Box Turtle Bulletin

Is Janice Shaw Crouse Smarter than a Fifth Grader?

I’ve written about anti-gay activist Janice Shaw Crouse in the past.  More than once, in fact. Her arguments tend to be so off-the-mark, it’s hard to decide whether she’s deliberately dishonest or just heroically incompetent.

She’s at it again. In the midst of a calm, measured, and false presentation against homosexuality, she says this, as if it were significant:

Homosexual relationships generally last only a fraction of the time that most marriages last. Very few homosexual relationships last longer than two or three years. In fact, it’s rare that they last more than one and a half years.

She doesn’t say where she got these numbers.  Perhaps she doesn’t want her viewers to find out she commonly uses obsolete data in ways that piss off her sources.  The problem in this case, though, is that Crouse is comparing relationships in general to marriages in particular. And if you do that, you can just as easily say:

HETEROSEXUAL relationships generally last only a fraction of the time that most marriages last. Very few HETEROSEXUAL relationships are long-term relationships.

Half of women don’t marry until after their 26^th birthday. For men, it’s even later.  And you know what?  Before that, they date, having relationships that a few weeks, a few months, occasionally a few years. As a result, the great majority of their relationships don’t last as long as most marriages.

How many three-month relationships can you have in your twenties?  And how many twenty-year marriages can you have in your life?  This isn’t about hetero/homo — it’s about arithmetic.

I’m sure Janice Shaw Crouse knows arithmetic. She’s got a Ph.D. in, well, something, and she’s a paid expert on, you know, stuff, so she ought to understand the gross error in comparing length of relationships to the length of marriages.  Hell, even Herman Cain understands the difference between apples and oranges.

And that brings us back to the original question: Is she dishonest or incompetent?*

Believe it or not, I’m now  leaning toward incompetence. I’m reading Thinking, Fast and Slow, by psychologist (and 2002 Nobel Prize winner in economics) Daniel Kahneman. He demonstrates that humans are bad intuitive statisticians. Instead, we makes sense of numbers by inventing causal explanations even when they don’t belong — especially if the explanations fit our pre-existing bias. Then, once our brains have come up with a story that feels coherent, we interpret all information in light of that story, avoiding or rationalizing away any contrary logic or data (the book is fascinating; I’ll be writing more about it in the next few months).

This isn’t a conservative trait or a liberal one — it’s universal and human. The only way out of it is to bump up your own self-awareness and deliberately apply some critical reasoning to your own bias-ridden intuitions.  That’s hard (it’s hard for everyone) but not too much to expect from a Ph.D. writing a statement she’s planning to read on camera. Apparently, though, this is something Janice Shaw Crouse is unwilling — or unable — to do.

*I understand this is not an either/or proposition.

The Daily Agenda for Wednesday, December 14

The Milwaukee Journal, Dec 14, 1954 (Click to enlarge

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Milwaukee Doctor Faced Blackmail: 1954. The Milwaukee Journal reported that Anthony Roy, 26, was charged with attempting to extort $500 from a Milwaukee physician in exchange for not “exposing” him for being gay. He also made similar extortion attempts against a jeweler and an osteopath. These blackmail attempts took place at a time when even rumors that someone was gay might result in the complete ruining of that person’s reputation. In the case of the doctor and osteopath, it might have even resulted in their licenses being revoked. After all, in 1954 they were both legally criminals and (according to the APA) mentally ill. The Journal described how Roy was caught:

Roy was seized in a public toilet at 1905 E. North av. The doctor, co-operating with police, had placed there a fake money package containing a dye powder. Officers said Roy’s hands were stained blue and the package was in his topcoat.

Police said the three professional men received a total of 10 extortion notes. Payment of $500 each was demanded from the physician and the jeweler and $1,000 from the osteopath. None of the intended victims is a homosexual, police said.

CA State Sen. Briggs Urges Appointment of Non-Gay To Succeed Harvey Milk: 1978. San Francisco Mayor Diane Feinstein released a telegram sent to her from California State Sen. John Briggs urging her to fill the vacancy left by San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk’s assassination with a “non-homosexual.” Briggs, who was the driving force behind an unsuccessful 1978 ballot measure (see Nov 7) which would have banned gays, lesbians, and anyone who supported them from working in public schools, responded that he was a “little shocked” that Mayor Feinstein made the telegram public. Feinstein, who had been elected mayor to fill the vacancy left by the the Nov. 27 shooting deaths of Milk and Mayor George Moscone, had said that she was considering appointing another gay person to fill Milk’s vacancy. Briggs responded via telegram:

“I am appalled by your apparent desire to use the quota system in appointing supervisor Harvey Milk’s successor ‘as the only moral thing to do.’ Surely merit not sexual preference should be the criterion. Supervisor Milk always insisted to be considered a human being first and a homosexual second. As an attractive alternative, perhaps now is the time to provide fair representation for San Francisco’s Oriental, black or Chicano populations.”

It’s pretty rich that Briggs wanted her to consider gay people “a human being first and a homosexual second,” given that his ballot measure, Proposition 6, would have done precisely the opposite. Feinstein ignored Briggs’s advice, and on January 8, 1979, she appointed Harry G. Britt, a former United Methodist minister and “avowed homosexual,” to fill Milk’s vacancy to represent the Castro district.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

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What Coloradans support couple rights?

