Analyzing and refuting the inaccuracies lodged against the lgbt community by religious conservative organizations. Lies in the name of God are still lies.
Not a very good picture but still, a historic one taken from twitter (Chris Geidner of Buzzfeed) as Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee signs the bill which makes the state the 10th in the nation to offer marriage equality.
Why I Am Signing Marriage Equality Into Law - Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chaffee on why he will sign the bill which will make his state the 10th to have marriage equality.
Is the Military Preparing to Court Martial Christians? - Not necessarily an lgbt-article per se, but you know how the religious right will try to tie this into gays and lesbians being allowed to serve openly. Also, it gives you another opportunity to explore the distortions of Todd Starnes.
I apologize for those who are offended regarding this post. But I feel that with regards of Jason Collins' coming out, there seems to be a loss of perspective. From the blog Women's Post comes the tweets of folks not happy with Collins' decision to come out:
Milky Cabrèra@Big_Sal17 - Listening to Jason Collins describe his gayness as "beautiful" makes me wanna puke. And kill him.
Batten down the hatches and hold your noses. Janet Porter and her Faith2Action group has come out with another ugly video repeating the same homophobic propaganda we have heard over and over again. The video is so bad that it was initially removed as hate speech. Luckily there is a back up copy for you to peruse.
Faith 2 Action’s Janet Porter has been releasing clips of her film which warns that gays and lesbians are out to criminalize Christianity and no different than adulterers.
In the latest segment, actors mock the books “Heather Has Two Mommies”
and “Daddy’s Roommate” by having a teacher read “Heather has Two
Cigarettes” and “Daddy’s Roommate has Lung Cancer,” while accusing a
non-smoking toddler of being a “smokerphobe.”
“Homosexual behavior is up to three times more dangerous than
smoking,” according to Porter’s film, “We don’t promote smoking in the schools, so why would we promote something even more dangerous.”
The film later interviews the head of the American Family Association’s Michigan chapter Gary Glenn, who favors the criminalization of homosexuality, who said that homosexuality should be discouraged in the same way we see campaigns against smoking.
“If you really care and love somebody you don’t want them to be
involved in behavior that’s going to make them die earlier,” Glenn said,
“if you love them you want them to stick around and encourage them to
get out of that lifestyle…. True Christian compassion is trying to help
people out of self- destructive behavior.”
This video pulls out all of stops, including citing that ridiculous Fox News story about the "forced middle school lesbian kiss," which I refuted.
The discredited idea that homosexuality is more dangerous than cigarette smoking is one which is derived from our favorite junk scientist, Paul Cameron.
Now with Janet Porter coming out with all of these recent videos, some of you have asked just who is she. Well I could go into a long expository of how strident and nauseatingly disturbed I see her as, but I think the following video of Porter praying to God - or rather demanding that God give her and folks like her control of the media - says it all. And by the way, it's not a joke:
Rush Limbaugh
said Penn State's Sandusky was gay. Bill O'Reilly retorted (1)
"homosexuality has nothing to do with the crime of pedophilia." Really,
O'Reilly?
We put "2012 Child Sexual Abuse"
through Google News from Feb 8 thru March 8, 2013. Counting same-sex
adult/child sex as homosexual; opposite-sex abuse as heterosexual, the
homosexual fraction for the 210 US perpetrators in Google-linked stories
was:
Women were 1 of 25 foreign, 22
(10%) of U.S. perpetrators (13 [59%]) engaged in homosexuality.
Homosexuality was also large among foreign clerics (Catholic 4/5;
Protestant 1/1; Jewish 3/3).
Child sexual abuse was excessively homosexual
as only 3% of adults admitted homosexual contacts in the U.S.
government random sample of 33,902.(2) In Jay &Young (3) 22% of
4,329 gays & 5% of 962 lesbians reported illegal sex with children
of their sex. And in Kinsey Institute (4) interviews with 671 San
Francisco gays, 23% admitted illegal sex with boys; of 288 lesbians, 4%
admitted illegal sex with girls. And these perpetrators said kids were
only 'half or less' of their sex partners -- the rest were adults.
