Box Turtle Bulletin

Donnelly Repeats Bogus Statistics to Congress

Timothy Kincaid

July 23rd, 2008

Today in Congressional Hearings on whether the Don’t Ask - Don’t Tell policy is effective or counter-productive, anti-gay activist Elaine Donnelly claimed that polls support her contention that military personnel don’t wish to serve with openly gay servicemen. The Army Times reports

Donnelly, head of the Center for Military Readiness, an independent public policy group that focuses on military personnel issues and a longtime opponent of gays in the military, said the annual Military Times poll of service members consistently shows that between 57 percent and 59 percent of service members oppose allowing gays to serve openly in uniform.

But the poll that Donnelly quotes is not a representative poll of service members. We analyzed Donnelly’s claims in February, and found the following:

Using the 2000 statistics of the Heath Status of the United States Army (and assuming that there is not a strong variance between services) we can compare the Military Times poll to the Army’s report of those who actually serve.

• Army average age – 28; MT poll participant average age – 37
• 44% of service members between 17 and 24; 7% of MT poll participants fell in this category
• 8% of army personnel are 40 or older; 41% of MT poll participants are 40 or older
• 51% of army personnel are married; 82% of MT poll participants are married

As the Military Times put it, “The annual poll has come to be viewed by some as a barometer of the professional career military.”

In other words, this is NOT a poll of active service persons who are on the front lines eating, sleeping, and showering with their mates. In fact, only 2% of those polled lived in barracks. Unlike the Zogby poll, the Military Times poll is of those who have made the military their career.

Perhaps Donnelly isn’t edequately skilled to determine for herself that the Military Times poll is non-representative. Or perhaps she deliberately uses deception as a tool to advance her anti-gay agenda.

But in either case she should not be testifying before Congress.

Janet Folger’s Prison Fantasies

Jim Burroway

July 22nd, 2008

Her fantasy looks something like this:

I can argue why marriage matters for the continuation of civilization. I can tell you about every study that shows without a doubt that children do best with both a mother and a father. But let me cut to the chase: If we don’t win the marriage battle, now on the ballot in California, Florida and Arizona, people who disagree with homosexual behavior will … go to jail. [Ellipses in the original]

Certified Cameronite: Jack Chick

Jim Burroway

July 22nd, 2008

I know you’ve seen them. You’ll usually find them deliberately left behind in some innocuous location where some unsuspecting soul can come across them and start flipping through the pages. You’ll find these strange little tracts just about anywhere: in car dealerships, dentist offices — for some reason I used to find them public men’s rooms.

As a Catholic growing up, I managed to run across the ones which painted the Catholic Church as the whore of Babylon and the Pope as the anti-Christ. That was one favorite theme for Jack Chick’s miniature comic books. Another one is the absolute, unblemished perfection of the King James Version and (and only the King James Version) of the Bible. Another still was the guy who was on his deathbed, facing the horrors of hell.

And, of course, there was homosexuality, with titles like Doom Town, Sin City, Birds and the Bees, and The Gay Blade. These were especially entertaining, laden with all the worst 1970s-style stereotypes, and they all seem to contain the same story of Sodom and Gomorrah. That is, after all, where fire and brimstone came from. But at the end of all the tracts is an invitation, like this charming one from Sin City:

If you choose Jesus Christ, all of your sins will be forgiven and you will receive God’s FREE gift of eternal life. If you do nothing, you’ll remain a condemned child of Satan…and one heartbeat from hell.

And in case you don’t think there’s a hell or a devil, Chick often included them in his tracts as well. In some of his comics they’re literally everywhere, usually standing just behind the evil-doer in case the reader is confused about who the bad guys are supposed to be. And sometime he places angels near the good guys, just so you’ll know.

Come to think of it, I think Chick ought to consider suing Oklahoma County commissioner Brent Rinehart for copyright violations. But I digress.

Anyway, it’s that last Chick comic that I mentioned, The Gay Blade, which caught my attention, because this one contains this so-called “fact” from our favorite Nazi-loving “researcher,” Paul Cameron.

I found this after a reader tipped me to an article in Battle Cry, Chick’s own monthly newsletter. (I was disappointed to find it was just an ordinary newsletter rather than a full-length comic book.) This article, “Homosexuals Hiding an ‘Inconvenient Truth’,” contains a similar claim:

Research by The Family Research Institute (FRI) of Colorado has discovered that the average lifespan of the male homosexual is only 39 years. Where 80% of married men lived past 65, only 2% of the homosexuals lived that long, as shown in the accompanying chart.

FRI found that sodomites “…were 116 times more apt to be murdered; 24 times more apt to commit suicide; and had a traffic-accident death-rate 18 times the rate of comparably-aged white males. Heart attacks, cancer and liver failure were exceptionally common. Twenty percent of lesbians died of murder, suicide, or accident—a rate 487 times higher than that of white females aged 25-44.”

In their web site at http:// www.familyresearchinst.org/ Default.aspx?tabid=73, FRI details the disgusting and unsanitary sexual practices that contribute to this early death sentence. The “outing” of the homosexual lifestyle in our culture has unleashed over 50 sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). AIDS is just one of them.

That link goes to Paul Cameron’s “Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do”, a brochure that I thoroughly investigated a few years ago in a project that gave birth to this very web site. And of course, a key component of Cameron’s brochure was his so-called “obituary study.”

It’s fitting that we finally got around to honoring Jack Chick as a Certified Cameronite. Chick joins other recent inductees like Insure.com and their CEO, Robert Bland and Oklahoma state rep. Sally Kern. They all make for some pretty good company.

But I didn’t want to honor Chick with our ordinary run-of-the-mill award that we’ve given to so many other deserving honorees. So I asked my good friend Bruce Garrett, a pretty good cartoonist in his own right, to see if he could come up with something special for Jack Chick.

So here it is, our Jack Chick Limited Collector’s Edition of the Certified Cameronite Award.


[Hat tip: John Thorp]

Cameronesque Award: Family “Research” Council’s “Slippery Slope” Brochure

Jim Burroway

July 21st, 2008

The Family “Research” Council is at it again, doing what they do best. Their brochure, “The Slippery Slope of Same-Sex ‘Marriage’,” which the FRC is touting in a recent action alert in their battle against same-sex marriage in California, is a prime example of the sort of “research” the FRC is all about.

