The Daily Agenda for Friday, February 10
Again anti-gays blindly and gleefully shoot themselves in the foot
Rep. Walsh leads with her heart
Advocate, WaPo, AP Get it Wrong On Anti-Homosexuality Bill
Uganda Executive, Parliament Tussle Over Anti-Homosexuality BIll
The Daily Agenda for Thursday, February 9
Something I'd Like to Know, But Never Can
The Solicitor General impact
Featured Reports
What Are Little Boys Made Of?
In this original BTB Investigation, we unveil the tragic story of Kirk Murphy, a four-year-old boy who was treated for “cross-gender disturbance” in 1970 by a young grad student by the name of George Rekers. This story is a stark reminder that there are severe and damaging consequences when therapists try to ensure that boys will be boys.
Slouching Towards Kampala: Uganda’s Deadly Embrace of Hate
When we first reported on three American anti-gay activists traveling to Kampala for a three-day conference, we had no idea that it would be the first report of a long string of events leading to a proposal to institute the death penalty for LGBT people. But that is exactly what happened. In this report, we review our collection of more than 450 posts to tell the story of one nation’s embrace of hatred toward gay people. This report will be updated continuously as events continue to unfold. Check here for the latest updates.
David Benkof: Behind the Mask
At first glance, David Benkof appears to be a young gay man who believes that same-sex marriage will damage the institution of marriage, that there are better options for gay couples than marriage, that the community should join him in prioritizing other more pressing issues, and that the marriage discussion is harming the efforts of gay couples in red states to get recognition for their unions. He also claims that he’s a gay columnist, that he speaks for an influential collection of gay thinkers, and that he is part of the gay and lesbian community and that he shares our goals and dreams. But none of that is true.
“Repeat After Me”: The Reparative Therapy Echo Chamber
The April 2008 edition of the pay-to-publish vanity journal Psychological Reports featured a new report from NARTH. Written by NARTH president A. Dean Byrd, past president Joseph Nicolosi, and Richard W. Potts, the report carries the unwieldy but self-descriptive title, “Clients perceptions of how reorientation therapy and self-help can promote changes in sexual orientation.” While the title describes what the authors meant to show — how clients describe the benefits of reparative therapy — the report itself actually illustrates something very different: the ex-gay movement’s remarkable ability to instill an almost robot-like parroting of ex-gay rhetoric among their clients.
Testing the Premise: Is MRSA The New Gay Plague?
The Toronto Star said that a new study “discover[ed] a new strain” of a super-bug “hitting gay men.” Headlines in Britain screamed, “Flesh-eating bug strikes San Francisco’s gay community,” and anti-gay extremists across America spread the alarm that gays were introducing another plague into “the general population.” But there was a small problem with all of this: None of it is true!
Paul Cameron’s World
In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that “[Paul] Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany.” What the SPLC didn”t know was Cameron doesn’t just “echo” Nazi Germany. He quoted extensively from one of the Final Solution’s architects. This puts his fascination with quarantines, mandatory tattoos, and extermination being a “plausible idea” in a whole new and deeply disturbing light.
From the Inside: Focus on the Family’s “Love Won Out”
On February 10, I attended an all-day “Love Won Out” ex-gay conference in Phoenix, put on by Focus on the Family and Exodus International. In this series of reports, I talk about what I learned there: the people who go to these conferences, the things that they hear, and what this all means for them, their families and for the rest of us.
Prologue: Why I Went To “Love Won Out”
Part 1: What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Part 2: Parents Struggle With “No Exceptions”
Part 3: A Whole New Dialect
Part 4: It Depends On How The Meaning of the Word "Change" Changes
Part 5: A Candid Explanation For "Change"
The Heterosexual Agenda: Exposing The Myths
At last, the truth can now be told.
Using the same research methods employed by most anti-gay political pressure groups, we examine the statistics and the case studies that dispel many of the myths about heterosexuality. Download your copy today!
And don't miss our companion report, How To Write An Anti-Gay Tract In Fifteen Easy Steps.
Testing The Premise: Are Gays A Threat To Our Children?
Anti-gay activists often charge that gay men and women pose a threat to children. In this report, we explore the supposed connection between homosexuality and child sexual abuse, the conclusions reached by the most knowledgeable professionals in the field, and how anti-gay activists continue to ignore their findings. This has tremendous consequences, not just for gay men and women, but more importantly for the safety of all our children.