Three centuries before Christ,
Aristophanes noted "when they grow to be men, they become lovers of
boys, and it requires compulsion to overcome their natural
disinclination to marriage and procreation." "Do some homework,
O'Reilly!" said Dr. Paul Cameron, who supervised the study: "Look at the empirical evidence, not pro-homosexual professional association statements."
What garbage. First of all, the premise is wrong. The gender of the victim has nothing to do with the sexual orientation of the perpetrator. Secondly, the belief that child sexual abuse being "excessively homosexual" has been rejected by several groups including the American Psychological Association, the National Association of
Social Workers, the American Academy of Child Psychiatrists and the
Child Welfare League of America.
Thirdly, two of Cameron's sources - Jay and Young (The Gay Report) and the Kinsey Institute (Homosexualities) were published over 30 years ago. And both works have explicitly said that their conclusions are not meant to generalize about the entire lgbt community.
The Gay Report - We agreed at the outset not to pretend that these percentages
represented the practices and views of all gay people—they reflected
only our respondents.
Homosexualities - “. . . 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.”
Is it any wonder why Cameron is a laughing stock in the medical profession?
Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality tells American Family News that Collins is actually struggling with homosexual sin.
“He was born with genes that made him tall. He wasn't born with a gay gene,” says LaBarbera. “I feel sorry for this man. He's being celebrated, which will encourage him to stay in his sin, and he needs to leave it like so many men and women have before him.”
The family advocate adds there is "a huge push to have homosexuality embraced in professional sports." Teams in the four major professional sports have special events to draw positive attention to the lifestyle – and LaBarbera contends that is not healthy for children.
“These professional athletes are models for children, whether we like it or not,” he says. “And so this will lead the children embracing homosexuality and saying, Hey, it's good enough for Jason Collins it's good enough for me.”
It is LaBarbera's hope that Collins will encounter Christians who will help him leave the lifestyle by embracing Jesus Christ.
In case you have been living in cave with your fingers in your ears, 12 year NBA veteran Jason Collins became the first openly active gay man in sports.
Now this story caught me flatfooted because I had two exclusives today. So I think it's better for me to give a news briefs recap just in case you couldn't catch all of the news - and there was a lot of it today - about Collins' landmark decision:
The Good - Collins has gotten a lot of support, which he richly deserves
And THEN there is the ugly, which is another way of saying the religious right. That leads me to ask a basic question. If these people detest homosexuality so much, then why are they always showing their asses:
The above video is the latest monstrosity from the group Faith2Action and Janet Porter (the entities behind several other ridiculously homophobic videos). It's the usual nonsense about how gays supposedly want to "silence" Christians and harm children.
I would have yawned and let it go by except for one vicious lie in it. At 1:02, the narrator - Folger - zeroed in on the Southern Poverty Law Center. Folger and other members of the religious right have been angry at SPLC ever since the organization designated several anti-gay organizations as hate groups due to their deliberate spread of untrue propaganda about the lgbt community.
Folger claims that SPLC published the personal information and address of Concerned Women for America's president Peggy Nance and invited people to "visit" her. Folger then connects this claim to last year's shooting at the Family Research Council headquarters.
But this is a lie. SPLC has never published Nance's personal information or address. I know that SPLC would have never stooped to such a tasteless and dangerous tactic. And I confirmed this via an email this morning with Mark Potok, SPLC spokesman and director of publications and information.
The shooting last year at FRC headquarters was awful and I am thankful that no one was seriously hurt. However, the attempt by Folger and other members of the religious right (particularly the Family Research Council itself) to exploit the shooting is simply nauseating.