It’s a lengthy brochure and it would take days to research the whole thing, but its entire premise is build on three specific claims. The first two are:

Relationship duration: While a high percentage of married couples remain married for up to 20 years or longer, with many remaining wedded for life, the vast majority of homosexual relationships are short-lived and transitory. This has nothing to do with alleged “societal oppression.” A study in the Netherlands, a gay-tolerant nation that has legalized homosexual marriage, found the average duration of a homosexual relationship to be one and a half years.

Monogamy versus promiscuity: Studies indicate that while three-quarters or more of married couples remain faithful to each other, homosexual couples typically engage in a shocking degree of promiscuity. The same Dutch study found that “committed” homosexual couples have an average of eight sexual partners (outside of the relationship) per year.

Both of those claims come from the same so-called “Dutch study,” published in 2003 bt Maria Xiridou and her colleagues in the journal AIDS. We’ve already published a full analysis of that report, but here’s the Cliff Notes version:

• This study was not about gay relationships, as most people who misuse this study claims. Its purpose was to study how HIV is transmitted in the Dutch population. That’s why the study was based only on those with HIV/AIDS attending STD clinics. It is no more generalizable to the general LGBT population than heterosexuals with STD’s are representative of straight people overall.
• This study excluded everyone over thirty — the prime age in which people are more likely to settle down and marry.
• “Relationships” weren’t defined. Anything including a second date to a lifetime commitment could be counted. You simply cannot compare that to straight couples who are married as the FRC does.
• FRC cites the study as taking place in a country with “legalized homosexual marriage”, but the Netherlands didn’t have anything like it when the study ended in 1998. Registered partnerships for same-sex and opposite-sex couples didn’t begin until October 1, 1999. A limited form of same-sex marriage wasn’t available until 2001.
• And this is the most important point of all: Because the purpose of the study was to look at how AIDS is transmitted, all monogamous couples were specifically excluded from the study. Because monogamous couples aren’t transmitting HIV, they would have been completely irrelevant to the study’s goals.

And what happens when you exclude all monogamous people from the study? It turns out that when people say they’re not monogamous, they tend to sleep around. But it has absolutely nothing to do with those who are monogamous, or the broader population generally.

This misused study is one of the FRC’s favorites. At the end of our “Dutch Study” report, we maintain a list of those who misuse this study, and the FRC are repeat offenders — including in two amicus briefs that we know of before the Maryland Court of Appeals and the Superior Court of New Jersey. If the FRC has no fear of lying to the courts, then they certainly aren’t ashamed of lying to the public.

The third point the brochure is built on is this:

Intimate partner violence: homosexual and lesbian couples experience by far the highest levels of intimate partner violence compared with married couples as well as cohabiting heterosexual couples. Lesbians, for example, suffer a much higher level of violence than do married women

They base this claim on the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Violence Against Women Survey (PDF: 62 pages/1,475 KB) If you want to see how they construct this particular distortion, I encourage you to download the report yourself and we’ll go through it step by step. Believe me, it’s worth it because this is a classic example.

On page 29, you will find that when you only look at victims with a history of same-sex cohabitation and compare them with those with a history of opposite-sex cohabitation, then it’s true, gays and lesbians experience higher levels of intimate parter violence. But that’s not true for gay and lesbian couples.

To see this, go to the next page. Among women with a history of same-sex partnership:

• 30.4% were raped, assaulted or stalked by their husband/male partner
• 11.4% were raped, assaulted or stalked by their wife/female partner.

And among men with a history of same-sex partnership:

• 10.8% were raped, assaulted, or stalked by their wife/female partner.
• 15.4% were raped, assaulted, or stalked by their husband/male partner.

So here is what it all means. Many women with a history of same-sex partnership also have a history of opposite-sex partnership. Because of that, they are far more likely to report being raped, assaulted or stalked because it is the men in their lives who are doing the raping, assaulting or stalking, not the women. Same-sex cohabiting women were nearly three times more likely to report being victimized by a male partner than a female partner.

And here is where the statistic gets really interesting: 20.5% of women in opposite sex relationships were raped, assaulted or stalked by their husband or male partner. That compares to 15.4% of men who were raped, assaulted, or stalked by their male partners. In other words, gay men are safer around their same-sex partners than straight women are around their husbands or opposite-sex partner.

But if course the Family “Research” Council didn’t want you to know the full story. That’s what makes their “research” so Cameronesque, and it’s why they are such deserving recipients of our latest award.

Proposition 8 Campaign Fibs About Poll

Timothy Kincaid

July 18th, 2008

Confronted with the latest Field Poll showing that Proposition 8 is not favored by California voters, the supporters of the anti-gay marriage amendment are scrambling to find positive ways to spin the results. Unfortunately, they relying on false statements to do so.

In a news release, Yes on Proposition 8 stated

A new Field Poll released today shows Proposition 8 — the Marriage Protection ballot initiative — is gaining among likely voters, although the survey continues to significantly understate support for the initiative, officials with the Proposition 8 campaign said today. The poll also shows that advocates of same-sex marriage are losing ground, compared to the last Field Poll released on May 28.

This seems contrary to news stories on the poll. But in support of their rather bold claim they state

The latest Field Poll reports support for Proposition 8 is at 42% (up two points since May) and opposition at 51% (down from 54%).

However, that is not really what the May Field Poll reported. In May, pollsters broke their sample in two and asked two slightly differently worded questions about a proposed constitutional amendment.

5a “Do you favor or oppose changing the California State Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman, thus barring marriage between gay and lesbian couples?”

Favor 40%
Oppose 54%
No Opinion 6%

5b “There may be a vote on this issue in the November election. Would you favor or oppose having the state constitution prohibit same-sex marriage, by defining marriage as only between a man and a woman?”

Favor 43%
Oppose 51%
No Opinion 6%

Although Field doesn’t tell us the combined average, it is likely to be similar to the answer to their primary question:

Do you approve or disapprove of California allowing homosexuals to marry members of their own sex and have regular marriage laws apply to them?