Quick answer: almost all of them.

The Public Policy Polling firm has released its latest polling of Colorado residents. Granted they are a Democratic polling firm, but the questions seem to be presented without obvious bias or leading so this poll is probably is a pretty fair reflection of actual views and can’t be dismissed as partisan push-polling.

And the best way to describe the views would be to say that the residents of Colorado are fairly evenly divided about whether “same-sex marriage should be legal or illegal”, but they very much believe that gay couples should either be allowed to legally marry or form civil unions.

So, which Coloradans support marriage equality? Not much surprise there.

Asking the “should be legal” yes or no question:

80% of very liberal
78% of liberal
55% of moderate
49% of women (as oppose to 41% illegal)
46% of men (as oppose to 45% illegal)
70% of Democrats
51% of Independents
48% of Hispanics (as oppose to 43% illegal)
47% of Whites (as oppose to 43% illegal)
60% of 18-29 years old
52% of 30-45
49% of 46-65 (as oppose to 41% illegal)

But that doesn’t necessarily say that those outside these groups were all for banning rights. Actually, healthy minorities support full equality:

24% of Conservatives (but only 8% of “very conservative”)
20% of Republicans
44% of “Other” (not White or Hispanic)
32% of older than 65 (with an additional 12% not sure)

All of which is very good news. But when you ask the three part question (marriage, civil unions, or nothing) the support for couple recognition is much stronger. The “marriage” response is slightly lower than in the legal v. illegal response, but a good many of those who did not support legal marriage do support civil unions.

So who supports some form of couple recognition? Three quarters of them. Every single category other than “very conservative”: 68% of Conservatives and 60% of Republicans and 59% of racial “other” and 65% of the older folk. Even 46% of “very conservative” Coloradans agree.

Last year the legislature played a political game to kill the Civil Unions bill in a committee. Let’s hope this poll gives them a bit more courage to do their actual job this year and vote in this very popular option.

Paul Varnell’s Legacy

Paul Varnell was an outspoken activist and early leader in our community. But Paul’s contribution was unique in a way worth mentioning.

After DADT and with GOProud as comparison, gay Republicans such as Log Cabin are enjoying a moment of acceptance. But when Paul founded the Chicago Area Gay Republican Organization in 1984 (which, if I recall correctly was one of the local groups which merged in the 90s to become the national LCR organization) being Republican publicly within our community was to invite contempt and abuse. Paul did it anyway.

Paul went on to also found the Independent Gay Forum, a site for expressing and apply conservative or non-Progressive ideology to issues in the gay community. This was not an act without criticism. That didn’t stop him.

Most of our heroes and leaders know what it feels like to face adversity from anti-gay conservatives. Paul did too. But he also knows the feeling of being condemned, opposed, and hated by those within our community who could not see the value of thinking independently rather than blind loyalty to the Democratic Party.

Paul, through tenacity and consistency cut a clearing in our political jungle where others could grow and develop a political voice other than the expected, and by that all of our community was enriched.

(side note: I appreciate the IndyGayForum, but if you ever wonder why we monitor the comments, it’s in response to the hate circus that dominates their comment threads)
Karen Ocamb shares some of her recollections:

When I first started freelancing for Frontiers magazine in the late 1980s/early 1990s, I was intrigued that the gay publication printed opinion pieces from conservatives and people who were more independent-minded than most of the left-leaning gay community. I didn’t know that the late publisher Bob Craig was a Republican until one-time “moderate” Republican Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed the gay rights bill he promised to sign. Bob quit the GOP and became something of a mash-up between Libertarian/Independent/Democrat.

Perhaps the most prominent consistent voice for Libertarian/Independents on the Frontiers Opinion page was Paul Varnell, a one-time academic-turned-activist-turned-columnist, mostly for the Windy City Times. Some of Paul’s columns would drive liberals and leftists crazy. There were angry letters to the editor and even some staffers would throw up their hands, vexed beyond words. But that’s what made a Paul Varnell column so interesting to read: he made you think, especially if you disagreed with him. He forced you to analyze why you disagreed. For those of us who think thinking is fun, it was a great intellectual exercise that often yielded new thoughts.

Rest in peace, Paul. We are appreciative of what you gave us.

Mitt Romney’s Marriage Pander

It’s a crazy time when a GOP presidential candidate can’t walk into a diner, spot on older guy in a red flannel jacket wearing a cap identifying him as a Vietnam veteran (“We have a veteran, a Vietnam Veteran! Wow!”), go over to sit down with him for some friendly-territory conversations, and suddenly find himself having his head handed to him over same-sex marriage. But that’s what happened when former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney stopped to talk with Bob Garon of Ebson, N.H., who was having breakfast with his husband, who he had married in June. Romney gave the standard plattitude (“I believe that marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman, and we apparently disagree.”) before an aide called him away (“Governor, we’ve got to get on with Fox News right now.”).

