Box Turtle Bulletin

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.

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?

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.

LaBarbera Award: This Guy

Jim Burroway

June 17th, 2008

We’ve never given the LaBarbera Award to an un-named person before, but we don’t know the name of this particular anti-gay protester in front of San Francisco City Hall yesterday. All we have is this photo, and this lovely example of a “Christian” witness.

“God killed him for loving fags!!”

According to Storm Bear (yes, that’s his name) at the Bilerico Project, a marriage supporter was playing a guitar when he “suddenly dropped like a tree” of an apparent heart attack or cardiac arrest. Police immediately swooped in and began administering CPR.

And while that was going on, one of the “loving” Christian protesters was chanting, “Satan Got You!” and “What is the Devil whispering in your ear about now?”

Storm Bear takes it from there

I yelled at the guy, “If you are such a Christian, why aren’t you praying for the guy dying on the concrete?” The protester replied, “God killed him for loving fags!!” The cops even stepped in and told the guy to shut his mouth.

I have no idea what the ultimate fate of the guitar player is. I have high hopes he will live to sing another day.

We are still waiting to hear whether the guitar player is okay. We hope and pray that he is. (Update: We have learned that the man did suffer a cardiac arrest and he is in guarded condition at St. Mary’s hospital.)

I have no idea whether this anonymous “Christian” (and I’m using quotes here deliberately to distinguish this “gentleman” from real Christians) is a fan of Peter LaBarbera’s or vice versa. But we do know that LaBarbera is a huge proponent of confrontational forms of “witnessing,” and he’s accused this web site of “anti-Christian bigotry” when we call him on it.  But we’ve challenged him to find a single post anywhere in which, even by the stretch of his wild imagination, we’ve engaged in the practice. Unsurprisingly, he hasn’t taken us up on the challenge.

And I think there’s a reason for that. We well understand that the confrontational, emotional, hyperventilating, panic-inducing style of “witnessing” that people like LaBarbera and this anonymous “loving Christian” perform is deeply embarrassing to millions of truly loving Christians the world over. This is why these extremists remain on the lunatic fringe. They see their failed efforts being eclipsed by the forward march of reason and sanity.

We recognize that those who think this sort of “witnessing” is constructive are not a reflection of Christianity. It’s only reflective of its lunatic fringe. It’s not anti-Christian bigotry or Christian bashing to say that. In fact, we can’t even come close to bashing Christians as badly as those who hijack the faith to serve their own perverted brand of self-described ”love.”

Update: We have a name. It’s Kevin Farrer.

[Hat tip for the name: Scott H.]

LaBarbera Award: Judge Bill Graves

Jim Burroway

June 5th, 2008

We’ve got another winner. It has recently come to light that Oklahoma Judge Bill Graves objected to proposed changes to the state Code of Judicial Conduct regarding sexual orientation.

In an April 8 letter to the Oklahoma Bar Association, Graves objects that the new code would prohibit him from refusing to award custody and adoption cases if a parent were gay. Graves also objecsd to the gender and ethnicity clauses as well, leaving us to wonder exactly which century he’s living in.

But this is Judge Graves’ award-winning argument against the homosexuals:

“Sexual orientation” would protect pedophiles, polygamists and homosexuals who practice anal sodomy, defined in state law as “the detestable and abominable crime against nature,” the judge wrote.

That’s right. Judge Graves is spreading the same old tired, disproved canard that homosexuality is linked to pedophilia. That, coupled with his refusal to consider gay parents fit to raise their own children, leaves us wondering about his capacity to dispense justice.

The long-suffering citizens of Oklahoma have another embarrassing wingnut on their hands again, and we have another LaBarbera Award winner. Sadly, it’s beginning to appear as if the two go hand in hand. Congratulations Judge Graves.

LaBarbera Award: Pastor John Hagee

Jim Burroway

June 2nd, 2008

I don’t know how we managed to overlook John Hagee when handing out LaBarbera Awards. He’s uttered so many doozies in the past, so much so that presumptive GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain was finally forced to distance himself from the man whose support he once courted.

But this latest discovery looks like it’s about as good a reason as any to recognize some of the lunacy which runs rampant among anti-gay extremists:

On March 16, 2003, on the eve of the United States’ invasion of Iraq, Pastor John Hagee took to the pulpit to warn of the coming Antichrist. In his sermon, “The Final Dictator,”Hagee described the Antichrist as a seductive figure with “fierce features.” He will be “a blasphemer and a homosexual,” the pastor announced. Then, Hagee boomed, “There’s a phrase in Scripture used solely to identify the Jewish people. It suggests that this man [the Antichrist] is at least going to be partially Jewish, as was Adolph Hitler, as was Karl Marx.”