Disapprove 42%
Approve 51%
No Opinion 7%

In order to have something positive to say, the supporters of the proposition ignore the rest of the results and focus on one subset of one question so as to claim movement on the issue. But not only is this blatantly dishonest, the fluctuation was within the margin of error and no honest pollster would claim that this was an indication of “advances” or of “losing ground”.

However, their claim of understated support is probably valid. The Field Poll did not accurately predict the results of the yes vote on Proposition 22. But it did yield interesting information that we may wish to apply to the current poll.

On February 9, 2000, the Field Poll released results of their polling on Proposition 22, the “Limit on Marriage Initiative”. This was the proposition that rewrote civil code to ban gay marriage (the code found inconsistent with the Constitution by the California Supreme Court).

Proposition 22 provides that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California. If the election were being held today, would you vote Yes or No on Proposition 22?

Yes 52%
No 39%
Undecided 9%

On election day, March 7, the initiative passed 61% to 39%. Clearly the Field Poll did not well predict the “Yes” votes.

But it did accurately predict the “No” votes. While undecided voters may have ultimately chosen to pull the “Yes” lever, those who polled as opposed to the ballot seemed – on average - to hold their conviction.

So lets look at the current Field Poll,

Proposition 8 is the “Limit on Marriage Constitutional Amendment.” It amends the California constitution to provide that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California. If the election were being held today, would you vote Yes or No on Proposition 8, the Limit on Marriage Constitutional Amendment.

Yes 42%
No 51%
Undecided 7%

Assuming that the Field Poll underestimated the supporters but accurately predicted the “No” votes, then a vote on Proposition 8 today would fail 49% to 51%.

No matter how they slice it or which way they spin it, today was not a good day for the Yes on Proposition 8 people.

LaBarbera Award: Perennial AZ Candidate Joe Sweeney’s “Genital Drives” and Mexican Whorehouses

Jim Burroway

July 18th, 2008

It’s time to give Oklahoma a bit of a rest. Today’s LaBarbera Award winner comes from my own back yard, right here in Tucson, Arizona. And there is no better recipient than our very own 13-time candidate and zero-time winner for Congress, Republican Joe Sweeney.

Arizona has a non-presidential primary coming up on September 9, and Republican candidates Joe Sweeney and Gene Chewning are running for Congressman Raul Grijalva’s congressional seat. Sweeney and Chewning sat down with reporters from the Tucson Citizen for a videotaped interview. This was Sweeney response when he was asked to give his position on the proposed anti-marriage amendment:

Sweeney: Yeah, I wouldn’t have a problem supporting that. I think you just can’t have two generations that are so confused about their genital drive or sexuality that they don’t know whether they’re coming or going. You can’t just add to that. It’s like pouring gasoline on a fire when you let this kind of nonsense going on and on.

And it goes back all the way to Sodomite statutes they had over in England back in the 1530’s. It was a felony. They’d put you in prison for a year if you conducted that kind of behavior.

Q: Was that good?

Sweeney: Yeah. Sure, they needed to do that. Otherwise you’d have even more chaos. People get addicted to these strange ways of exercising their genital drives. Once it becomes addictive, you’ve got a real problem, social problem.

Actually, when England enacted it’s anti-sodomy statutes in the 1500’s the penalty was death. Just so you know.

But that’s not the only lunacy coming from Sweeney’s mouth. It seems that when he thinks of homosexuals, he thinks of “genital drives” and whorehouses in Mexico. I really don’t know how anyone except Sweeney himself can make any sense of this, so I’ll just leave you with this video excerpt and relevant transcript without comment. Unfortunately , the video ends before the good part about whorehouses, but you can see the full video on the Tucson Citizen’s web site.

Sweeney: Yeah, you know, this Sodomite behavior is not marriage. It’s just, you can’t go with that, I mean, we’ve got a society that was founded on the principles of Christian doctrine, and that’s what you’ve got to go with. That’s what made this country, an ideology worth repeating.

Q: Actually, the country was founded on deist principles.

Sweeney: Well, it’s a deism that’s supported by some sense of revelations. Some sense that, that well over there was witched. That’s a sense of revelation. Do you see what I’m trying to say? We’ve got dogmatic theology and theistic theology and all that, but we also have the primacy of revelation theology that a lot of times is neglected by what I call “low church,” people that don’t understand the elevation of revelation theology.

Q: So, again I’m going to ask the same question I asked Mr. Chewning. Basically, a secular reason why two consenting adults of the same sexual orientation should not be married or allowed to be married.

Sweeney: Well because it’s addictive and it creates social chaos, social problems.

Q: Just out of curiosity, what would you base that on?

Sweeney: Well I would base that on the fact that people come together with their genital drives, and they either bridle their genital drives — and that’s what a marriage contract is supposed to be about — or they just go around acting like they can go whoring down in Nogales or prostituting anywhere they want, they can do whatever they want with their bodies. They don’t have any higher responsibility other than their own gratification. [Note: The video snippet above ends here; the full video continues with the following] Hedonism, which is maximizing pleasure over pain. And that’s what happens at Nogales every night when they go down there whoring and causing all the social strife. Now they got those kids in the whorehouses in Nogales coming up here to Tucson to be anchor babies. You know I’ve witnessed that stuff.

Q: Okay, so there’s another question following that. You guys both have said marriage should be between a man and a woman. What about a transgender person who used to be a man, now became a woman and wants to marry a man.

Sweeney: Well, I’ve got a friend like that. And… you know… That’s what he wants to do with his social activity and his life, his social functioning, that’s up to him, you know? But to say that we have to validate that, the rest of society has to validate that kind of behavior, you know, let him conduct his behavior the way that he’s going to conduct his behavior. You know, I don’t agree with prostitution in Mexico, but they have laws that say it’s a way of functioning, socially functional society five feet the other side of the border that allows that to happen. We think the repercussions of that totally outweigh the responsibilities.

Q: Just out of curiosity, what do you think that homosexuals have to do with whorehouses in Mexico?

Sweeney: Oh, I don’t know. We’ve got the only Southwest weekly newspaper, we’ve got more homosexuals down here than we’ve got a lot of other kinds of people.