Garon then talked with reporters about why that question was so important to him:

“Because I’m gay, alright? And I happen to love a man just like you probably love your wife. Alright? And I think that he or she or whatever are entitled to the same rights that I have. I fought for my country, I did my thing, and I think that my spouse should be entitled to the same entitlements as if I was married to a woman. What the hell is the difference? I was definitely offended. He doesn’t even open the door to a conversation. It’s just a boom! But I did ask him ‘yes or no,’ so I got what I asked for.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates says that “asking people to die for this country, while denying them the full rights accorded other citizens is an ancient and disreputable tradition.”

Blacks fighting in the Civil War suffered mortality rates 35 percent higher than their white comrades. Moreover, they faced court martial and execution at much higher rates. If they surrendered they were subject to enslavement, torture or massacre. Ten percent of all troops who fought for the Union were black. For their sorrows, they were turned over to the tender mercies of Red Shirts and White Liners and their sacrifice was erased from the history books.

…Others smarter than me can fill in the history of Native Americans, of Japanese-Americans, of Latinos, of women, who fought and loved their country in spite of itself. But the tradition of asking people to die for America abroad, while denying their American-ness at home, is one fully embraced by modern conservatism. And not simply by its rabble-rousers, but by its intellectual architects like William F. Buckley.

Report: Malawi Only “Reviewing,” Not Repealing, Anti-Gay Law

Malawi’s Solicitor General Anthony Kamanga is now backing away from last week’s report that Malawi was reviewing a number of laws infringing on basic human rights, including that nation’s colonial-holdover law criminalizing homosexuality. According to Voice of America:

“I wouldn’t say backing away is the right word. There are a number of other laws that have also received public comments, and what the government is doing is, we are taking the opportunity to look at all those laws, and we are referring those laws and provisions to the Malawi Law Commission.  We are hoping that, as a way forward, we can have specific recommendations,” he said.

President Bingu wa Mutharika

Other laws include one which prevents citizens from obtaining injunctions against the government, another one which allows President Bingu we Mutharikato call snap elections for local governments, and another which allows the government to shut down newspapers. Mutharika’s increasingly autocratic tendencies have earned the attention of foreign donor nations. Earlier this year, a Wikileaks cable revealed that the British ambassador warned his London superiors that Malawi’s President was becoming increasingly autocratic and intolerant of criticism. Mutharika responded by proving the ambassador’s point and expelled him. Britain then began cutting aid to Malawi as a result in July 2011.

Meanwhile, Malawi’s Daily Times reports that President  Mutharika has condemned what he calls “cultural impositions” at a forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations in Doha, Qatar:

Said Mutharika: “There should not be any nation on this earth that looks down or marginalises the cultures of other countries including their traditions.

“No culture should be called primitive because primitiveness is the state of mind. Civilizations serve a people for a particular time and they cannot be primitive as long as they are useful to those people.”

Laws criminalizing gay people are typically defended with appeals to African traditions and arguments that homosexuality is a Western import.

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, December 13

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Allen R. Schindler, Jr.: 1969. When “little Allen” was growing up, his step-father regaled him with stories of surviving the sinking of the battleship USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor. And so when he decided to enlist in the Navy on turning eighteen, it came as no surprise to his mother. He was ecstatic to learn that he would be assigned to the aircraft carrier Midway, but in 1991 he was transferred to the Belleau Wood, a smaller ship with a reputation for poor discipline. On October 27, 1992 while on shore leave in Sasebo, Japan, two drunken shipmates from the Belleau Wood followed Schindler into a public restroom in a park. Airman Charles Vins watched — and occasionally joined in — as Airman Apprentice Terry Helvey kneed Schindler in the arm, punched him repeatedly on the floor, and stomped on him with the heel of his boot. The pathologist described Schindler’s body as the worst case he had ever seen, and compared the damage to that of a “high-speed auto accident or a low-speed aircraft accident.” He also said that it was worse than another case he had seen, that of a man who had been trampled to death by a horse. The pathologist’s report chronicled a litany of lacerations, contusions and abrasions of the forehead, eyes, noes, lips, chin, neck, Adam’s apple, trachea, lungs, liver (which was “like a smushed tomato”) and, tellingly, penis. All but two ribs were broken, and both his lungs and brain had hemorrhaged. The only thing recognizable about Allen’s body was a tattoo on his right arm, of the USS Midway.

The Navy stonewalled the investigation. The murder occurred just as the pre-DADT debate was getting started over allowing gays to serve in the military. The Navy refused to confirm how Schindler died or whether a weapon was involved. At one point, a Navy senior officer leaked the story that Schindler’s murder was the result of a romance with Helvey gone bad. Meanwhile, Schindler’s mother, Dorothy Hajdys, was kept in the dark by Navy officials about what happened to her son or about the investigation. Her journal told the story: “Oct. 30: Heard nothing.  Nov. 1: Sill heard nothing.” Meanwhile, the Navy tried Vins without her knowledge and sentenced him to four months in the brig. All the information Dorothy received about her son’s case came from the press. That’s how she learned her son was gay and had been killed by his shipmates in an anti-gay orgy of violence. “If one more reporter calls me with information before you do,” she told the Navy commander in charge of the case, “you haven’t even heard me scream!” Two months after the murder, Navy officials finally admitted that Schindler had been killed in a gay bashing.

The Navy denied that they had received any complaints of harassment. But as the investigation continued, it was slowly revealed that Schindler’s ship, the amphibious assault ship Belleau Wood, was a living nightmare for him. His locker had been glued shut and he was the brunt of frequent comments, like, “There’s a faggot on this ship and he should die.” Schindler requested a separation from the Navy, but his superiors insisted he remain aboard ship until the process was finished. During Helvey’s trial , it was revealed that Helvey told one investigator that he had no remorse for the killing. “I don’t regret it. I’d do it again. … He deserved it.” After confessing to the murder, he wrote in a four page statement, “Homosexuality is disgusting, sick and scary and I hate homosexuals.” When the investigator suggested that he might want to consider expressing remorse, he wrote, “I regret this incident happened and I feel like it could have been averted had homosexuals not been allowed in the military.”

Helvey avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty to “inflicting great bodily harm,” and was sentenced to life in prison. The ship’s captain who had tried to keep the crime quiet was demoted and transferred to Florida. Dorothy, virtually overnight, became a fierce advocate for hate crime protections and for gays being allowed to serve in the military. Helvey is still serving his lifetime sentence. In 1994, two years after the murder, he still had no regrets. He told a reporter:

We were just doing the Navy thing … We were drinking and fighting. It happened so many times, I can’t count them. That’s all we ever did was drink and fight. I was having fun and this dude ended up dying.”

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

The Daily Agenda for Monday, December 12

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Danish Surgeon Dies Of Mysterious Disease: 1977. Dr. Grethe Rask was a formidable and indomitable woman who was as intense as she was relentless in the care that she gave to her patients in the remote Zairian villages near the Congo River basin. She first went to a primitive rural hospital in northern Zaire in 1972 delivering much-needed surgery to her patients amid appalling poverty and severe shortages. Everything was in short supply: syringes, antiseptics, even surgical gloves. Supplies were used and re-used until they wore out, and it wasn’t unusual for her to perform emergency surgeries with her bare hands. After putting together a simple jungle hospital in the remote village of Abumombaz and bringing it into operation, she took on a job as head surgeon at the Danish Red Cross Hospital in Kinshasa in 1975. A fellow doctor and friend, Dr. Ib Bygbjerg, became worried over Gerthe’s weight loss. She was suffering from persistent diarrhea and fatigue, but given the host of often unknown tropical diseases which were common in northern Zaire, her condition was easily overlooked at first. But when standard treatments only temporarily alleviated the symptoms without actually restoring her health, Bygbjerg looked further and found that her lymph nodes, the glands that play an essential role on the body’s immune system, were completely out of whack. They had been swollen for nearly two years for no apparent reason.

In July 1977, Grethe took a vacation to South Africa to try to rest up from her constant fatigue, but her condition got worse. She became short of breath and was flown immediately back home to Denmark. Some of Denmark’s best doctors worked frantically to try to figure out what was wrong with her, but the more they looked, the mysteries surrounding her health only deepened. The inside of her mouth was covered with yeast infections, staph infections spread throughout her body, and blood tests showed that her T-cells, which are the main component of a body’s immune system, were completely gone. When that happens, the natural assumption was lymph cancer, but biopsies ruled out that as a cause for her immune system’s collapse. On December 12, her body finally gave out and she died.

An autopsy revealed that her lungs were filled with Pneumocystis carinii, a yeast-like fungus which causes a severe pneumonia. Because it is one of the easiest organisms for an immune system to fight off, it is extremely rare in healthy people. And even in the rare cases where people did catch it, it was usually treatable. It’s one of those diseases that nobody dies from, but Gerthe did. It was just one more conundrum added to a host of mysteries.

Five years later,  gay men, Haitians, hemophiliacs, and intravenous drug uses also began to die in very large numbers of the same type of pneumonia that people almost never caught, let alone died from before.  This time, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia became so common its acronym, PCP, entered into the lingo of the gay community along with KS (Kaposi’s sarcoma, a previously rare form of cancer), and AIDS. American epidemiologists were mostly looking at AIDS as an American disease however, and with most of the people coming down with AIDS coming from stigmatized populations, the disease itself was similarly stigmatized. It was, in the popular mind anyway, a “gay plague.” But in 1983, Dr. Bygbjerg recalled his colleague and friend, and had in mined a more likely source for the disease. He published Gerthe’s medical case history in the April 23, 1983 issue of The Lancet and concluded:

“During my stay in Zaire in 1976 I was impressed by the epidemiological and virological flying teams from the USA and Europe who quickly identified Ebola virus. Perhaps such teams should search for another African virus, albeit slow killing, and explore the possible connection between endemic and epidemic AIDS/KS in Africa and America.”

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Writer, Gay Activist Paul Varnell Died

Paul Varnell (Photo by Rex Wockner)

I learned of his death Friday evening, but wanted to wait until there was a more complete obituary available, appropriately at Windy City Times where he was a columnist in the 1990s. He left WCT in 1999 to start Chicago Free Press, and remained there until 2009, just before the paper folded.

Journalist Rex Wockner remembers trying to marry Paul at one point:

“He and I, as a journalistic exercise, tried to get a marriage license in Cook County in 1989. And when rebuffed, we filed human-rights complaints with the city and the state. We lost. We claimed sex discrimination but they told us it was sexual-orientation discrimination and that that wasn’t illegal at that time in Illinois. The Sun-Times made a big story of our little effort. We turned down an invite to appear on Oprah. I suppose everyone is unique, but Paul was unlike anyone I’ve ever known. I think it was the degree of his independence and the degree of his self-sufficiency that stood out. He had very specific ideas about how he wanted to live his life—and that is exactly how he lived it, each day and without compromise.”

Paul’s interests were many:

“Paul was a man of many and varied interests. He could discourse with equal facility about the philosophy of Friedrich Hayek or the latest superhero comic books. He could review a book of art photography, describe an opera recording or analyze the latest public-opinion data about issues of concern to the gay community.

“I always appreciated his annual articles about the survey of entering freshmen into U.S. colleges and universities. Nobody but Paul was able to discern sometimes subtle trends in those polls, often portending monumental changes in attitudes toward gay men and lesbians. Today’s greater acceptance of ideas about equal marriage rights and the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell were visible to Paul years ago in those freshmen surveys, but other researchers and journalists, looking at other questions and concerned about other issues, didn’t see the trends.”

I never met Paul, having only gotten to know him via a listserve. He was, as described in the obituary, a curmudgeon, but he also had a quiet generosity about him. When I was just getting this web site off the ground, he mentioned that he enjoyed this satire I had written and contributed one of his own for me to publish, “Origins of Heterosexuality”.

Paul had been ill for the past three years following a stroke and pneumonia. There are no plans for a memorial, but donations can be made in his name to the Howard Brown Health Center.

The Daily Agenda for Sunday, December 11

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Gay Rights Advocate Interrupts CBS Evening News Broadcast: 1973. Among the issues that gay rights advocates faced in the early 1970s was the way gay people continued to be portrayed in the press and on television — if they bothered to cover gay issues at all. The New York Times, which was supposedly the newspaper of record for the city, had never even bothered to mention the Stonewall uprising four years earlier until several months later. To call attention to the problem, Mark Segal of the Philadelphia-based Gay Raiders posed as a reporter for the Camden State Community College newspaper and called CBS asking permission to watch the broadcast of the CBC Evening News with the legendary Walter Cronkite from inside the studio. The network agreed, and so on December 11, 1973, he briefly interrupted the broadcast about halfway through by running up in front of the camera with a yellow sign reading “Gays Protest CBS Prejudice.”:

“I sat on Cronkite’s desk directly in front of him and held up the sign while the technicians furiously ran after me and wrestled me to the floor and wrapped me in wire — on camera,” (Segal) recalled in an interview. “The network went black while they took us out of the studio.”

Ever the professional, Cronkite reported on the event. “Well, a rather interesting development in the studio here — a protest demonstration right in the middle of the CBS News studio,” Cronkite told viewers. He later explained: “The young man was identified as a member of something called Gay Raiders, an organization protesting alleged defamation of homosexuals on entertainment programs.” Segal was charged with trespassing.

The “zap” payed off. After Segal’s trial for trespassing in which his attorneys subpoenaed Cronkite the testify, the news anchor began to take an interest in Segal’s grievance. He arranged a meeting at CBS where Segal could air his complaints to management, and Cronkite’s broadcast on May 6, 1974 featured a segment on gay rights, reporting on the ten cities throughout the country that had passed legal protections for gay people.

Segal went on to become publisher of Philadelphia Gay News, and remembered his friendship with Walter Cronkite days after his passing in 2009:

“He was the kind of man who believed in human rights for everyone,” Segal said of Cronkite. “I am amazed and humbled by his willingness to reach out to me. He was a bridge between the gay movement and major media. We remained friends, and it was a privilege knowing him.”

American Psychiatric Association Rejects Ex-Gay Therapy: 1998. The American Psychiatric Association’s board unanimously rejected therapy aimed solely at changing gay people straight, saying it can cause depression, anxiety and self-destructive behavior. Dr, Nada Stotland, head of the APA’s joint committee on public affairs, said, “The very existence of therapy that is supposed to change people’s sexuality, even for people who don’t take it, is harmful because it implies that they have a disease. There is evidence that the belief itself can trigger depression and anxiety.”

The APA’s move was, in part, a response to a massive nationwide push by Focus On the Family and Exodus International to publicize the ex-gay movement, complete with a cover of Newsweek the prior August featuring ex-gay spokesman John Paulk and his ex-lesbian wife Anne. Paulk who was the so-called gender specialist at Focus On the Family and organizer of the Love Won Out ex-gay roadshows, denounced the move. “This makes it more difficult for clients who want to be treated for unwanted homosexuality,” Paulk complained. “Furthermore, no scientific study has given conclusive evidence that homosexuality cannot be successfully treated.” Less than two years later, Paulk himself would be found in a Washington, D.C. gay bar flirting with patrons. (See Sept 19.)