You see? Fred Phelp’s Westboro Baptists aren’t a complete aberration. You can get the full effect here:

Now you see, that’s how you win the LaBarbera Award.

By the way, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) still says he’s going to deliver the keynote address at Hagee’s Christians United For Israel (CUFI) summit. Also scheduled to attend is Rep. Elliot Engel (D-NY). No word yet on whether Engel has reconsidered given this latest outburst.

Foolish Anti-Marriage Activists

Timothy Kincaid

June 1st, 2008

The Alliance Defense Fund - not surprisingly - has asked the California Supreme Court to stay its marriage equality decision until after the likely November election. I think that their petition betrays a weakness in the anti-gay position that greatly increases the likelihood that no stay will be issued.

I’m going to segue off for a moment and then get back to that.

I just noticed something about the dates of the process that I find interesting.

The county clerks in California have until June 18 to determine whether there are adequate signatures for the constitutional amendment to be considered in November. But the Supreme Court only has until June 16 to decide whether to issue a stay. Thus, the anti-gays are asking the court to act on a possible result to an election that potentially can’t even be verified as occurring until after the stay is made.

Although it’s pretty likely that there will be a vote in November, this argument is based on more than one uncertainty and thus is not very compelling. Theoretically, the anti-gays could be asking the court to stay its decision until after a vote that won’t even take place.

OK, back to the anti-gays. In their petition, the ADF did something that surprised me. Even for them.

Great public harm and mischief, as outlined herein, will result from permitting same-sex “marriages” for a five-month period, only to later change the law by returning marriage to its traditional definition.

The Court determined that marriage was open to same sex couples; marriage, as in the legal recognition by the civil government. The Court spoke on what the civil institutions of the State of California would do in regards to marriage. As is their right.

But the ADF did not give this court the recognition of their right to make determinations about civil law. Instead, in their petition, the ADF refers to same-sex marriage as “marriage”, in quotes. They objected to “marriage” licenses and “marital” relationships.

They said, in essence, that regardless of the decisions of the highest legal body in the state, that same-sex marriage was not real or genuine, that it was only “marriage” in name, and not marriage in actuality. No matter what the Court may have determined.

I question the wisdom of that decision.

“It’s NOT marriage and I won’t call it so!” may be an argument that serves well in fundraising emails, but I don’t think it will fare well with judges who just said that, indeed, it IS marriage.

Now I may not be as imperturbable as the Justices of the Court, but if I were being asked to rule in favor of a petition, I would not be immediately encouraged to do so if the pleading party deliberately insulted me and my position and indicated that my decisions were not valid.

Now it may be that ADF is comprised of particularly weak legal minds. Or they may have recognized that their plea is futile and therefore the plea was written with their donors in mind rather than the Justices of the Supreme Court of California.

But in either case, this seems to me to be a foolish action and one which makes them appear to be petty and bitter.

In other words, thanks ADF, you’re helping our cause.

ADF’s “Homosexual Agenda” Looks Surprisingly Like Their “Heterosexual Agenda”

Jim Burroway

May 23rd, 2008

LGBT bloggers are having a field day over the Alliance Defense Fund’s “discovery” of the Homosexual Agenda. According to the ADF, the agenda looks something like this:We did some digging around, and we managed to get a copy of the actual Heterosexual Agenda. Guess what? It looks surprisingly similar:They may try to tell you there’s no such thing as a “Heterosexual Agenda,” but don’t you believe it.

 

[Hat tip: Pam Spaulding for the ADF’s “Homosexual Agenda”] 

 

LaBarbera rants on like… well, LaBarbera

Timothy Kincaid

May 13th, 2008

In response to our criticism of his alliance with racists, Peter LaBarbera has lashed out in his usual way, ranting and frothing and void of all reason or accuracy.

Pete doesn’t rebuke his allies David Duke and Ted Pike for their racism and anti-Semitism. He doesn’t admit that he is fearful of the story that might come out in court if VanAdslen is prosecuted. He doesn’t allow that “the homosexual”, the witnesses, and the police just might be telling the truth. He doesn’t acknowledge that his language contrasting Velasquez with the “strapping, clean-cut, All-American looking young man” lends itself to racism.

Ah, but if he did any of that, he wouldn’t be Peter LaBarbera.