Q: Again, what does that got to do with whorehouses in Mexico?

Sweeney: Well, what happens is you get what I call a hedonistic attractiveness to do anything and everything with your genital drive . ….

Q: Again, are the homosexuals frequenting the whorehouses?

Sweeney: I wouldn’t be surprised. Anything can happen around this town. We’ve got gay bars down on Fourth Avenue …

Sweeney ran for Congress twelve times before as a Democrat, a Republican, a Democrat, a New Alliance Party member and then Republican again, and he’s lost every time. Last year he captured the Republican nomination and the local party did everything they could to distance themselves from this gadfly. He’s just one of those people you can always count on around here to give the local elections a bit of, ah, color.

Chewning, believe it or not, may lose the primary to Sweeney this year on Sweeney’s name recognition alone. Not that Chewning is any kind of a political rocket scientist himself, if this video is any indication. Something about marrying first cousins or German Shepherds. At least Sweeney is creative.

Fortunately, the 7th is a very safe district for Rep. Grijalva.

All of you Oklahomans out there — feel better now?

Most Pathetic Comic Book Ever

Jim Burroway

July 17th, 2008

We told you earlier about Oklahoma County commissioner Brent Rinehart’s new comic book that (literally) demonizes homosexuality — complete with the words “anal sodomy.”

Now via Reason.com, we have two pages from that comic book. (Click on the images for the full-size version).

Rinehart says it took two months to write this comic book. I don’t think Marvel has anything to be worried about though. After two months, Rinehart’s still trying to figure out whether child molesters are “pedaphiles” or “pedifiles.”

Most Pathetic Protest Ever

Jim Burroway

July 17th, 2008

The AFA’s McDonalds boycott has started off with a resounding thud. Have you ever seen anything more sad?

Oklahoma Politician Writes Wacky Homophobic Comic Book

Timothy Kincaid

July 17th, 2008

What is it about Oklahoma?

Fresh off Sally Kern’s rantings, we have Brent Rinehart, an Oklahoma County Commissioner, who has written a comic book demonizing (literally) homosexuals and “liberal good ol’ boys”.

You have to read this nutjobbery to believe it. And The Oklahoman has it here.

“This is one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen,” said Keith Gaddie, a political science professor at the University of Oklahoma. “I’ve never seen a comic book with the phrase ‘anal sodomy’ in it before. That was a new one for me.”

In addition to fighting “pedifiles” (spelling and grammar aren’t his strong points), Rinehart rails against his political opponents with the help of an angel (opponents have a demon on their side).

County Assessor Leonard Sullivan (not pictured in the comic) perhaps said it best:

“I’ve really encouraged him on more than one occasion to get professional help. He really needs it,” said Sullivan, who is not depicted in the comic.

Certified Cameronite: Insure.com

Jim Burroway

July 17th, 2008

Insure.com, a popular online insurance quote-comparison portal, is proud of its numerous awards. Its web site brags that it was named “best web site” for two years in a row by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine, and the “best life insurance site on the web” by Forbes.com. Insure.com is mentioned every day as a sponsor of Bill O’Reilly’s radio program, with O’Reilly himself voicing the commercials.

Now Insure.com can add another feather to its cap: the Certified Cameronite award for citing the discredited research of holocaust revisionist Paul Cameron.

Last Friday, BTB’s Timothy Kincaid first exposed Insure.com’s false and defamatory article which uses Cameron’s widely-discredited research to claim that gays die, on average, twenty years younger than non-gays. He also reported how Insure.com engaged in deceptive Cameronesque tactics by misrepresenting the findings of another legitimate study from Vancouver conducted at the very height of the AIDS crisis, long before life-saving Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART) became widely available.

We have been very hesitant to issue this award to a publicly traded company like Insure.com because we recognize that many people who are not familiar with Cameron’s research may fall prey to his deceptive tactics. We were, however, disturbed to see that the author of Insure.com’s anti-gay smear also engaged in similar Cameron-like misrepresentations by deliberately misquoting from Dr. Robert Hogg, the Canadian researcher who wrote to denounce the widespread misuse of his research by anti-gay extremists.

So Timothy wrote to Insure.com on June 1 to notify them of the problems with their online post. Communications were cordial at first as CEO Robert Bland personally assured us that they don’t have a political stance and that he would look into the claims himself. He asked for one to four weeks to investigate; we ultimately gave him six. Today, those false claims are still on Insure.com’s web site, and Bland has written numerous comments on this web site repeatedly touting Cameron’s credentials.

Since Insure.com still appears to be willfully ignorant about Cameron’s credentials, here they are in a handy, one-stop reference:

• Cameron was expelled from the American Psychological Association in 1983 for ethical violations
• Cameron was censured by the Nebraska Psychological Association (where he lived at the time) in 1984 for misrepresenting legitimate social science research.
• U.S. District Court Judge Jerry Buchmeyer found that Cameron had committed “fraud or misrepresentations” in testimony before the court in 1986.
• Cameron was censured by the American Sociological Association in 1985 and 1986 for misrepresenting himself as a sociologist (after having been kicked out of the APA), and for ethical violations.
• Cameron was censured by the Canadian Psychological Association in 1996.
• Cameron was censured by the Eastern Psychological Association in 2007 for misrepresenting his own research and participation at the group’s convention.

Cameron has written approvingly of how the Nazis “dealt with” homosexuality at the Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, and he once suggested that exterminating homosexuals might be an option here unless we got “medically lucky.” His obvious hatred for gays and lesbians so poisons everything he writes that Focus On the Family scrubbed their materials of all mention of him more than a decade ago.

In fact, the only people who rely on Cameron anymore are those who occupy the most radical fringes of anti-gay extremists. Insure.com, CEO Robert Bland, and author Joseph White are now officially in their company.

Even the Anti-Gays want Randy Thomasson to Get Lost

Timothy Kincaid

July 16th, 2008

As we’ve shown you before, Randy Thomasson and the Campaign for Children and Families are not likely to go down in history as great thinkers of our generation. I’d go so far as to say that they’re downright loony.

Now it seems that the backers of Proposition 8 want nothing to do with them as well.