It's bad enough to create a false connection between the obviously disturbed young man who attacked FRC and SPLC (particularly when there was no connection between the two), but now religious right spokespeople are stooping to distasteful inferences that SPLC is deliberately trying to create another tragedy.
The above story has been playing huge in religious right and conservative circles lately. The story, which not only includes the tale of a forced lesbian kiss but also boys being told to carry condoms in their pockets, has been the talk of several conservative sites from Free Republic to The American Thinker to World Net Daily.
The National Organization for Marriage referred to this story in three separate emails last week as an example of what will happen should marriage equality become legal across the country.
Not surprisingly, the story isn't necessarily true.
According to the school district, during the workshop at Linden Avenue Middle School, no female student was forced to engage in any lesbian kissing, male students were not told to carry condoms, and sexual activity between students was not condoned in any way. The district also said:
During the week of April 9, eighth grade communication sessions were held at Linden Avenue Middle
School. These sessions were designed by building leadership and the guidance department. The goals of
these sessions were to encourage students to treat one another
(and all marginalized groups)
with more
respect as well as to further develop an appreciation for personal dignity.
In response to parental concerns about these sessions Dr. Zahedi, the middle school principal, held an
evening informational forum on April 16. This session was well attended and the subsequent feedback
has been positive. In addition, the Board of Education and Superintendent of Schools, Paul Finch,
addressed the community at the April 24 board meeting on the topic of these sessions. Here again,
feedback from the community and students was overwhelmingly positive.
Here is an interesting fact you do need to remember - this story gained steam when it was picked up by Fox News reporter Todd Starnes. While Starnes did cite the area newspaper, The Poughkeepsie Journal, in his post, he choose to add more lurid detail about the alleged lesbian kiss. Also, while The Journal talked about the entire workshop as a whole, Starnes chose to take the "they didn't even notify the parents" route, thereby playing up a semantical tone that the school was trying to "indoctrinate" students.
On Monday of last week, the district sent Starnes an email asking that he update his story with correct information. It is not known whether or not Starnes chose to update his story but now the school district has to deal with what it calls "hostile and hateful emails" from many who don't even live in the area. It puts the blame for this solely on Starnes and the organizations - such as NOM - who chose to repeat Starnes' "inaccurate" story.
My guess is that Starnes had already made up his mind what the "true story" about the workshop was once he heard of the alleged lesbian kiss and condoms.
According to Equality Matters as the "culture reporter" for Fox News, Starnes uses his role as a mouthpiece to not only funnel information from several anti-gay groups, but also to push anti-gay information into the mainstream. Equality Matters points out several other incidents in which Starnes has made it a point to report stories which "depict LGBT equality as a threat to religious and personal freedom."
In the case of the Red Hook School District, the only threat was most likely Starnes himself. A reporter on a crusade to push a point of view instead of the facts is always dangerous.
Meet Todd Starnes, Fox’s Mouthpiece For Anti-Gay Hate Groups - Todd Starnes is the religious right point man for Fox News. If the lgbt community does not watch out for his biased and shrill way of spreading false stories about "gay oppression," it will cause us problems.
The Family Research Council has released footage of the FBI questioning Floyd Corkins, the shooter who targeted the organization last year. In this footage, Corkins says that he saw FRC listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Translation by FRC and its supporters will be that SPLC led Corkins to go on his attempted murder spree.
Rumor control has it that FRC president Tony Perkins will appear on Fox News with Megyn Kelly tomorrow to talk about this footage. Knowing Fox News, Kelly, and Perkins, it will be a biased, propaganda interview in which Perkins will do his best to attack SPLC for the actions of Corkins.
I will be highly surprised if someone from SPLC will be invited to come on the show and defend the organization from this barrage of propaganda.
While I am glad that no one was harmed by Corkins's absolutely stupid attempt at activism, the one thing which will also drive me crazy is how Kelly and Perkins will work together to change the subject of the issue and divert attention away from the fact that SPLC didn't start this entire mess.