The 1998 statement, along with a 2000 follow-on statement, can be found here.

If you know of something that belongs on the Agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

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This Anglican Bishop Wants You To Rot In Jail

Archbishop Peter Akinola, retired Anglican Primate of the Church of Nigeria, has enthusiastically endorsed Nigeria’s anti-gay bill which would impose criminal penalties on same-sex unions and LGBT gatherings. Akinola told Nigeria’s Guardian that the Nigerian government should reject warnings from Britain and the United States that efforts to deny basic human rights to LGBT people would have international implications:

Since its passage by the Senate, Nigeria has received strong criticisms and warnings from the British, Canadian and the United States of America governments, which have individually threatened to withdraw aids and other forms of assistance to Nigeria, if the law is allowed to exist.

But Akinola, in an exclusive interview with The Guardian, urged President Jonathan not to succumb to such pressure, but rather tow the path of God by assenting to the bill.

Akinola, who described the bill as “a new orientation towards transformation and reformation of Nigeria from its moral decadence into a new platform of sound morality,” said President Jonathan would be going against God’s will for Nigeria if he refused to sign the controversial bill into law.

He stated that Nigeria needs such law to preserve the nation’s sacred moral heritage for national development.

Akinola has been the most visible leader of a worldwide revolt of conservative Anglicans against the elevation of the openly gay Rev. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. Akinola has actively courted dissident American Episcopal Churches to leave the Episcopal Church in America and organize themselves under his leadership In 2007, Akinola traveled to Virginia to install Martyn Minns as bishop of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA), an organization that Akinola established with conservative American Episcopalians. In doing so, he defied Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, leader of the U.S. Episcopal Church.

The bill which Akinola endorses so enthusiastically would penalize anyone entering into a same-sex marriage or any other arrangement “for other purposes of same sexual relationship” with imprisonment for fourteen years. It also provides for ten years imprisonment for anyone showing displays of affection “directly or indirectly,” an incredibly vague and ambiguous phrase which could be interpreted in any number of unpredictable ways. In addition, anyone who “supports the registration, operation and sustenance of gay clubs, societies, organisations, processions or meetings in Nigeria” will be subjected to a ten year term. By outlawing even ad hoc meetings in which topics concerning gay people are discussed, Nigeria proposes to obliterate the rights of free assembly and speech for all Nigerians and visitors, including health care workers and organizations. It would even effectively ban coordination of monitoring human rights violations from within Nigeria. The bill passed the Nigerian Senate in late November and has reportedly been introduced in the House of Representatives, where one lawmaker threatened to increase the penalties further.

Unsurprisingly, so-called “ex-gay” theories have also entered the debate in Nigeria. The Guardian quotes from Felix Jovi Ehwarieme, who is described as an adjunct professor of scientific theology and Biblical history at the United Bible University in Lagos. Ehwarieme has a rather odd theory about homosexuality, tracing it to “excessive masturbation”:

“An average male child has masturbated at one stage of his life or the other. If this behaviour were not controlled, it would lead to lack of interest in the opposite sex. This often happens in the subconscious mind, so that by the time one grows into it, one would not know why one hates the opposite sex. This is because when one masturbates, one may have practiced it with other male children,” he argued.

“So, by the time they are qualified to have sexual relations, they just discover that they have something that satisfies them more than natural sex.”

According to Ehwarieme, there is a role played by hormones in masturbation. “One cannot just masturbate without thinking of the opposite sex. When you masturbate, you have a picture in mind of someone you like, a woman, definitely,” he said.

“By the time you masturbate and ejaculate, you end it that way. After a period, if the woman you have in mind is given to you and you find that you do not enjoy her, you would still want to go back to masturbation, because something else has replaced original process.”

“The problem with homosexuals is that they do not know how they become what they are,” he surmised.

Statements from an Islamic professor, Dr. Ishaq Akintola, demonstrates that nothing can united Christians and Muslims in that deeply divided country more than their shared hatred for gay people. Akintola told the Guardian:

“We urge President Goodluck Jonathan to quickly sign the Bill into law once it is passed by the House of Representatives before these Western countries drag Nigeria down with them. He must not succumb to the intimidation of neo-imperialists.”

“We assure the President that Nigerians are united on this matter. We are solidly behind him and the National Assembly,” Akinola added. “There have always been hidden agenda in foreign aid. Once colonialist, always a colonialist!”

The Guardian also quotes from a Catholic chaplain and a Lagos criminology professor supporting the bill. Only at the very end of the article is there a paragraph devoted to criticism of the bill.

Full Prop 8 Court Videos of Thursday’s Hearings

Two hearings took place on Thursday before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The first hearing considered whether the video tapes taken during the Prop 8 trial should be released:

The second hearing was probably the most entertaining, where judges considered the question of whether being gay and having a partner made Federal District Judge Vaughn Walker ineligible to serve as judge in the case. Because, you know, divorced judges can’t rule in divorce cases, or something.