Thomasson and CCF were not backers of the current proposition to ban marriage but instead supported an alternate proposition that banned civil unions as well. Their initiative did not get enough signatures, but while it lasted they said unkind things about what is now Proposition 8.

But now Thomasson and CCF want to jump on the band-wagon. And the backers of Proposition 8 are trying to force them out. Publicly.

Law.com reports on efforts to get CCF to shut up and go away.

In a short brief filed Thursday, Folsom, Calif., lawyer Andrew Pugno, counsel for ProtectMarriage.com, argued that rather than back Prop 8, the CCF actively campaigned against it for years in favor of another amendment that would have sharply curtailed all gay rights.

“Only now that the act has qualified for the ballot as Proposition 8 do proposed intervenors support it,” Pugno wrote. “Against this backdrop, there is significant concern that the presence of [the CCF] in this action will substantially interfere with real parties’ ability to effectively defend Proposition 8.”

In an interview Monday, Pugno referred to the CCF as “extremists” who want to go beyond the issue of marriage and “strip away gay rights” of any kind.

Well, Pugno certainly knows Thomasson and his goals. But I would say the differences between them are only a matter of degrees.

(hat tip Good-As-You)

AFA’s Latest Email Perfectly Illustrates Their Fixation With Man On Man Sex

Daniel Gonzales

July 15th, 2008

I just received an email from the AFA’s “One Million Dads” campaign “alerting” me to the grave danger that awaits young children in any public library with a reasonably stocked gay and lesbian studies section Barnes and Noble bookstores.

In Collierville, Tennessee, recently, an 11 year-old boy named Landon Howse was walking through the Barnes & Noble bookstore when he noticed a book lying open on one of the reading area tables. His dad, Brannon Howse, was right behind him. What Landon saw were graphic pictures of two men engaged in sex. The book was titled “Ultimate Gay Sex,” and is one of the many sexually explicit books offered in Barnes & Noble stores.

[snip]

Since this story broke, AFA has learned that this is a serious problem in Barnes & Noble stores across the country. Many parents have written to say they have had the same type of heart wrenching experiences with their children as Barnes & Noble does not place the homosexual pornography behind the counter or even in a restricted area not open to minors. Anyone can go in and find it on the shelf. I wanted to warn parents and grandparents about this danger because this is the largest bookstore chain in America and other bookstores have similarly have no responsible policy when it comes to placing these kinds of books in theirs stores.

“Since this story broke” the AFA says? Odd how a Google News search for the father’s name turns up nothing.

But back to my main point. The offending book, “Ultimate Gay Sex,” or at least the one sold on Amazon.com is nothing more than a sex guide, a sex guide that happens to be written for gay people. Gay people of course enjoy reading about how they can improve their sex lives much as straight people do.

But alas the AFA hysteria alert makes no mention of straight sex guides sold at Barnes and Noble — yet another example of how the AFA is fixated on the sex lives of gays and lesbians more than any other group.

As a side note, Collierville hosted a Love Won Out conference earlier this year.

Insure.com CEO Defends Paul Cameron

Timothy Kincaid and Jim Burroway

July 14th, 2008

Last Friday, Timothy Kincaid revealed for the first time that a popular insurance portal, Insure.com, is hosting false and defamatory anti-gay claims. This follows nearly six weeks of private communications with Insure.com CEO Robert Bland, in which we tried to work with them in resolving the situation.

Soon after Kincaid’s exposé appeared, Mr. Bland wrote a response defending his company’s material, and he has left other comments on this web site which suggest that Insure.com has little interest in factual accuracy or professional responsibility. With these latest comments, whatever hope we first held that Insure.com would act responsibly and in the best interests of their customers, shareholders and participating agencies has now vanished.

In a comment on Kincaid’s article, Mr. Bland wrote:

We expect to take another look at this article over the next 4 weeks because we want to make certain that we encompass all available current research on this topic. We think that there’s a human interest story to be researched here on why all U.S. life insurers decline HIV-positive applicants (many of whom are healthy and have been for two decades) but will not even attempt to segregate gays who, according to a growing body of evidence, may have a much shorter lifespan than non-gays. [emphasis ours]

This comment left us dumbstruck. There simply is no “growing body of evidence” to suggest that gays have a different lifespan — let alone a “much shorter” one — from non-gays. In fact, there’s no evidence for it at all. We challenge Insure.com to show us their “growing body of evidence,” because we certainly haven’t seen it in any of the hundreds of peer-reviewed journals that we continually monitor as part of our work.

Mr. Bland is not unaware that Insure.com’s claims are without merit. This is not an example of benign ignorance or lack of information, which was our assumption when Kincaid first contacted Insure.com on June 1. We both have provided him with evidence that the bases for Insure.com’s anti-gay article are either not relevant or are the product of a discredited anti-gay extremist.

We repeatedly told Mr. Bland about Paul Cameron’s professional misconduct. Kincaid even warned him that relying on Cameron has resulted in public embarrassment of those who quote him, including Secretary of Education William Bennett. Kincaid provided links to detailed analysis, and he advised Mr. Bland to search the Internet for additional information about Mr. Cameron.

This is not difficult to do — Cameron’s reputation is very well known. Even Exodus International, which works closely with Focus On the Family to lobby against civil rights for gays and lesbians, has pulled their references to Paul Cameron. Focus On the Family themselves scrubbed their materials of anything associated with Cameron more than a decade ago. And yet just last Saturday morning, Insure.com’s CEO returned to our web site once again to cite Cameron and his Denmark gay lifespan “study”:

Then, in early 2007, Drs. Paul and Kirk Cameron reported at the Eastern Psychological Association convention that married gays and lesbians lived about 24 fewer years than their married heterosexual counterparts. This time, the Camerons extracted official data from Denmark, the country with the longest history of gay marriage, for 1990-2002. Married heterosexual men died in Denmark die at a median age of 74, while 561 partnered gays died at an average age of 51.

We found this surprising, as we had already provided Mr. Bland with Burroway’s analysis of that study when Kincaid first contacted Insure.com six weeks before. But if Insure.com doesn’t trust our analysis, then maybe they can trust conservative Christian psychology professor Warren Throckmorton. He examined Cameron’s Danish “Gays Die Young” notions and devoted a nine part series to the subject. Throckmorton concluded that the Camerons skewed their findings “to the point where any results cannot be trusted.”

And as insurance professionals, Insure.com surely can trust Dr. Morten Frisch. He’s the senior epidemiologist at Copenhagen’s Statens Serum Institut. Frisch described the Camerons’ report as having “little to do with science… The methodological flaws are of such a grave nature that no decent peer-reviewed scientific journal should let it pass for publication.” But Dr. Morton did manage to find one good thing to say about it:

Although the Camerons’ report has no objective scientific value, the authors should be acknowledged for providing teachers with a humorous example of agenda-driven, pseudo-scientific gobbledygook that will make lessons in elementary study design and scientific inference much more amusing for future epidemiology students.

As for what Drs. Cameron “reported” at the Eastern Psychological Association convention, Burroway wrote EPA president Dr. Phil Hineline in April 2007 to ask about the nature of the Camerons’ participation at the gathering. Dr. Hineline responded with a public letter condemning the Camerons for misrepresenting their participation at the convention. First, the Cameron’s didn’t present a report at all. All they did was participate in a “poster session,” in which they manned a table with a poster of some of their data in a large hall, alongside scores of other presenters. Not to be too condescending about it, but this is more like a science fair for grown-up professionals than a formal presentation before the convention as the Camerons portrayed it. What’s more, Dr. Hineline confirmed that the data they submitted to the EPA had nothing to do with lifespans at all — that had been added later — and he said they would not have been accepted it if it did.

We both tried to disabuse Insure.com’s CEO of the notion that most gay people have HIV, as he appeared to have alluded to such an argument in an earlier email. On June 12, Kincaid explained that at most, perhaps 15% of gay men and almost no gay women have HIV. And yet last Saturday morning, Mr. Bland continued his “gay = AIDS” smear by quoting from a Canadian doctor who said that once diagnosed with HIV, the average lifespan of such a person is 8 to 10 years, and that’s why we all die so much earlier. But even if that “gay = AIDS” canard were true — and it clearly isn’t — we suggest that the Canadian doctor and Mr. Bland read last week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found that the life expectancy of those with HIV is actually approaching something closer to normal.

Our readers have suggested that Insure.com pull down the disputed article until pending verification of its sources. As an insurance portal providing relevant information to its many customers, that would be the prudent thing to do. But instead of following that sensible advice, CEO Bland reposted the entire article as a comment on our web site, saying that Insure.com has “no intention of ‘taking (it) down’ because it contains no factual errors and no editorial bias or slant whatsoever.”

Insure.com is a well-known, publicly traded company. In our private communications with CEO Bland, he reassured us on June 2 that Insure.com has no political agenda, and that in their 24 years in business they have never asked about anyone’s sexual orientation before hiring them. We took them at their word, which is why we waited nearly six weeks before going public with our concerns.

Mr. Bland kept delaying and asking for more time, claiming that “other priorities” interfered with Insure.com’s investigation of the article. But since Friday, Insure.com’s busy CEO has found the time to write several comments on this web site — and on at least one other web site as well — claiming that “Box Turtle Bulletin is too anxious to bash Insure.com.” He decided it was a priority to take the time to write these comments, and yet he hasn’t found it to be a priority to simply have someone hit the delete button on the false information promoted by Insure.com. The remedy for all this is incredibly simple.

But instead of doing the reasonable and sensible thing, Mr. Bland continues to stake his reputation and that of his publicly-traded company in defending these anti-gay smears. More startling, he continues to tie this reputation to that of Paul Cameron, a man who:

• once said that “unless we get medically lucky, in three or four years, one of the options discussed will be the extermination of homosexuals,”
• wrote approvingly of how the Nazi’s “dealt with” homosexuality at the Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps,
• and who just last month urged a group of Russian ultra-nationalists to press on with their often-violent suppression of gays in that country.

We frankly find this to be both puzzling and troubling.

Mr. Bland claims that he is not homophobic and that Insure.com does not have an agenda. We believe that the “growing body of evidence” suggests otherwise.

David Benkof, Signing Off

Jim Burroway

July 13th, 2008

David Benkof has said farewell to his “Gays Defend Marriage” cause:

It is with great sadness that I announce that I feel I must withdraw from openly supporting man-woman marriage in the United States. I recently learned quite a bit of disturbing information that makes it impossible for me to continue supporting a movement I no longer respect. I have not yet decided when or even if I will write about why I’m ending my participation in this debate.

Update: Wayne Besen has a short statement from David expressing his disillusionment about the people behind California’s proposed anti-marriage amendment.

Insure.com’s CEO Bob Bland Responds

Timothy Kincaid

July 11th, 2008

Earlier today we reported that we have been trying for over a month to get Insure.com to remove false and defamatory articles from their website. Specifically, the articles - which were written by Insure.com staff - rely on a non-representative AIDS study from the early 90’s and fraudulent “researcher” Paul Cameron to claim “the life expectancy of gay males to be at least 20 years below average”.

The CEO of Insure.com, Bob Bland, has replied:

Box Turtle Bulletin is too anxious to bash Insure.com and you posted private e-mails from me to you without my permission, which says more about you than me. I’ve been open and forthright in dealing with Box Turtle’s many recent inquiries.

The article(s) you’ve referenced are but one or two over 3,000 that we have posted at Insure.com since 1996.

This particular article talks about third party studies that have claimed that homosexuals have a markedly different life expectancy than heterosexuals. We posted this as a human interest story from an actuarial standpoint and without any political agenda whatsoever and without comment as to the accuracy of the third party research.

One’s sexual orientation has no bearing on how a life insurance agency, including ours, would go about quoting life insurance.

We represent 35 leading life insurance companies and do not know of any that ask about sexual orientation at the time of quoting or at anytime during underwriting. Furthermore, sexual orientation is NOT considered or asked about in the quoting or underwriting of a life insurance policy. When quoting a life insurance policy, we, as an agent and broker, ask only those questions that are required to be asked by each life insurance company, which is typically an exhaustive set of 50-100 questions about one’s health history, past and current. Every U.S. life insurance company that I know of does ask each applicant if they are HIV positive and, to the best of my knowledge, each company will automatically then decline such an applicant, so apparently the life underwriters are convinced that that medical condition is somehow relative to one’s longevity.