The anti-gay propaganda and the demonizing homophobic rhetoric of FRC also had much to do with this mess. And I think that any conversation about the shooting must include the above video. Please pass it along.
The 20th Anniversary of the LGBT March on Washington: How Far Have We Come? - I was there 20 years ago during the march and I do not have good memories of it. I may write about it in the future but I can say that MUCH has changed. For one thing, we are more disciplined and attuned to what we must do.
Yesterday, the Rhode Island Senate passed a marriage equality bill. The bill now goes back to the House where it will be voted on again - a mere formality - and from there it will go to Governor Lincoln Chaffee who has said he will sign it.
Naturally, Brian Brown from the National Organization for Marriage is vocal about his disappointment:
"Lawmakers have allowed themselves to be fooled into thinking they have
protected people of faith when in fact they have put those who believe
in true marriage in the crosshairs of the law and gay 'marriage'
activists. It won't be long before the repercussions begin to be felt."
. . . "For the first time, the state of Rhode Island is saying to its children
they do not deserve both a mother and a father, and are backing a law
that is designed to intentionally deprive some kids of either a mom or a
dad," Brown said. "It's bad enough when families break down through
divorce or death, but it's unconscionable when a state encourages this
through policies that deprive children of the love of both a mother and a
father. This is a very sad day for Rhode Island."
Same old arguments, same old lies. That's the thing about using the same old arguments. Sooner or later, folks recognize how empty they are and begin to turn against them.
Sometimes, if you give bigots enough rope, they embarrass themselves so badly that you can't help BUT to put them up for display. Perfect example is Bryan Fischer whom I'm beginning to think is secretly working on our side. The above video is him defending an Ohio Catholic school for firing a lesbian teacher.
Remember that Bryan Fischer is a spokesman of the American Family Association, one of the groups designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as anti-gay hate groups. But Fischer and the AFA - along with the other groups fitting that designation - claim that they are being attacked for their so-called Christian values.
I guess the above video is a vocalization of their so-called Christian values. Such a brazen admission of prejudice by Fischer is really nothing to get angry about. Getting angry at Fischer's need to vocalize his homophobia is the equivalent of a football team getting angry at another team for handing them the ball and allowing them to score points which will put them ahead with two seconds on the clock.
If homophobes are constantly complaining about being unfairly labeled as "bigots," when why do they make it so easy?
Allow Right Wing Watch to tell you about the above monstrosity:
Stooping to a new low, Janet Porter’s Faith 2 Action is mocking the
process of gay people coming out by releasing a video of a man revealing
to his family that he is an adulterer and demanding affirmation.
This is the latest in a series of hideously piss poor homophobic videos coming from Porter. Remember the past hits such as:
The Criminalization of Christianity:
And Don't Homosexualize The Boy Scouts:
One more thing you should know about Porter. In 1998, she was head of a national religious right campaign which sought to persuade Americans that homosexuality was a choice which one could allegedly "walk away from." The campaign focused largely on the visibility of a man named John Paulk who claimed that he was once gay but was presently happily married and heterosexual.
Today, Paulk has issued an apology for his involvement in that campaign and the ex-gay movement at large. Meanwhile, Porter has dropped down to making triple z-level videos so bad that famed director Ed Wood would have disavowed them.
Editor's note - no big calamity, folks. I am simply taking one of my half days off to deal with personal issues. I will be back tomorrow morning, full of fire, vinegar, and music. Or if something good happens later today, then you know I will be posting it.
I'm yanking this awesome exchange from Jeremy Hooper. It's from Delaware's House of Representatives hearing on the possible marriage equality law and it also demonstrates that probably one of the reasons why opponents of marriage equality are losing. Their arguments about the destruction "constitutional rights" and religious liberties" are one-note talking points which dissolve under questioning by folks who know their facts.
And this just in - the Delaware House of Representatives just passed marriage equality bill by a 23-18 vote. Now on to the Senae.