The Daily Agenda for Saturday, December 10

Charter for the Society for Human Rights, 1924.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
First American Gay Rights Group Founded: 1924. Pro-gay activism in the U.S goes back a very long way, far longer than most realize. Henry Gerber, a Bavarian immigrant to Chicago, served in the U.S. Army’s occupation of Germany following World War I, where he came in contact with the growing German gay rights movement. He read up on German homophile magazines and came in contact with Magnus Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first organization in the world working to advance gay rights. When Gerber returned to the U.S. he founded the Society for Human Rights (SHR) in 1924. With an African-American clergyman named John T. Graves as president, SHR is believed to be America’s first gay rights organization. Gerber also founded Friendship and Freedom, the first known American gay publication.

When the state of Illinois granted a charter on December 10, 1924, the Society became the first documented gay organization in America. To gain the charter, they deliberately kept Society’s mission vague and omitted any mention of homosexuality in their application. Still, they were surprised that no one from the state investigated before issuing the charter. According to the charter, the Society’s objective was:

to promote and to protect the interests of people who by reasons of mental and physical abnormalities are abused and hindered in the legal pursuit of happiness which is guaranteed them by the Declaration of Independence, and to combat the public prejudices against them by dissemination of facts according to modern science among intellectuals of mature age. The Society stands only for law and order; it is in harmony with any and all general laws insofar as they protect the rights of others, and does in no manner recommend any acts in violation of present, laws nor advocate any matter inimical to the public welfare.

SHR didn’t last very long. The wife of the group’s vice president denounced Gerber and his associates to police as “degenerates.” In July, 1925, police arrested Gerber, Graves and two others while the Chicago Examiner reported the story under the headline, “Strange Sex Cult Exposed.” Gerber was tried three times, but the charges were eventually dismissed because he was arrested without a warrent. He was nevertheless ruined, jobless and drained of his life savings, and SHR was no more. Gerber continued writing about gay rights, sometimes under his own name and sometimes under a pseudonym. In 1962, he wrote a detailed history of SHR for ONE Magazine (major portions of that account can be found here.) He died on New Year’s Eve in 1972 at the age of 80, having lived long enough to see gay rights advocacy take on a new vibrancy in the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in an explosion of advocacy and pride after the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969.

AIDS Transmission Linked to Blood: 1982. Ever since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first began to track a new disease that would be known as AIDS in the summer of 1981 (See June 5), doctors and epidemiologists were scrambling to try to figure out how this disease was transmitted. Some believed it was the result of heavy drug use, some believed that it was somehow blood-borne, and some just thought it was some sort of natural breakdown of the immune system among “promiscuous homosexuals” who had too many sexually transmitted diseases over their lifetime. That last explanation didn’t do a very good job at explaining why AIDS was showing up among Haitians and hemophiliacs, but when you have homosexuals available for an ready target, it’s easy to ignore the pieces that don’t entirely fit the theory.

The CDC was finally able to shed some light on the controversy in the December 10, 1982 edition of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. That weeks MMWR carried a report of a 20-month old infant in San Francisco who developed all of the hallmark opportunistic infections associated with AIDS. The infant was delivered by C-section in March 3, 1981, and was given several blood transfusions over a four-day period, followed by more transfusions and other blood products during the one-month hospitalization that followed. Six months later, he began developing infections that continued through the next year. MMWR reported, “The parents and brother of the infant are in good health. The parents are heterosexual non-Haitians and do not have a history of intravenous drug abuse. The infant had no known personal contact with an AIDS patient.” But further investigation revealed that one of the nineteen donors who gave blood that was given to the infant during that first month was found to have AIDS:

The donor, a 48-year-old white male resident of San Francisco, was in apparently good health when he donated blood on March 10, 1981. Platelets derived from this blood were given to the infant on March 11. Eight months later, the donor complained of fatigue and decreased appetite. On examination, he had right axillary lymphadenopathy, and cotton-wool spots were seen in the retina of the left eye. During the next month, December 1981, he developed fever and severe tachypnea and was hospitalized with biopsy-proven Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. … He died in August 1982.”

The CDC concluded:

The etiology of AIDS remains unknown, but its reported occurrence among homosexual men, intravenous drug abusers, and persons with hemophilia A suggests it may be caused by an infectious agent transmitted sexually or through exposure to blood or blood products. If the infant’s illness described in this report is AIDS, its occurrence following receipt of blood products from a known AIDS case adds support to the infectious-agent hypothesis.

…This report and continuing reports of AIDS among persons with hemophilia A raise serious questions about the possible transmission of AIDS through blood and blood products. The Assistant Secretary for Health is convening an advisory committee to address these questions.

If you know of something that belongs on the Agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

As always, please consider this your open thread for the day.

Servicemembers United’s Alex Nicholson responds to Gov. Perry

As an illustration of “Obama’s war on religion” and “liberal attacks on our religious heritage”, GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry cited “gays can serve openly in the military”.

Not only is Perry’s statement bigoted, it has almost no reflection on reality. While Barack Obama was in favor of repealing the Military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, the change did not originate in the White House nor was it a significant priority of the President.

Most know of the December 2010 vote in Congress and it goes without saying that much credit is owed to Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) who orchestrated a bipartisan effort that eventually gained the support of eight Republicans and all but one Democrat. But less known is the impetus behind the change, the lawsuit brought by Log Cabin Republicans against the Military and its policy.