As I explained to you earlier this week we’ve been delayed in having our writers and editors take a another look at this article, but still expect to do so over the next 4 weeks because we want to make certain that we encompass all available current research on this topic.

Once again, Insure.com has no political agenda on this issue and never has had any such agenda.

The Insure.com article making the claim that gay men die 20 years younger remains an available part of the “impartial insurance information” provided in their “vast library of originally authored insurance articles and decision-making tools” while Mr. Bland makes certain that he encompasses all available current research on this topic.

Founder of Desert Stream Complains about Gay Wedding Coverage

Timothy Kincaid

July 11th, 2008

On July 4, the Kansas City Star published an article by Derrik J. Lang with the headline At California’s gay weddings, traditions remain strong. In the article, Lang investigated whether same-sex weddings were similar to opposite-sex weddings and found that gay couples are opting mostly to follow tradition.

Rhodes said most wedding conventions — invitations, music, formal attire, cake, Champagne — are finding their way into the same-sex ceremonies that her full-service wedding and events planning company has been hired for since the California Supreme Court’s ruling in May.

The article didn’t touch on whether gay people should marry or delve into discussions about civil rights, religion, philosophy, politics or other contentious matters that often surround discussions around same-sex marriage.

But nonetheless, this article didn’t sit well with Andrew Comiskey. Comiskey is the ex-gay who founded Desert Stream ministries and will be a keynote speaker for Exodus International’s Freedom Conference next week in Asheville, NC.

He wrote a letter to the editor objecting to the use of certain words when discussing gay unions.

Soothing readers with words like “tradition,” “commitment” and “marriage equality,” Lang tried to normalize the gay marriage experience, even implying that these unions are so authentic, they don’t have to “hide behind a basic ritual.”

They cannot hide, because anyone with common sense knows that a wedding and a marriage celebrates only one thing: the audacious effort of a man and a woman to become one unit for life, a truth lost on the California Supreme Court when it overturned the will of the people and mandated gay marriage last May.

Wordplay matters in the battle for marriage, and Lang showed his hand shamelessly. I urge The Star to opt for more objective reporting on this crucial topic.

Now I’ve seen plenty of anti-gays use snear quotes aroung the words “gay” or “marriage”. But it really takes a truly bigoted mindset to insist that the words “tradition” and “commitment” are the exclusive property of heterosexuality.

Insure.com’s Anti-Gay Propaganda

Timothy Kincaid

July 11th, 2008

The trend in business relations has been towards an acceptance and welcoming of gay and lesbian clients and appreciation of them as customers. This may be because of the perception that product loyalty is particularly strong in gay consumers or because businesses generally believe that moralistic rants drive away not only gay customers but also those who love them.

Which made it all the more surprising to find that Insure.com, an online insurance purveyor, has been hosting articles that make false and defamatory statements about gay men and women.

Gay Mortality Claims
Insure.com is a publicly traded company with an advisory board ranging from a former US Senator to executives with various companies, including AT&T. The company is a major sponsor of Bill O’Reilly’s radio talk show and Bill gives voice to their commercial.

In addition to selling insurance, they provide information about the insurance industry. Joe White, an employee and company blog contributor, wrote two pieces in which he claimed that “being gay” was a health risk, and not just a minor one.

In an article on the business website entitled Top five ways to kill yourself and get away with it, White lists the number one way to kill yourself:

1. Being gay. A gay lifestyle is by far the biggest risk to life expectancy that goes unrecognized by insurance companies. The question has been considered by multiple studies, and the gay lifestyle is universally acknowledged to decrease life expectancy. A conservative estimate is that a gay lifestyle takes away 8-20 years from the average lifespan.

In other words, living a homosexual lifestyle has health risks at least as severe as smoking (by some estimates even more), but due to the sensitive nature of the issue, life insurance companies don’t charge different rates for gays. So gays save money on life insurance at the same rate they die young.

White bases his Number One self-killer information on another insure.com article he authored, Gay men die 20 years younger.

It’s a loaded subject, but let’s get right down to it: gay men, on average, die significantly younger than the rest of the population.

Vancouver Study
Part of the bases for White’s wild claim is an extrapolation from a 1997 study from Robert Hogg entitled Modeling the Impact of HIV Disease on Mortality in Gay and Bisexual Men. It was based on research performed in Vancouver from 1987 through 1992. The question that they were trying to answer was not the mortality of gay men, but rather the impact that HIV might have on the gay population.

White acknowledges that this study was of HIV positive individuals but then says something curious: “Many who read the study, however, understood it to categorize the gay lifestyle as inherently hazardous.”

Perhaps recognizing that “Impact” means the opposite of “inherently”, White did not reveal the name of the study. Further, the only persons who read some inherent hazard into sexual orientation were anti-gay activists and writers. In fact, this so annoyed the authors that they responded to the claims of anti-gays with a letter of clarification.

Mr. White was aware of the letter; he references part of it.

In the same letter, the researchers reiterated their original claim, that a gay man in Vancouver had the same life expectancy as a Canadian man in 1870, 8-21 years shorter than the average male today.

The wording in the letter is

The aim of our research was never to spread more homophobia, but to demonstrate to an international audience how the life expectancy of gay and bisexual men can be estimated from limited vital statistics data. In our paper, we demonstrated that in a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 21 years less than for all men. If the same pattern of mortality continued, we estimated that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged 20 years would not reach their 65th birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre were experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by men in Canada in the year 1871.

That does sound ominous, if you stop there. Which is exactly what Mr. White chose to do. He opted to eliminate the substance of the words following this quote:

In contrast, if we were to repeat this analysis today the life expectancy of gay and bisexual men would be greatly improved. Deaths from HIV infection have declined dramatically in this population since 1996. As we have previously reported there has been a threefold decrease in mortality in Vancouver as well as in other parts of British Columbia .