No, instead Pete identifies me as “the Left”, accuses me of hate, and calls me an anti-Christian bigot like Barney Frank (I don’t know why he brings up Barney Frank, but I’m guessing it’s because he’s Jewish and we know what Pete’s allies think about those radical homosexual Jews).

Oh, and to prove that LaBarbera is not a racist he posts a picture of a Black ex-lesbian (yes, he capitalizes “black”). If it wasn’t so tragic it would be funny.

OK. Sure I question the theology of exclusion and condemnation. Yeah I point out when conservatives twist Scripture, logic, and truth to fit their anti-gay agenda.

But “the Left”?

Anti-Christian?

Now that’s what I call irony.

So we have a challenge for LaBarbera: Hey, Pete, give us an example of how our writings here at Box Turtle Bulletin show that we hate Christians. Provide us an example of the anti-Christian bigotry that you think is so prevalent on this site.

APA Symposium’s Critical Flaw: What About The Ex-Gay Survivors?

This commentary is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the opinion of other authors at Box Turtle Bulletin.

Jim Burroway

May 13th, 2008

Don’t you hate it when you know that people are talking about you and you’re not there? And don’t you hate it even more when they’re talking about something that’s directly relevant to your experience, and that the whole point of their conversation is to arrive at conclusions about how to deal with you in the future? And you’re not invited to be a part of the conversation?

I know I do. But the now-canceled American Psychiatric Association Symposium “Homosexuality and Therapy: The Religious Dimension” was about to do just that.

The symposium, as the title suggests, was intended to discuss the intersection of faith and therapy, with special consideration to issues surrounding homosexuality. One particular topic was likely to dominate the discussion: efforts to change sexual orientation through therapeutic means. After all, this panel’s formation came as a response to the APA’s decision to form a working group to review its stance on ex-gay therapy.

The panel was organized by Dr. David Scasta, past president of the APA’s Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists. Also participating would have been Dr. Warren Throckmorton, who defends sexual reorientation therapy for those who want it, while recognizing that some forms can be harmful. Together they were to have covered the “therapy” aspects of what might have been a interesting exchange (although it would have been grossly incomplete for reasons I’ll get into in a moment).

But the panel was doomed from the start with the participating of two starkly polarizing figures representing the “religious dimension” of the panel. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Rev. Albert Mohler was to be one participant. He has been a stridently vocal advocate for sexual reorientation therapy, so much so that he even approved of prenatal therapy if such a thing were to exist — which, of course, it doesn’t. What contribution he might have had to a symposium which was supposed to bring “scientists and clinicians” together is very unclear.

Providing “balance” for the other side would have been Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican community. He too is a very odd choice. Bishop Robinson may be famous for his groundbreaking position in the church, but there’s no indication that he has any background for speaking about sexual reorientation therapy. Against Dr. Throckmorton and Rev. Mohler (who often speaks in support of reorientation therapy), Rev. Robinson would have been very much out of his element. No wonder Focus On the Family was so excited to mischaracterize the event as a “debate” between Robinson and Mohler to validate their position on sexual reorientation therapy.

That would have left Dr. Scasta as the only one who would have had even a remote possibility of speaking knowledgeably about reorientation therapy as an LGBT-affirming advocate. But unlike Throckmorton, Scasta has not published anything himself concerning sexual reorientation therapy that I’m aware of. With his background as editor of the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy, he may have been able to hold his own just fine, but I’ve not been able to find anything which speaks to his knowledge on this particular subject.

We were about to hear a lot of people talking about people who tried to change their sexual orientation, but it wasn’t clear that we were going to hear a lot of informed people talking about them. And worse, in setting up the symposium they left out the most important perspective: ex-gay survivors. This seems to happen all too often. Christine Bakke, ex-gay survivor and a Beyond Ex-Gay organizer, put the problem this way:

What got lost was the actual people who were doing [the ex-gay ministries]. It’s like a kid in a custody battle.

Well they’re definitely not kids anymore. Over the past year, we’ve seen hundreds of former ex-gays come forward in something that is beginning to resemble a movement. Before now, we all knew they existed — we certainly talked about them a lot — but we are just now starting to hear from them directly in pretty significant numbers — as well as from former ex-gay leaders and spokespersons. The days when they were seen but not heard are clearly over. Their experiences in ex-gay therapy are far too compelling to ignore, and their rapidly growing numbers in just a few short years suggests that many more will follow.