Straight From The Source: What the “Dutch Study” Really Says About Gay Couples
Anti-gay activists often cite the “Dutch Study” to claim that gay unions last only about 1½ years and that the these men have an average of eight additional partners per year outside of their steady relationship. In this report, we will take you step by step into the study to see whether the claims are true.
The FRC’s Briefs Are Showing
Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council submitted an Amicus Brief to the Maryland Court of Appeals as that court prepared to consider the issue of gay marriage. We examine just one small section of that brief to reveal the junk science and fraudulent claims of the Family “Research” Council.
Review: The Gay Report
When Karla Jay and Allan Young published The Gay Report in 1979, it quickly a favorite source of statistics for many anti-gay extremists. But before you accepts these statistic at face value, you should examine the inner workings of this survey very carefully. What you learn might surprise you.
Daniel Fetty Doesn’t Count
The FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics aren’t as complete as they ought to be, and their report for 2004 was no exception. In fact, their most recent report has quite a few glaring holes. Holes big enough for Daniel Fetty to fall through.
News, analysis and fact-checking of anti-gay rhetoric
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Ah, Senator Craig. You really should know by now that a sex scandal is all the more delicious when it screams of hypocrisy. And since people have been talking about this for years, you’d think you’d have the sense to be a bit discreet.
Robguy
August 27th, 2007 | LINK
As someone who has never gone for the anonymous sex in public bathrooms – I sometimes wondered how they figured out who to partner with…
Emily K
August 27th, 2007 | LINK
Yeah, me too.
Jim Burroway
August 27th, 2007 | LINK
And here I thought the guy tapping his foot was just groovin’ to his iPod…
Lynn David
August 27th, 2007 | LINK
Whatever happened to the old hanky code? Eh, I never could remember whether I was supposed to where my navy blue/gray gingham on the right or the left.
cowboy
August 28th, 2007 | LINK
Before you rush to conclusions: Mr. Craig is NOT a Mormon.
Also, I had a question from a sibling about the: “recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct.”
I have never heard of such a thing. Were those pages missing from my handbook from the good folks at Gayagenda.com?
If I saw a man moving his fingers on my side of the partition in a restroom I would
1) give him a spare roll of toilet paper
2) find something to smash his little pinkies
one or the other.
Ben in Oakland
August 28th, 2007 | LINK
Though I am as pleased as anyone that yet another right-wing, family values, religiously hypocritical Republican has been brought down AND hoisted on his own petard (mixed metaphors cheerfully acknowledged!!!) So, Larry Craig hates gay people because he hates that part of himself, and he gains personal and political advantage by oppressing gay people to fight his own demons. Big whoop. No real news there– we have Ted Haggard, Lonnie Latham, Mark Foley, Jimmy Swaggart, David Vitt, among a veritable host of others, who did exactly the same thing. Hypocrisy IS the homage that vice pays to virtue, as someone else famously said. What Rochefoucauld did not mention is that it is also more profitable, as the host of hypocrites has demonstrated repeatedly.
But I don’t think it is a good thing beyond that one more of them has been exposed. We gay people all scream “hypocrisy”, because it is so obviously that– at the absolute minimum– so it is just preaching to the choir here. But in one sense, it is NOT hypocrisy. (I’m not making excuses for Craig). He is demonstrating self-hatred privately and very clearly, just as he is demonstrating his homo-hatred in the public arena. I mean, what kind of an idiot (pace Bob Allen) who has this kind of position, power, and wealth, does this sort of thing, except for someone blinded by self-hatred and the delusion that he is not really that way? He just slips once in a while. That is why he is not a gay man, and he hates those who are. Ted Haggard is another one.It is very consistent–and very sad.
As for the he haters screaming “see how all those fags are, and here’s another scuzzy queer in a pyublic toilet.” I don’t think it matters at all. From their point of view, everything they know about us is true– look at Larry Craig and Lonnie Latham and Ted Haggard–and so changes nothing for them. At some level, this is an acknowledgment that Larry and Lonnie and Ted really are straight men– who fell. That they and the people who think that way have a great deal of responsibility for this less savory aspect of gay life does not dawn on them, nor would they care. As we have all pointed our repeatedly, this is not about morality, the bible, marriage, the family, or any of it. It is only about prejudice and hatred, whether disguised as sincere religious belief or admitted for what it is.