It is essential to note that the life expectancy of any population is a descriptive and not a prescriptive mesaure. Death is a product of the way a person lives and what physical and environmental hazards he or she faces everyday. It cannot be attributed solely to their sexual orientation or any other ethnic or social factor. If estimates of an individual gay and bisexual man’s risk of death is truly needed for legal or other purposes, then people making these estimates should use the same actuarial tables that are used for all other males in that population. Gay and bisexual men are included in the construction of official population-based tables and therefore these tables for all males are the appropriate ones to be used.

This is a most curious edit. By leaving out the above paragraphs, White leaves the reader believing exactly the opposite what the authors intended. They did not “reiterate their original claim”; rather, they reported that circumstances had changed significantly and that their statistics were no longer applicable.

While Vancouver during the late 80’s may have had a large number of HIV positive individuals, and while they may have been dying young, this cannot be extrapolated to any other geographic region or time.

Paul Cameron
But Mr. White did not rely solely on the Vancouver study (with selectively eliminated information). He also based his claims on a familiar source, Paul Cameron.

In 2005, Dr. Paul Cameron, the President of the Family Research Institute, published a study in Psychological Reports that confirmed a 20-year life expectancy gap for actively gay men. Researchers performed the study by examining gay obituaries and comparing them with data from the Center for Disease Control. Both data sets put the average age of death for gay men about 20 years younger than average.

Those of us who are familiar with Cameron and his followers know that these claims are fraudulent. But others relying on White’s claims might not know that Dr. Paul Cameron has been thoroughly discredited.

He has been dropped from the American Psychological Association, condemned by the Nebraska Psychological Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Canadian Psychological Association and been barred from presenting himself as an “expert” in at least one courtroom. And even the anti-gay fringe disavowed Cameron after he lauded Rudolph Höss, the camp commandant of Auschwitz, and his efforts to eradicate homosexuality.

White takes the outdated Vancouver study, combines it with Cameron’s bogus “research” and declares:

this revised estimate would establish the life expectancy of gay males to be at least 20 years below average.

This classifies gay men with a graver risk of mortality than smokers and the obese—perhaps the highest mortality risk for any demographic its size.

Are there Mortality Variances?
To the best of my knowledge, there have been no serious studies that reveal any difference in average age of death between heterosexual and homosexual persons. But that does not mean that such a difference does not exist.

Various demographics of persons do have different average life expectancies.

Many factors impact life expectancy - genetics, diet, exercise, smoking, drugs and alcohol, stress, marital status, poverty, and many many more. And there are likely to be some characteristics that result from the social patterns found more often in the gay community.

But we cannot know whether the increased emphasis on diet, exercise, health, and body awareness leads to a measurable average increase in life expectancy. Nor can we know whether a higher incidence of drug use or stress related to discrimination or rejection leads to a measurable decrease. We don’t even know if enough gay persons share enough stereotypical characteristics that these presumed risk factors can impact the gay population as a whole.

During the 80’s and early 90’s we know that deaths from AIDS related illnesses impacted the gay community much more severely than the population at large. But current drug regimens have brought the life expectancy for some HIV positive persons to be nearly that of non-infected persons. And even if there is some reduction due to HIV infection, this subpopulation is only about 15% of gay men and no measurable percentage of lesbians.

Perhaps there is some mortality variance, but neither White nor myself have any idea as to what it might be. And only a highly irresponsible insurance provider would provide to its clients “information” that is both defaming and demonstrably false.

Corporate Response
On June 1, we contacted the Robert “Bob” Bland, the CEO of Insure.com and informed him that his company was hosting articles that were factually inaccurate and based on the work of an anti-gay activist that had been discredited.

Bland responded that because the articles were based on third party studies and not original research they would require time to do fact-checking. He did not pull the articles.

We offered to provide Bland with additional information, if needed. He responded:

I may, thank you. We want to do a wider-ranging issue that is fair and balanced and include more research and debate, maybe even quotes from you and your organization.

Can you give me a list of studies or links regarding gay male life expectancy that you think may be valid? Or are you saying that there’s no difference in mortality there?

We discovered that, while the 35 major life insurance companies do not ask about sexual orientation, virtually all of them immediately decline any applicant who is HIV positive, indicating to me that their actuaries have sound data showing reduced mortality for this group, just as they decline anybody who engages in risky hobbies or racing.

We provided Mr. Bland with thorough information about the invalidity of Whites sources as well as clarifying for him that HIV status does not equate to sexual orientation. He responded by repeating his “risky hobbies” comment. That was on June 12th.

On the 28th I wrote inquiring how the research was coming and whether they were going to continue to host the anti-gay articles on their site. Bland responded:

Other priorities came in front of this. This could take 1-4 more weeks as we have limited editorial resources. We’ve never hosted anti-homosexual articles at our site and have no corporate agenda on this issue whatsoever.

As of this writing, the Top Five Ways to Kill Yourself article is no longer at the web address. But those persons wishing to find fun insurance facts can still read that gay men die 20 years sooner, on average, than straight men. Mr. Bland has not clarified why he does not believe this to be an “anti-homosexual” article.

No doubt Insure.com does have some accurate information on their website. But considering the extent to which they are willing to accommodate and defend myth, lies, and homophobic ranting, I would be more trusting of a fast-talking guy with a bad toupee to accommodate my insurance buying needs.

Dobson Nominated for Radio Hall of Fame

Jim Burroway

July 9th, 2008

Imagine my surprise on learning that Focus on the Family’s James Dobson has been nominated to the Museum of Broadcast Communication’s Radio Hall of Fame. I wonder, is Father Charles Coughlin also a member? If so, then Dobson might make good company. But no, I don’t see Coughlin on the list, so I don’t see how Dobson deserves the honor. Not after such gems like this:

“Homosexuals are not monogamous. They want to destroy the institution of marriage. It will destroy marriage. It will destroy the Earth.”

Wayne Besen at Truth Wins Out is organizing a campaign to remove Dobson from consideration.

To fight back against this offensive decision, TWO strongly urges fair-minded people to take three actions. First, sign TWO’s formal request to have James Dobson removed from consideration. Second, contact Museum of Broadcast Communications CEO Bruce DuMont directly, brucedumont@museum.tv, to express your displeasure. Third, as an option, vote for nominees other than James Dobson or Laura Schlessinger (the general public