's Cameron's mess because Schumm used the same bad research tactics that Cameron committed in his original study. According to Box Turtle Bulletin:

Schumm’s paper seeks to replicate Cameron’s work while acknowledging some of the criticisms of Cameron’s 2006 paper. It’s important to emphasize however that Schumm only acknowledges someof the criticisms. The most important criticism — the completely non-random nature of the so-called “dataset” that Cameron used — Schumm not only ignores, but he repeats that same flaw and embellishes it in a grandly enlarged form.

. . . Schumm’s “meta-analysis” (and Cameron’s before him) doesn’t even have the benefit of being built off of random convenience samples. There were no convenience samples in any of the ten prior works that Schumm used for his meta-analysis. In fact, they weren’t even professional studies. They were popular books!

That’s right, each of the ten sources that Schumm used to construct his “meta-analysis” were from general-audience books about LGBT parenting and families, most of which are available on Amazon.com. Schumm read the books, took notes on each parent and child described in the book, examined their histories, and counted up who was gay and who was straight among the kids. The ten books were:

* Abigail Garner’s Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is
* Andrew Gotlieb’s Sons Talk About Their Gay Fathers: Life Curves
* Noelle Howey and Ellen Samuels’ Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up with Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Parents
* Maureen Asten’s Lesbian Family Relationships in American Society: The Making of an Ethnographic Film
* Mary Boenke’s Trans Forming Families: Real Stories About Transgendered Loved Ones
* Jane Drucker’s Families Of Value: Gay and Lesbian Parents and their Children Speak Out
* Peggy Gillespie’s Love Makes a Family: Portraits of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Parents and Their Families
* Louise Rafkin’s Different Mothers: Sons and Daughters of Lesbians Talk About Their Lives
* Myra Hauschild and Pat Rosier’s Get Used to It!: Children of Gay and Lesbian Parents
* And Lisa Saffron’s What About the Children: Sons and Daughters of Lesbian and Gay Parents Talk About Their Lives

Furthermore, according to Box Turtle Bulletin, Schumm copied how Cameron distorted certain books:

Schumm used Abigail’s book in precisely the same illegitimate way that Cameron did. Despite the fact that Abigail expressly said that she intentionally made her balance of gay kids to straight kids at about 50/50, Schumm used that sample as part of his “meta-analysis” to conclude that gay parents are more likely to create gay kids. Schumm doesn’t say how many of his 262 “samples” he derived from Abagail’s book. Cameron said he used “over 50″ of Abigail’s interviews, so it is likely to be a considerable chunk of Schumm’s “dataset” as well.

So in other words, Schumm didn't validate Cameron's work. He just copied it.

The irony of LaBarbera's piece is that if he sought to somehow enhance Cameron's - and Schumm's - credibility, he failed miserably.

Nothing anyone on the right can do or say will ever make Paul Cameron a credible expert. He has too large of an ugly paper trail. But what LaBarbera did was further destroy his own credibility and given the lgbt community another weapon against him to remind folks just how phony and hateful he actually is.

Personally, every time LaBarbera's name comes up, I'm going to remind people of his "love" of Paul Cameron every chance I get.

And I mean every chance I get.

Related post:

AOL article sanitizes Paul Cameron and bad science

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Message to the Tea Party - What took you so long to get angry?

Not necessarily an lgbt issue per se, or is it? I didn't write this. The actual author is unknown but he/she speaks gospel. In anticipation of the election and most assured coronation of the astroturfed group as kingmakers, no matter the outcome:

You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate Energy policy and push us to invade Iraq .

You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

You didn't get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.   You didn't get mad when we spent over 800 billion (and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn't get mad when Bush borrowed more money from foreign sources than the previous 42 Presidents combined.

You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars in cash just disappeared in Iraq .

You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn't get mad when Bush embraced trade and outsourcing policies that shipped 6 million American jobs out of the country.

You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden.

You didn't get mad when Bush rang up 10 trillion dollars in combined budget and current account deficits.

You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn't get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans drown.

You didn't get mad when we gave people who had more money than they could spend, the filthy rich, over a trillion dollars in taxbreaks. You didn't get mad with the worst 8 years of job creations in several decades.

You didn't get mad when over 200,000 US Citizens lost their lives because they had no health insurance.

You didn't get mad when lack of oversight and regulations from the Bush Administration caused US Citizens to lose 12 trillion dollars in investments, retirement, and home values.

No.....You finally got mad

When a black man was elected President and decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick.

Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, job losses by the millions, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, and the worst economic disaster since 1929 are all okay with you, but helping fellow Americans who are sick...Oh, Hell No!!

Editor's note - as you may have noticed in the comments section, some tea party member tried to answer back this post. I answered the person back but a more complete version of what I said to him/her is at this link. It was enjoyable to refute the tea partier's lies but his/her callous comments were sad.

Will homosexuality bring America's downfall and other Thursday midday news briefs

NBC Affiliate: Will Gays Bring American Downfall? - Of course not. Cell phones have already done that.

Uganda’s “Hang Them” Tabloid To Resume Publication - This ain't good.

Gay U.S. House members: ‘Elections Matter’ - That right, dammit.

How Do We Really Make It Better for Gay Teens? - This is an excellent piece.

De Rossi: 'Being a lesbian caused anorexia' - I'm pushing this to show how a bad headline can ruin an excellent article. De Rossi said that her struggle with her lesbian identity caused her problems. It was an unfortunately bad headline.

Clint McCance demonstrates the best way for a gay child to commit suicide

I would love to see and hear how the religious right can defend this one:

The Arkansas Department of Education has condemned anti-gay comments made by a local school board member and posted on a social networking site.

Midland School District Vice President Clint McCance wrote on his personal Facebook page that he wanted gay people to commit suicide, according to The Advocate, a newspaper focusing on gay news. McCance used the terms "queer" and "fag" repeatedly, promised to disown his own children if they were gay, and stated that he enjoys "the fact that [gay people] often give each other AIDS and die."

A strongly worded statement signed by Dean Stanley, superintendent of the Midland School District, disavowed the remarks. "The district strives to foster an environment that discourages all forms of bullying," the statement read, "and an environment that encourages a safe and productive educational climate of all of our students. The district is very diligent in pursuing and addressing bullying of any variety on our campuses."

A separate statement sent to CNN by Julie Thompson, director of communications for the Arkansas Department of Education, said the department is "dismayed to see that a school board official would post something of this insensitive nature on a public forum like Facebook."

I hear he is running again for the school board unopposed. That's nice. Words cannot describe the absolute disgust I feel at this man. It is the height of irony that this awful story comes out in the midst of religious right so-called experts coming out with statements claiming that homophobia doesn't lead to suicide. Guess what dumbasses, it does. The following is a clip of Anderson Cooper interviewing the man who blew the whistle on McCance's actions: