Analyzing and refuting the inaccuracies lodged against the lgbt community by religious conservative organizations. Lies in the name of God are still lies.
How is this for a swift attempt to kick the gay community in the face? Not only is Mark Regnerus attempting to use his fraudulent study on gay parenting to attack same-sex families, but apparently he is now attempting to create a link between pornography and marriage equality support from information taken from the same study:
There is a correlation between watching porn and support for gay marriage among men, Dr. Mark Regnerus, associate professor of sociology at University of Texas at Austin, found. Exposure to diverse and graphic sex acts, he believes, may undermine a traditional view of marriage.
Using data from The New Family Structures Study, a project for which he was the principal investigator, Regnerus found statistically significant positive correlation between porn use and support for same-sex marriage among men, even after controlling for other predictors, such as political party, religiosity, marital status, age, education and sexual orientation.
In the full sample, 42 percent of men and 47 percent of women agreed or strongly agreed that gay marriage should be legal. Among men who view porn daily or almost daily, though, 54 percent strongly agreed (not just agreed) that gay marriage should be legal while only 13 percent who said they viewed porn monthly or less believed the same, Regnerus wrote for The Witherspoon Institute's "Public Discourse."
Wasn't that flawed study - which received much deserved criticism - about same-sex parenting? Just how in the world did the porn factor come in?
I almost can't wait to hear what "negative" factor involving marriage equality Regnerus' study conveniently finds.
Hat tip to an anonymous Facebook buddy who pointed this out to me.
Unfortunately, when you are a member of a targeted minority, it is difficult to talk about problems affecting your community without the haters swooping to exploit the discussion.
Case in point, our friend "Porno" Pete LaBarbera is practically dancing in the streets over this video by an angry gay man over getting older:
On one hand, he sounds like a bitter man who has a personal problem with the "It Gets Better" project. On the other, he raises valid points - albeit in an unfairly extreme fashion - which I am sure many of us have raised.
Of course on the other hand, a small part of me questions if this mysteriously anonymous individual is real. I guess it's too much Columbo, but the way he likes to cite statistics is bizarrely similar to how religious right spokespeople cite statistics.
But let's operate from the stand point that he is on the up-and-up.
Every community has their problems. Things aren't exactly easy for folks in the Black community. We have inner community issues that we have to discuss and deal with. For example, I always felt that there has been never enough discussion regarding depression in the black community, nor gay issues in general.There seems to be a fear of being vocal about what troubles us about each other as African-Americans for fear that we are putting our business out in the street and "whitey" may use it against us. That's a problem that goes way back and is rooted in some form of reality.
And don't even get me started on the light-skinned vs. dark-skinned issue which has been a huge problem in the black community from day one.
My main point is not to discuss this man's issues, but to say that life is not supposed to be easy and no community is a Utopia. Every community - be it black, gay, Latino, female, etc. - has its problems.
And there are two things people should remember:
1. There is nothing wrong with discussing these issues, but in a proper way. You do not tear down good things built up in the community, such as the "It Gets Better" project, simply because your issues aren't getting enough attention. Why not create a positive way to generate a discussion. The gay community has problems with trust issues and other issues involving our physical and mental health. However, the homophobia we have had to deal with put us in this state. We shouldn't be turning on each other.
2. Don't be so general about problems in the gay community. While it has been my experience that some segments of the gay community may be as shallow as this man as called them, a vast majority are NOT like that. We certainly wish we could all join hands and sing in fellowship, but it ain't going to happen. But that's life.
In the long run, nothing is And not everyone is going to be your friend, whether you are gay or not. But remember, it's your life and you are responsible for your own choices. Don't blame others for whatever problems you have and don't allow their ignorance to define you, whether that person be gay or heterosexual.
Texas Pastor Addresses Controversy Over Uganda Remarks - Turns out the Texas pastor who Monday voiced support for the anti-gay Ugandan bill is now claiming that he never even read the bill. Yeah, as if that makes things better. It makes him look like a bigger dumb ass than he seemed before.
If your morning coffee don't wake you up, these two videos are sure to do the trick.
First from Right-Wing Watch is a video of Pastor John Benefiel who claims that the demon Baal is behind homosexuality. I refuse to inform you who exactly Baal is. I do suspect that Benefiel is kinda cracked:
And if that's not enough for you, check out this absolutely bizarre video from Ireland's Iona Institute, which makes me suspect that the reason why we haven't seen Maggie Gallagher is because she is in Ireland. I will say one thing for this video - it certainly uses the word "unique" a lot:
To paraphrase Rosalind Russell in The Women, "get a grip on yourself because you are simply going to swoon." The Family Research Council is getting sued for retaliating against an employee who filed a sexual harassment suit
The former director of women’s and reproductive health at the Family
Research Council, a prominent Christian conservative advocacy group, is
suing the organization, claiming it retaliated against her and fired her
after she filed a sexual harassment complaint against her boss.
According to court documents first obtained and reported by journalist Evan Gahr,
former FRC employee Moira Gaul, 42, filed a complaint in 2009 with the
District of Columbia Human Rights Commission in which she accused her
supervisor of gender discrimination. She claimed that her boss, the
director of the Center for Human Life and Bioethics at the time,
referred to the use of birth control pills as "whoring around,"
addressed emails to her with the words "hi cutie," pressured her to
attend parties, and referred to her as a "young, attractive woman."
"His attitude toward me and other women was rude, belittling, and at times, angry," she wrote in the complaint.
Gahr identified Gaul's former supervisor as prominent anti-abortion
lawyer William Saunders, who now works at the anti-abortion group
Americans United for Life. Saunders and his attorney, William J. Hickey,
did not respond to requests for comment on the case.4
The FRC fired Gaul shortly after she filed the complaint, citing a
loss in federal funding for abstinence -- Gaul's area of expertise --
and the need for someone with more experience on abortion issues. Gaul
claims the FRC also retroactively canceled her health insurance for the
time that she was on short-term disability for systemic lupus.
According to the Huffington Post article, the complaint was settled in 2009. And there lies the interesting rub. Gaul is suing FRC for unfair retaliation to her filing the complaint:
The suit claims that Gaul had received excellent reviews and no
reprimands at the FRC up until she filed the gender discrimination
complaint. Then, three months after she was fired, abstinence funding
continued to the FRC, and the organization "created a new position with
duties substantially similar to those previously performed by Ms. Gaul."
J.P. Duffy, vice president of communications at the FRC, told The
Huffington Post that "D.C.'s Office of Human Rights made no finding" on
the gender discrimination case, "and the case was withdrawn." Duffy did
not comment on the retaliation case, which is ongoing.
However this ends, I know one thing for sure. FRC can't blame the gay community for THIS one.
Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin Now Going After Gay Troops - So Todd Akin, who lost a sure bet Senate seat for his unbelievable comments about women and rape, now seeks to serve as a roadblock to gays serving openly in the military. Somehow, I don't think that this is a good idea for Akin.
This is an old clip, but I want you all to pay attention to something:
Barber claims that molestation leads to homosexuality by citing a passage from the Archives of Sexual Behavior. He makes it seem like the study in question backs him up, but the study in no way has ever said that molestation leads to homosexuality. In fact, one wonders if the phrase "homosexual pedophile" even existed in the study. When citing the study in another piece, Barber said:
“46 percent of homosexual men and 22 percent of homosexual
women reported having been molested by a person of the same gender. This
contrasts to only 7 percent of heterosexual men and 1 percent of
heterosexual women reporting having been molested by a person of the
same gender.”
The phrase "homosexual pedophile" is a creation solely of Barber and it proves that he is "cherry-picking" the legitimate study from the Archives of Sexual Behavior to reach the conclusion that he wants. And that conclusion is wrong.
Pay attention to that word, "cherry-picking." It plays heavily into the religious right repertoire of anti-gay lies and you will be hearing it a lot in the future.
In my last post, I defended Christianity in light of a Texas pastor who voiced support of the Ugandan anti-gay bill. The jackasses in these news briefs are making THAT job more difficult:
And the disgusting finale? The following tweet was sent last night by the Liberty Counsel's Matt Barber:
It was a 180 degree turn for Barber who issued a beautiful prayer for the victims of the shooting earlier this weekend.
This shooting has been a colossal tragedy for the country and it is a warning sign to folks who practice true Christianity.
You are losing support because of people like these. If you are going to blame "demonic forces" for people getting turned off of Christianity, you had best check the next Values Voters rally, take a deep sniff, and hope that the overwhelming smell of sulfur don't make you sick.
American pastor David Dykes from the Green Acres Baptist Church in Tyler, TX is very vocal in his support of that awful Ugandan anti-gay bill. He is even saying that if the Uganda passes that bill, "Christians" will put pressure on our government not to cut aid to Uganda and if our government does such, then the Church will try to take up the slack and send resources to Uganda.
Don't even start any nonsense about how supposedly "evil" Christianity is because those who would even consider supporting Dykes are NOT Christians in any shape or form. That goes the same for criticizing the state of Texas.
I feel safe in saying that no amount of spin can make what this man proposes look good.
It ain't gonna happen. Mr. Dykes has the same verbal disease that Mike Huckabee and Bryan Fischer has in that he thinks he can speak for all Christiandom. It's a shame the disease if farther along with him than Huckabee and Fischer.
One of the biggest lies told by religious right groups and their spokespeople is that they are merely defending their personal religious beliefs and that they want to promote fairness by interjecting their opinion into the talk about sexual orientation.
Recent comments uttered by two leaders of religious right groups contradict that argument.
Linda Harvey from Mission America - a minor yet influential person in religious right circles - said that the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law, shouldn't apply to gays:
Why should the equal protection argument be made in favor of
homosexual behavior, which is changeable? People are not naturally
homosexual, so the definition of "person" in the Fourteenth Amendment is
being twisted to make this assumption.
"Person" should be understood based on historic, beneficial, or at
least neutral and fact-based traits; it should not be twisted to
incorporate behavior that most religions and most cultures have said a
firm "no" to.
It's also behavior for which there's no recognized science
demonstrating a genetic or hormonal origin. And it's also not
beneficial and does not stand the definition of marriage, used for
millenia - that is, the act of consummation. It's another sad fact of
homosexual behavior that two men or two women can never consummate a
marriage; they can never conceive children together.
Peter LaBarbera
Before you can even attempt to wrap your head around that nonsense, Peter LaBarbera from the group Americans for Truth - who is always lurking around religious right circles like the hyenas in The Lion King - issued this forewarning of a "shocking" meeting sponsored by the federal government:
I’m writing you from Oklahoma, having just attended a pro-homosexual
conference funded with YOUR tax dollars and sponsored by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA),
a branch of HHS. We will have a full report on this one-day
conference, which not only was devoid of pro-family advocates but
featured speakers who were explicitly anti-biblical in their ideology,
e.g., claiming that Romans 1 does NOT proscribe homosexual acts as
sinful.
Here’s an excerpt from a conference flier titled, “What does the bible say about homosexuality?” passed out by presenter Kathy McCallie, in a session called “Spiritual Wellness in BGLT (sic) Communities, a Primer”:
“[The Apostle] Paul
had no inkling that for some persons, a same-sex orientation might be
natural, that is, part of who they are created to be. If he had known
this, he would have had to argue that, for such persons, heterosexual
acts would be unnatural.”
Whatever happened to liberal demands for “Separation of Church and
State” (which is actually a twisting of the First Amendment)?! Here we
have Americans’ tax dollars being used to assault historic biblical
teaching against homosexuality as sinful.
. . . the Oklahoma conference, although supposedly focusing on substance
abuse, devoted much energy to promoting gender confusion and
homosexuality. Can you imagine comparing gender-confused men who believe
they are “women” but are denied use of the ladies’ restroom to Blacks
suffering under official Jim Crow racism — as male-to-female trans “woman” Celeste Flemming did?
The very first speaker at the conference, Randy Roberts Potts – the openly homosexual grandson of the late Oral Roberts – maligned my friend and Oklahoma St. Rep. Sally Kern,
accusing her of being “hateful” toward homosexuals and going on a
“witch-hunt” against them. Stay tuned to this story, which also sheds
like on the Obama administration’s radical use of the federal
bureaucracy to promote the homosexualist agenda across America.
I fail to see the problem here. So what if SAMHSA conducted an all-day conference devoted to gay health? That's a good thing. SAMSHA seeks to provide education regarding the needs of the lgbt community. When there is a problem with substance abuse in the gay community, one of the root causes happens to be homophobia - like the homophobia expressed by LaBarbera in his statement, i. e. the vicious attack on Ms. Flemming and the transgender community at large.
And what if at this conference folks posed a different interpretation of the Bible's view of homosexuality? Is that against the law? Is LaBarbera's interpretation the only one which should be allowed? What in the world gives him the right dictate how people interpret the Bible? Even the title of his piece is offensive - Federally-funded 'LGBT' conference in Oklahoma Undermines Scripture
And don't even get me started on LaBarbera's attempt to "defend" the Civil Rights Movement."
The main point I am trying to make is this - some members of religious right groups seem to have a feeling of entitlement in regards to the gay community. They feel that they entitled to dictate our lives and whether or not tax dollars should be used in the advancement of our well-being.
It's only a feeling, guys. It's not fact. And that's something that people like Harvey and LaBarbera had better get used to.
Republicans in Congress are starting to cheese me off. They want to cut monies on Social Security and Medicaid, while at the same time doing the following, via Think Progress:
It has come to light that House Administration Committee Chairman Dan Lungren (R-CA) secretly approved a $500,000 increase to a contract with a private law firm to defend the unconstitutional
Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in federal court. While the increase was
approved in September, neither the public nor the Democratic House
minority was informed until this week, Roll Call reports. The contract now authorizes Bancroft PLLC and former Solicitor General Paul Clement
(R) to spend up to $2 million in to defend DOMA — the second increase
to what was originally a $1 million cap. The U.S. Department of Justice stopped defending the 1996 law in February 2011 after determining the law to be in conflict with the U.S. Constitution.
Two million dollars in an attempt to deny gays the right to marry. And if that's enough to get you angry, remember the fact that Clement, their lawyer, is using faulty research and tactics in his case. I wrote about this last year but let's recap:
But Dent's work - which Clement uses - cited both Paul Cameron and George Rekers,
two discredited researchers. Cameron has been censured or rebuked by
several organizations for his bad methodology in his studies. He has
published work which claimed, among other nauseating false things, that gays stuff gerbils up their rectums. (Editor's note-
the piece Cameron cited to make this claim - The Straight Dope -
actually said that this claim was not true. Cameron dishonestly "flipped
the script" to make it seem that The Straight Dope was affirming this
claim.)
Rekers lost a lot of credibility for last year's scandal when he was
caught coming from a European vacation with a "rentboy."
Also, Dent cited the work of Walter Schumm's study Children of
Homosexuals More Apt To Be Homosexuals? A Reply to Morrison and to
Cameron Based on an Examination of Multiple Sources of Data.
Furthermore, Dent cited a book called Straight & Narrow by
Thomas E. Schmidt to make criticisms about gay health. However, Schmidt
is not a credible researcher in the field of gay health. He is a
professor of New Testament Greek at Westmont College in Santa Barbara
and according to Rev. Mel White of the group Soulforce, Schmidt cited
Cameron's discredited studies many times in Straight & Narrow(5th letter to Jerry Falwell.)
And last, but not least, Dent cited the work of the American College of
Pediatricians. The American College of Pediatricians is not a credible
organization, but an organization created to give credibility to junk
science about the gay community. Last year, over 14,000 school
district superintendents in the country were sent a letter by ACP
inviting them to peruse and use information from a new site, Facts About Youth. The site claimed to present "facts" supposedly not tainted by "political correctness." Of course these were not facts, but ugly distortions about the gay community, including:
Some gay men sexualize human waste, including the medically
dangerous practice of coprophilia, which means sexual contact with
highly infectious fecal wastes.
If this isn't enough to get you angry at Boehner and company, then you need to check your pulse. You may not have one.
With all due respect, this video I pulled from Jeremy Hooper's blog is super inane:
And the reason that allowing gays to marry would hurt the above concept is how . . .. ?
This video is from the Iona Institute in Ireland. Man they need to do something better to explain their point of view.
In other news:
WND Promotes Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill- Via "World Nut Daily," arch-bigot Scott Lively speaks up for Uganda's anti-gay bill. He should because he helped start the panic which created it. And get this - while he doesn't believe in the death penalty for gays, he is all for life in prison. Well gee. "Thanks a lot, @!%$"
FRC and NOM tries to lie about families like this one.
I have talked about how the religious right distorts legitimate studies to attack the gay community. There have been many times in which this has happened. And today comes another one. From the Family Research Council:
According to a new study,
having two married parents may be the best educational advantage you
can give your kids. Based on data from 1.6 million children, Michael
Rosenfeld confirms what FRC's research has shown for some time: children
from intact, married families were 35.4% more likely to do well in
school than kids in homosexual homes. Also, children adopted into
heterosexual families fared better -- with a 24% edge in school progress
over kids in same-sex families.
If the "new study" sounds familiar to folks who have read this blog, it's because I talked about it days ago. That time, the National Organization for Marriage was touting it and I pointed out how one of the study's authors - Douglas Allen - was affiliated with the National Organization for Marriage's Ruth Institute.
In the comments section of this blog, readers were alerting me to something that I confess I should have been paying more attention to. And now that the Family Research Council is touting the study - and inadvertently revealed an important fact about it - I am wide awake and raring to raise hell.
Both FRC and NOM are misleading folks in far more detail than I realized.
NOM omitted the fact that technically Allen didn't necessarily create an original study. Allen told The Washington Examinerthe following:
The study also looked at similar scholarly work
that had determined no difference in children of same sex and
traditional marriages. The authors said that those studies filtered the
sample of children to get their result.
"The previous study claiming no differences
between the children of same sex parents and other children had serious
problems," said study co-author Douglas Allen, an economics professor at
Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. That study, he said,
"excluded children who were not biologically related to the household
head, and children who did not live in the same place for five years.
That threw out over half of the observations. When we put those children
back into our analysis, but controlled for these factors, we found that
the children of same sex parents are less likely to make normal
progress through school."
In other words, Allen took another study, published in 2010 and added new details in an attempt to get a conclusion more desirous to his position.
FRC is misleading folks making them believe the study is new and that the actual author - Michael Rosenfield - interprets it as a knock on same-sex families. This is not true because of a letter Rosenfield wrote in November. In the letter, published in the same issue of Demography, he blasted Allen for manipulating his original work. It reads in part:
In Rosenfeld (2010),
I was very careful to include only children who lived with their
current parents for at least five years because those children’s current
family structure influenced their progress through school. In their
revision of my analysis, Allen et al. preferred to analyze the outcomes
of all children, regardless of how long they had lived with their
current families. Allen et al. therefore attributed to the current
family (at the time of the census) child outcomes that may have been
produced years before the current family was formed. Allen et al.
violated a fundamental rule of causal order, which is that later
characteristics ought not be used to predict earlier events.
It is a long point-by-point take down that you can read in its entirety if you wish. But the main gist is at the end. Rosenfield says:
Allen et al. reached the conclusion that children in
same-sex-couple families fare worse in school by including all children
regardless of how long the child has lived with the family (see their
Models 2 and 4) and by including adopted and foster children along with
the head of household’s own children (their Models 3 and 4). Allen et
al.’s finding of worse school performance by children living with
same-sex couples is due to their conflating the initial disadvantage of
children who come into same-sex couple families (a disadvantage that
appears to be substantial) with the progress children experience during
the time when they are actually being raised by same-sex couples
(progress that is excellent).
There is no statistically
significant difference in making normal progress through school between
children raised by same-sex couples and children raised by heterosexual
married couples after family socioeconomic status is taken into account
(see Table 1,
column E). Allen et al. noted that even if the difference is not
significant, the children of heterosexual married couples appear to be
faring better. By the same logic, the children raised by unmarried
heterosexual couples appear to be faring worse (with higher rates of
grade retention) than children raised by same-sex couples (all of whom
were unmarried according to U.S. law), though the difference in grade
retention is not significant after socioeconomic controls are applied.
If formal marriage of the parents is
beneficial to children, and if the goal of public policy is to maximize
children’s chances of success, then perhaps the logical public policy
prescription would be to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples in
the United States.
So it seems that both NOM and FRC both tried to pull a fast one at the same time and got caught. This is certainly a first for me - the first time I am able knock two religious right groups at the same time for lying.
And it was fun. I wish it would happen more often
Editor's note - To the readers who were trying to point out the main problems with Allen's study to me, I profusely apologize for not paying attention like I should have.
I look at the Liberty Counsel's Matt Barber the way I view Linda Harvey from Mission America.
Don't get mad at their anti-gay speech. By all means, let them talk. They only serve to help us.
A perfect example of what I am talking about today is Barber on a radio show today labeling gay rights activists as "insatiable beasts."
It's truly hilarious to hear him and the host, Janet Mefferd, talk about how we are never satisfied, as if they control what we should and shouldn't get in terms of civil rights.
And that line he throws out about gays wanting to turn schools into "indoctrination centers?" Classic ironic comedy.
The more I hear Barber's rants, the more I am glad with my decision to put him on the cover of my upcoming booklet, How They See Us:
Transcript:
Mefferd: You look at how the LGBT activists are
operating in California and it just seems like there is no limit to what
they want, it’s just one thing after another out there, they get one
thing and then they move on to the next thing and they move on to the
next thing and with great vigor.
Barber: That’s right. The homosexual activist lobby is
an insatiable beast, as I’ve often said before. They do want everything
that we’ve said that they wanted and that is not just affirmation of
homosexuality but celebration of homosexuality under penalty of law,
they absolutely want to turn our public schools into indoctrination
centers and the narrative that people can and do leave homosexuality
does not align with their political, cultural and legal goals so they
are throwing children under the bus here—in order to try ends justifies
the means agenda here.
Photograph Of Little Boy Wearing Pink Shoes To Preschool Sparks Heated Blogosphere Debate - A little boy wears pink shoes to preschool and the blogsphere freaks out about it. Meanwhile, the child only wore the shoes because they reminded him of zebras, his favorite animal. I mean REALLLY people! It's preschool! These kids just want to play. Let them, pink shoes and all!
Leave it to and old stand by in demeaning the gay community, Robert Knight, to actually make the case against those upset at the recent same-sex wedding held at West Point.
Who knew that when Penelope Gnesin and Brenda Sue Fulton,
a West Point graduate, recently exchanged vows in the Cadet Chapel that it would cause so much consternation amongst the religious right.
Various not very nice comments have been leveled at West Point and the couple. So while Robert Knight's comment doesn't take the proverbial cake, they do reveal the weakness of the arguments behind those angry at this wedding:
"It's a disgrace that West Point allowed same-sex so-called
'marriage' in the chapel. That's a blasphemy against
God. It goes against the Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law.
It's a finger in the eye of God and the American people who still
hold to biblical morality, and it was done deliberately. They did
it there to make a point."
First of all, I don't think the wedding goes against the Defense of Marriage Act. Secondly, and most importantly, I fail to see how this wedding is an insult to those who supposedly hold to biblical morality seeing that they weren't forced to be there.
Knight's comments underscores a discussion which is sorely needed in this country. Not all Christians believe that homosexuality is a sin. In fact, some LGBTs are Christians. But for those Christians who feel that homosexuality is a sin, how far should the nation go to accommodate their belief, even when it comes to situations that do not directly involve them? Unfortunately, there are some Christians who believe that this country was founded solely for them and the rest of us who don't believe as they do are only here for their will and pleasure. And when challenged on this, they revert to the victimhood mentality, implying that if some of us -particularly lgbts - take full advantage of rights afforded to us, we are somehow targeting them.
This sense of entitlement needs to be nipped because this nation was not created as a homeland for Christians who believe as Knight does, but for all Americans.
Sorry to folks who may feel the need to roll their eyes, but I am going to post more pictures of gay couples just married in Washington state this week:
I can't help it. But be honest. Wouldn't you rather be staring at this rather than Maggie Gallagher, Brian Brown, Tony Perkins, Linda Harvey, Matt Barber, or the rest. Of course that's not to say that I won't be on my soap box tomorrow throwing out thunderbolts as usual. But for tonight, let's just bask in the glow of progress:
