Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyJune 9th, 2010
One Senator Congressman in Missouri thinks the entire debate on repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ought to come with a parental advisory sticker:
Rep. Ike Skelton, a conservative Missouri Democrat, said he thinks the debate in Congress over the proposed repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law might force families to explain homosexuality to their children.
“What do mommies and daddies say to their 7-year-old child?” Skelton asked reporters during a media breakfast.
Skelton said that even though no one in his district has raised the topic with him, he says he still doesn’t think the mere discussion of DADT is family-friendly enough. “My biggest concern are the families,” he said.
Skelton is the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. The full House has already passed the Defense Authorization Bill which includes a clause paving the way for repealing DADT.
Latest Posts
Featured Reports
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.
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 500 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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Google” is a trademark of Google Inc.
© Box Turtle Bulletin. All Rights Reserved.
Posts 
Posts via daily email:
Ben in Oakland
June 9th, 2010
Oh, will no one think of da chilluns, de innocent chilluns?
Does he mean by explaining homosexuality that sometimes people of the same sex love each other and build a life together, or does he refer to the mechanics of gay sex?
Methinks he is thinking about the latter…way too much.
John in the Bay Area
June 9th, 2010
Hopefully this useless character will be ousted in November (no doubt by a Republican who is even worse on gay rights…but whatever).
By the way, please don’t promote this jerk. He is a Congressional Representative, not a Senator.
Rebecca
June 9th, 2010
Here’s a hint: If you don’t want to have to explain a government policy to your children, DON’T SUPPORT IT.
Jason D
June 9th, 2010
“What do mommies and daddies say to their 7-year-old child?†Skelton asked reporters during a media breakfast.
They could start with age-appropriate truth.
I saw an article on this by a Librarian. What determines age-appropriateness is not subject matter, but treatment. There are children’s books on such topics as murder, suicide, divorce, molestation, and other “adult” topics. The key is how you address the issues.
Children don’t need to know the mechanics of sex between two men or two women to understand they are a couple, that they are dating, together, “going steady” or whatever term you use to explain it.
But then again, anti-gays have painted themselves in a corner on this one by refusing to recognize that we have relationships in the first place.
penguinsaur
June 9th, 2010
What an amazing example of the ‘moral’ crusader’s hypocrisy.
He’s talking about DADT. A policy which applies to soldiers. You know, people who fight wars. And he’s worried children will learn about gays and sex.
Kids learning that boys can love boys and girls can love girls=awkward and traumatizing.
Kids learning that nations regularly engage in armed conflict where thousands of people, often innocent civilians, die in the most horrible ways imaginable=Age appropriate.
Regan DuCasse
June 9th, 2010
Ben in Oakland, HOLLA!
We have men and women who are in elected leadership, who are educated ministers, who are attorneys and teachers…
And yet, articulating LOVE between same sex couples is the limit of their competence of explanation?!
I tell you what’s difficult to explain to children: the violence that children are willing to commit against another child pointed at with anti gay epithet.
Explaining the violence against young people like Sakia Gunn, Scotty Joe Weaver and Matt Shepard.
Explaining the violence on the news where domestic abuse wiped out an entire family, or why we’re at war with a far away place where their friend’s parents might be serving in uniform.
See, children are far more exposed and desensitized to the suffering and pain of others.
Especially gay people. They are deliberately disconnected from what that all means, and at the same time are told that expressions of casual affection between same sex people is what’s violent, wrong and worthy of attack and censure.
The assertions that gay people are threatening and are out to get children, don’t square with the experience these children have with a gay member of their family, church group, school or personal interests.
Yet, the actual violence they are bombarded with, exposes them to another level of dispassion for it too.
The real excess in separation and propaganda against gay people, desensitizes children to the truth of gay lives.
As long as they are kept from gay people and any form of being informed BY gay people, it’s easier to maintain the FICTION espoused by people like Skelton.
I’ve had teenagers, limited in their social experience with gay people, parroting Skelton and every other anti gay adult around them.
These children don’t understand or care to, that it’s THEY who are ignorant, and no, an opinion isn’t as valid as facts, experience with socio/political/historical context.
The children who are curious, or respect that they DON’T know and look for more information and experience, will find themselves being disrespected, or abandoned by the very adults who try to control what they think and feel.