The people I am concerned about are the ones in the middle. Who knows how they will take it? I am afraid they will blame homosexuality instead of homophobia for the Larry Craigs of the world. This underlines yet again the terrible, destructive, corrosive nature both of the closet and of the homophobia that creates it, which twists and distorts and sullies and perverts everything it touches, whether it is in the gay world or the straight world. The costs to the Haggards, Lathams, and Craigs are just as important as the costs to every family that has broken up over a gay relative, or every gay couple that can’t get married, or every soldier that has been kicked out to the detriment of our armed forces. Because of the prejudice and the homophobia and the closet, Larry Craig and Ted Haggard and pedophile priests are seen and being in the same class as Joe and Sam or Mary and Ellen, who just want to live their lives free of harassment, with the same rights and responsibilities and respect as everyone else.
The closet twists and distorts, dirties and perverts. That is it. And this is the poison that the right-wingers and the christo-hetero-supremacists are feeding our society. It may strangle us.
The right-wingers claim that homosexuality causes the downfall of civilizations– no evidence, but it sounds right to the ignorant. The irony is delicious and unfortunate both, because it well may be that the fear of homosexuality and the hatred of gay people is what brought this current batch of idiots and moral degenerates to power. And that may well be seen one day as the cause of the downfall of the american empire.
Ben Janken
Ben in Oakland
August 29th, 2007 | LINK
Just sent to the SF Chronicle:
So many gay people are calling Sen.. Craig a hypocrite for seeking out gay sex and then voting against any equality for gay people because we are “immoral”. Truly, that would be a hypocritical “wide stance” if he were gay. But he says he isn’t, and really, we don’t want him. No self-respecting gay man I know would be caught dead cruising in a public toilet. That’s really for closet cases like Craig, and it exists because of the homophobia of people who believe as he does– truly a delicious irony.
No, the real hypocrisy lies in “protecting the sanctity of marriage” by preventing gay people from marrying when he is out there intending to commit adultery by seeking out anonymous sex with someone who is not his wife.
As with Ted Haggard, Bob Allen, Lonnie Latham and a host of others, the sanctity of marriage applies only if we’re not talking about HIS marriage.
Steve
August 30th, 2007 | LINK
C’mon guys, pretending you’d never heard of this stuff before. It was all laid out in “Dr.” David Reuben’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex*But Were Afraid to Ask”–the foot tapping, the reaching under…as well as the fact that public restrooms were where *all* homosexuals prefer to have sex, in our sad and furtive lives, and that we male homosexuals all really want to be women.
And it must all be true, since it was printed in a real book that you could buy in a store, a book I furtively read in my teens while babysitting.
I’ll admit I enjoyed some encounters in public restrooms and parks in my early 20s–when I had lots of hormones and few sexual outlets. But by the time I hit 30, I pretty much left it behind. So, yeah, taping, the whole bit, that’s true.
I’m afraid I can’t get on the shaming bandwagon for Mr. Craig. A truly humane society would set apart places for men to enjoy quick anonymous encounters free from hassle and arrest–spaces that allow expression of this very real and legitimate human desire that the unwitting an unwilling are not likely to stumble on our observe what is going on–so they wouldn’t be compelled to use public restrooms.
But the fact is that there are fewer and fewer such places–the infamous Christopher Street Docks in New York, the bushes in Lincoln Park in Chicago, and quite a few others are now long gone. Read Samuel Delany’s book “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue” (whose focus is adult theatres on Times Square–but the idea is pretty much the same), and one can’t help but think that the loss of such places is harmful to society as a whole. And the Internet is only partially adequate as a replacement.
————–
(BTW: You are all usually such careful writers/editors here that I was surprised to note that no one noticed the misuse of “discrete” for “discreet” and fixed this common error.)
Timothy Kincaid
August 30th, 2007 | LINK
(BTW: You are all usually such careful writers/editors here that I was surprised to note that no one noticed the misuse of “discrete” for “discreet” and fixed this common error.)
Thanks Steve. I completely forgot about discrete and discreet. My bad. I fixed it.
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