But so far, their existence was been largely overlooked or, worse, dismissed as a stunt. When survivors organized their very first conference in Irvine, California, more than two hundred people showed up. But Exodus International president Alan Chambers responded with snide comments while Focus On the Family spread bold-faced lies about the gathering. Even Dr. Throckmorton cast doubts on the ex-gay survivors motives during their historic, first-ever meeting.

Clearly this new movement has touched a nerve. Before now, the ex-gay movement and their defenders have had a free hand in defining the parameters of debate with very little effective opposition. Beginning in the 1990’s they embarked on a massive television and billboard campaign to convince the world that “ex-gays do exist” and “change is possible.” Exodus International took out full-page ads in national newspapers, and ex-gay ministry leader Michael Johnston appeared in television commercials. This, of course, was before his downfall in 2003 when it was learned that he had been hosting orgies, taking drugs and practicing unsafe sex without disclosing his HIV status.

Dr. Throckmorton himself has contributed to this publicity effort. In 2004, he produced the video “I Do Exist,” which he encouraged churches and schools to show as a counter to National Coming Out Day. In it, he described studies which he claimed documented cases “of people who had changed from completely homosexual to completely heterosexual.” The video featured several ex-gays including Noé Gutierrez, Sarah Lipp, Joanne Highley, and Cheryl and Greg Quinlan. All of these were presented as though they were ordinary, run-of-the-mill ex-gays who had an interesting story to tell.

But Sarah Lipp certainly isn’t an ordinary humble ex-gay picked at random. Her segments were filmed in Chattanooga, where she happens to be the women’s ministry coordinator for the Harvest USA ex-gay ministry, having founded several ex-gay support groups throughout the mid-South. Joanne Highley also leads an ex-gay ministry in New York. She’s an especially interesting character. She describes her lesbian past as having been “under demonic oppression.” She has also said that she heard a voice telling her that she would be “ministering to homosexuals and Jews.” That, of course, is not on the video, where she instead appears as a nice, kindly, and perhaps even a timid older lady.

Also not on the video is Greg Quinlan’s exuberance for manufacturing public confrontations while representing PFOX. He does that when he’s not acting on behalf of his own Dayton-based Pro Family Network. He and his wife Cheryl were very active in promoting Ohio’s anti-marriage constitutional amendment, which is just one example of how ex-gay leaders routinely leverage their own marriages for political causes against LGBT citizens.

In fact, of the five ex-gays appearing in that video, four of them had a personal vocational stake in promoting ex-gay ministries. Not surprisingly, this fits a well-known pattern. In Spitzer’s famous 2003 ex-gay study of people who claimed to have changed, he reported that “the majority of participants (78 percent) had publicly spoken in favor of efforts to change homosexual orientation, often at their church,” and that “nineteen percent of the participants were mental health professionals or directors of ex-gay ministries.” Exodus president Alan Chambers and vice-president Randy Thomas were just two of those participants.

The only person featured in ”I Do Exist” who was not an anti-gay activist was Noé Gutierrez. He proclaimed himself to be “entirely heterosexual” in the video, but after the video’s release he announced that he regretted that his story became a part of “the divisive message of the ex-gay movement.” In a later update to his web site, he described how quickly Exodus International banned him from their annual conferences after he expressed doubts about ex-gay ministries, and some of the harms that he experienced as a fallout from his participation in ex-gay ministries — harms that are remarkably familiar to many ex-gay survivors I’ve talked to over the past year.

Nevertheless, “I Do Exist” is still available for sale on Dr. Throckmorton’s web site.

So yeah, we’ve all heard a lot from ex-gays. They’ve had free reign for nearly two decades to use their lives as examples to argue against advancing the civil rights of their fellow LGBT citizens. And until now, they’ve enjoyed something of a monopoly on the public square. Sure, there have always been activists who argued against sexual reorientation therapy, but many of them — as well-intentioned as they may have been — were often demonstrably uninformed about the movement, and that has diminished both their credibility and their effectiveness.

But now we have real live former ex-gays who, in concordance with their faith, tried to change their lives to fit the only mold their faiths allowed them — only to find themselves outside the false promise of “change” and, worse for some of them, feeling as though they were beyond reconciliation with God. These are people who really tried to bring their lives into congruence with their faiths, and yet this is where their ex-gay experiences left them. Ex-gays and their supporters have been speaking for decades now; it is way past time now for survivors to have a place at the table.

Talking is good, but this forum would not have included the very people who most needed to be heard. Ex-gay survivors really do exist, to borrow a phrase. And until these survivors are invited to speak to those who would presume to speak about them, a critical part of the conversation will remain unheard. And that won’t do anyone any good.