Those of you who followed the efforts towards that repeal either here at Box Turtle Bulletin or elsewhere know that the repeal process, which had been of little interest in Congress, suddenly took on a new life after September 9, 2010 when U.S. District Court Judge Virginia A. Phillips sided with Log Cabin Republicans in their lawsuit against the military and its anti-gay policy. Her injunction the following month led to a brief official cessation of the policy (until appeals were filed) and was the unofficial end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell as a hiring and detaining policy.

But even so, this ruling did not work alone. Significant lobbying efforts in Congress provided Congressmen and Senators with the information about public attitudes on the repeal effort. And those attitudes were impacted by a steady stream of ejected service members who refused to quietly go away in shame.

In fact, if one looks at the parties most heavily involved in the change of policy, the one thing that becomes clear is that this was not in any way an attack on religion nor were the leading advocates for change particularly “liberal” (though that is undoubtedly the dismissive label that Rick Perry would assign to Senator Collins, Log Cabin Republicans, and the men and women risking their lives for his freedom).

One man at the heart of the effort was Alex Nicholson. As both the plaintiff in Log Cabin’s case and as the founder of Servicemembers United, Alex had his feet planted in both the legal and the legislative efforts to end this discrimination. And Alex, writing a guest column for CNN, reminds the Governor that not only was the repeal not a “liberal attack on religious heritage” in its implementation, but that it did not speak only to the wishes of liberal Americans.

The ad begins: “I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a Christian. But you don’t need to be in the pews every Sunday to know that there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military, but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.” What’s really wrong with that statement is that solid majorities of his fellow Republicans, self-described conservatives, and even weekly church-goers disagree with him on open gays and lesbians serving in the military.

Among these demographics, independent polling more than two years ago demonstrated surprising levels of support for repealing that archaic law, including 58% of Republicans, 58% of conservatives, and 60% of those who attend church weekly. Those numbers are likely significantly higher now that the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” has come and gone without the U.S. military falling apart at the seams as predicted. Indeed, even the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. James Amos, who predicted disaster if the law were repealed, has come around, recently admitting that the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” has been smooth sailing for the Marine Corps, as it has for the other branches of the armed forces.

So not only does Gov. Perry now find himself at odds with the majority of the American people and even his own conservative base on the righteousness of us being finished with “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but he is also at odds with the senior defense leadership. It was, after all, a Republican-appointed secretary of defense — Bob Gates — and a Republican-appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — Adm. Mike Mullen — who called for an end to the ban on known gay men and women serving in the military.

Rick Perry suffers from a delusion, a common one really. He believes that people who identify in the same way that he identifies must share the same bigotries and hatreds that he has.

We’ve seen it many times before. Someone in a cocktail party will assume that due to your skin tones that you’ll find her racist humor funny. Or because it’s all ‘just us guys’ that the room will agree with his demeaning comments about women.

And Rick Perry, being a Texas Republican who has never had any electoral cost to pay for his long pattern of blatant homophobia, thinks that all Republicans hate gay people the same way that he does. But that day is gone.

It is true that Republicans, on the whole, are significantly less supportive of gay issues and that they, on large, start from an adversarial position. But like other Americans, this demographic too is coming to discover that people whom they know and love are gay and, even more important, they are recognizing that unbased bias carries a social cost.

Rick Perry may have been well served by appealing to fear and loathing of gay people in a national Republican primary as recently as a decade ago. But after this ad, I think that Rick Perry is going to discover that he’s not in Texas anymore.

Maggie Gallagher Lies. Or Forgets. Or Something.

Maggie Gallagher ought to remember that her opponents know how to Google.

Today, over on NOMblog, she offers us this:

I would like to say personally that nothing in any argument I’ve ever made on gay marriage, rests on the idea that same-sex couples harm their own children at any higher rates than any other family form.

Really? How about this, from January 28, 2010, in which Maggie reports on a study about child abuse, a study that didn’t look at same-sex couples:

Question: What kind of family structure best protects children from child abuse?

Answer: Married biological parents. (see page 5-25).

…

Children living with both their mom and dad united by marriage have one-third the rate of serious child abuse, compared to children in any other family structure.

Here’s my question for Ted [Olsen] and David [Boies] as they strive to prove that Science Says same-sex unions are just like opposite-sex ones, when it comes to children.

Perhaps you are right. Perhaps alone of all the family structures science has ever studied, children living with same-sex couples do just as well as children in intact married families…

But does this study, which is one of hundreds with similar results favoring the natural family give Ted Olson and David Boies pause late at night as they assert the scientific irrationality of respect for the natural family at all I wonder? Ted and David, I’m wondering: not even a little bit?

Here we have Maggie arguing that we should think twice about gay marriage because it’s possible same-sex couples harm their own children at a higher rate married biological parents do — a possibility she admits is completely unsupported by evidence, even as she couches it in terms that make it sound likely.

Now what did she just claim today?

I would like to say personally that nothing in any argument I’ve ever made on gay marriage, rests on the idea that same-sex couples harm their own children at any higher rates than any other family form.

Google, Maggie, Google.