And that child will either blame gay people for it, or start to realize that it’s the adults who have kept the reality of gay lives from them, who actually betray them.
Some people are curious, adventurous and their intelligence and compassion guides them in the simple direction of looking for the truth from the source who best knows it.
That’s why I challenged a boy of 17 on that.
Living in Carthage, MO on that.
I asked him, if he wanted to know about Jews, learn the experience of Jews and understand what it’s like, would he go to a non Jew, anti Semitic to find out?
I told him that other than Jews, gay people are on the receiving end of the longest, most violent hatred in the history of man.
But the difference is that gay people are a constant presence that hasn’t really changed and is throughout all cultures and evolutionary history of humankind.
Gay people will and always have been the same.
So, why would he dismiss gay people and defer to non gay, anti gay people to be informed of what it’s like to BE gay?
Especially when Jews and gay people exist to tell him.
This Senator’s assertion is as ridiculous as if he’d said as much about blacks and their influence on the nation or the military, if segregation were still in place.
And I really wish people would get educated on the fact that it’s been BLACK SEXUALITY that’s been the impetus of segregation NOT COLOR.
COLOR was simply an easier means if identification and separation.
But the perception of BLACK BEHAVIOR, morality, sexuality and mental capacity has always been the root of every rationalization for discrimination.
For anyone to not know this, deny this is a strictly behavior based argument is showing their ignorance of facts. It frustrates me a great deal because it returns to simplistic (read simple minded) rationalizations, but not information that’s ON RECORD and is not a matter of opinion for me.
I know better than to express opinion.
I find men like this offensive that he dares to pontificate this way in the extreme negative.
I went through the index of photos from an infant girl who had a black eye and a horribly burned hand from deliberate abuse by her parents.
Explaining love between same sex adults is easy.
How that child will explain the terrible scars to her body when she attends school someday….?
I’d like this buttfaced Rep. to see what explanation goes to that.
Christopher Eberz
June 9th, 2010
Having just been made a godfather to my friend’s son over the weekend, it’s just so nice to see that balanced out with the idea that the very knowledge of what and who I am is a threat to children.
Kelly
June 9th, 2010
Oh, honestly. What do you say to a seven-year-old about homosexuality? Here’s what I said to my FIVE-year-olds seven years ago when I started speaking at marriage rallies: “That’s when a boy loves a boy or a girl loves a girl.” Isn’t that just SHOCKING?
The idea that there is no way to talk about LGBT people or same-sex relationships in an age-appropriate way is just asinine.
Timothy Kincaid
June 9th, 2010
Well however you talk about it, I would not use Matt Barber’s definition: “one man violently cramming his penis into another man’s lower intestine and calling it ‘love.’” That really would be traumatizing to children.
Come to think of it, maybe we can get Rep. Skelton to make a statement in opposition to Liberty Counsel. Yeah, didn’t think so.
Jason D
June 9th, 2010
timothy, I always found that a rather peculiar quote, as it would not be hard to make a hetero version
“A man violently cramming his penis into a woman’s uterus and calling it ‘love”
Both are equally repulsive and inaccurate depictions.
Edwin
June 9th, 2010
Matt Barber needs to get his head out of the sand and see how the real world functions. There might have a gay person in his family years ago that was afraid to come out because of people like him.
All these anti-gay people might all have gay people in there lives and never know it because of their stand against everything LGBT.
They are all ignorant a**h*****.
I don’t know how they think they are the only ones going to heaven from their preaching and talking hatred all the time. They are full fledged IDOITS.
Burr
June 9th, 2010
Uh.. why would parents be talking about this with their kids anyway? Who talks about military policy with children?
I agree with Rebecca, the only reason homosexuality keeps coming up in a national context in the first place is because the bigots refuse to step aside and continue making it an issue.
Ben in Oakland
June 9th, 2010
As always Regan, you have it exactly.
WMDKitty
June 9th, 2010
Yeah, ‘cuz gays don’t have families, right?
/sarcasm
RWG
June 10th, 2010
Please….every 5 year old these days knows what ‘gay’ means. How out-of-touch do you have to be to not know that kids already know all this stuff? By the time they get to school they’ve been watching Will and Grace and South Park for years already. His comments are just a screen for his own bigotry. He should be honest and say HE doesn’t like gay people. Better yet, time to retire.
wister
June 10th, 2010
I called his office this morning and was met with a very sympathetic ear. I suspect I’m not the only one who’s called. I also called the DNC head office to complain and tell them I will not be donating anything to the party till they do something about this fool. I will support candidates but not the party. We just got smacked by Reuben Diaz voting against ENDA here in NY. No respect? No money.
Paula Brooks
June 10th, 2010
hmmmm… I wonder what Rep would say to the fact that my twin 3-years-olds (yes the ones with a very openly lesbian mom) attend a day care center… run by the military….
and if anyone knows anything about 3-years-olds… they know 3-years-olds love to talk… about everything… even when you rather they not.
the military kiddies know ALL about gays now…
Regan DuCasse
June 10th, 2010
I think I’ve mentioned this story before. But when a friend of mine’s six year old twins witnessed two men peck each other on the lips, she tried to prepare herself to comment if asked by her kids.
But they saved her the trouble.
“Oh look mommy, those men really love each other.”
She agreed, end of issue.
BTW, those twins grew up to be defenders of their gay friends in school and continue to be as young men in their early 20’s now.
Witnessing love and kindness, is never a bad thing for children. They, after all, will emulate that.
As they emulate violence, scapegoating and cowardice too.
Barber, with his boxing themed photos and Peter LaB going on and on as if he can’t avoid the adult expos he attends have more than a strange interest in sex and violence.
We see what THEY choose to teach children.
Regan DuCasse
June 10th, 2010
If anyone wants to figure out what to tell a little one…all they have to do is reference the video of that little six year old having it all explained (easily) to him…then he wants to go play ping pong.
I really wish fearful, cowardly and ignorant adults wouldn’t project their crap onto children who are the exceptional opposite of all that. Children naturally are curious (it’s what is supposed to keep us adults educated, honest and disciplined ourselves), and children are also naturally sensitive.
And you can’t lie to a child. And shouldn’t. Eventually they’ll challenge us adults on any contradictions, hypocrisy and strength of character.
That’s the beauty part about the relationship between us adults and children that makes decent adults better people and children respect us as their proper guides.
I don’t think I’ve EVER tried to make a child fearful.
Reasonably cautious for their own safety, but not diarrhea inducing scared.
Especially of other human beings.
That’s another level of abuse.
My parents always encouraged curiosity and satisfying it with experience and education through the pertinent source.
But the best education I ever had, was experiencing and witnessing prejudice in action. Bigoted expressions couched in brazen invasion.
We are living in a strange time of overt crassness and blatant hostility, and at the same time, the subtler aspects of racial and anti gay bigotry are less so.
Some people don’t know how to pick up on these kinds of signals, so think they don’t exist.
Even those of us more used to those slights and insults, are debated by those with less experience.
Which is rude too.
What the subtext of all this is, that spreading lies and bigotry is getting harder. People are thinking for themselves and having experiences that belie his statements.
Only someone as young as grade school wouldn’t be engaged in such discussions, so people like Skelton want to get there first and sow the seeds.
That’s pathetic. Seriously.
moi
June 11th, 2010
The thing that always gets me when people worry about “the children” is that as a pre-teen and young teenager growing up around right-wing AFA types, I learned far more than a kid at that age should know about the more extreme gay and straight sexual behaviors because while they were all so busy worrying about the nebulous concept of “the children” and “what are they going to teach the children?” they never bothered to take into account that they were discussing it with children present and within earshot.
Désirée
June 11th, 2010
Of course they want to “protect” the children. They know that if they didn’t indoctrinate them in their hate, the kids would just “get it.” Kids don’t have prejudice until it is taught to them. I’m 41 and I still remember my mother having to explain to me at age 8 why my visiting grandmother was so shocked the girl next door was coming to the door asking if I could out to play. Ya see, she was black. Apparently, to my grandmother, this meant something. To me, she was just someone to play with.
I often babysit my wife’s 7 year old nephew. He watched me kissing his aunt goodbye when she went to work and his comment was “you can’t have kids ya know”
My sister’s daughter has barely seen me and my wife in 5 years, since she was 3 years old and yet when she had a 1st grade writing assignment to write a letter to someone far away she wrote to her two aunts saying she loves and misses us. And this is a 6 year old living in Texas!
Kids get it. And the whackadoodles know it. and that scares them more than we ever could.
Leave A Comment