Straight Convention Workers An Epicenter For Potentially Deadly Norovirus

Jim Burroway

May 10th, 2008

It was just last January when the San Francisco Chronicle stoked fears over a new “gay plague” in their article about methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MSRA), a bacterial staph infection that is resistant to certain antibiotics. An article published in the Annals of Internal Medicine documented an outbreak of MRSA in the Castro, which lead anti-gay activists to falsely accuse gay men of spreading MRSA from the gay community into the straight community. The only problem with that charge is that MRSA had been making its rounds among heterosexuals for several decades. Ironically, athletes are at particularly high risk.

The Chronicle headline that started that hysteria read:

S.F. gay community an epicenter for new strain of virulent staph

Today, San Francisco activist Michael Petrelis noticed that this morning’s Chronicle headline about an outbreak of a potentially deadly norovirus among straight workers is very different:

Moscone Center workers sickened by norovirus

San Francisco public health officials are warning of an outbreak of a virus that has sickened dozens of people at Moscone Center.

About 70 people who fell ill had been at the Moscone Center between April 30 and Thursday, authorities said Friday. All but three were staff members working at the convention center, said Moscone spokesman David Perry.

Michael Petrelis observes that while the MRSA story in January hyped fears of a dreaded disease in the gay community infecting the “general population,” this story is being treated by some news outlets as a light-hearted, low-key tech story (this norovirus epidemic started during a JavaOne tech conference) aimed at calming fears rather than stoking them. He noticed that CNET’s coverage was downright adolescent:

To clarify, this is a virus that makes you barf and gives you diarrhea. It’s not the kind of virus that sends Viagra-pitching e-mails to all your friends or treats you to a Rick Astley sing-along every time you turn on your computer.

No, you won’t drop dead from it. Norovirus is better known as one of the viruses that causes a nasty stomach flu. Symptoms only last about a day or two, but it’s highly contagious. Just to up the gross-out factor: Norovirus is found in the fecal matter or vomit of people who are infected. If they don’t wash their hands properly, they spread it when they handle food or drinks.

What a difference. When it was gays coming down with MRSA, headlines screamed, “New Superbug Hitting Gay Men” or “Flesh-eating bug spreads among gays.” This time, it’s “Did you get infected? Virus runs amok amid JavaOne.”

The norovirus is passed exactly the same way as MRSA — by people who don’t wash up. And get this: fecal matter is a culprit. That detail is an anti-gay activist’s wet dream. I wonder when Matt Barber and Peter LaBarbera will exploit this latest danger coming from the heterosexual community.

Hat tip: Michael Petrelis.

Focus On the Family’s Familiar New Logo

Jim Burroway

May 1st, 2008

Focus On the Family has finally retired its old, tired logo in favor of this new one:

Right away, I thought that logo looked familiar:

So there you have it: more evidence of their total embrace of their sinister agenda.

See also:
The Heterosexual Agenda: Exposing the Myths

Heterosexual Incestuous Sex Slave

Timothy Kincaid

April 30th, 2008

In the Box Turtle Bulletin’s The Heterosexual Agenda: Exposing The Myths, Jim Burroway satirically illustrates how heterosexual militant activists are destroying society.

Here’s yet another example.

Josef Fritzl locked his 18 year old daughter in the basement so he could continue having sex with her… in 1984. She, and the children he subsequently fathered, have been there since. Upstairs, his wife never noticed.

Which all goes to show just why you can’t trust heterosexuals with marriage or children.

Colorado Springs Gazette Defends Paul Cameron

Jim Burroway

April 28th, 2008

This was shocking. Two weeks ago, the Colorado Springs Gazette defended Paul Cameron against the Southern Poverty Law Center’s naming his Family Research Institute a hate group:

The story about elevated hatred included a list of Colorado hate groups, as identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center - a thoroughly discredited organization that labels organizations with opposing political philosophies as hate mongers.

The new Colorado list includes the Colorado Springs-based Family Research Institute. The conservative fundamentalist organization is headed by Paul Cameron, a psychologist and reviewer for the British Medical Journal, Psychological Reports and the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association. The organization’s mission is “to generate empirical research on issues that threaten the traditional family, particularly homosexuality, AIDS, sexual social policy, and drug abuse.”

There’s no question about it: The Family Research Institute opposes homosexuality, and goes out of its way to discourage and besmirch it. It’s controversial, ideological, politically incorrect and unpopular. But is it a hate group, like the Ku Klux Klan or a Nazi skinhead club? Far from it.

Far from it? Really? Cameron has more in common with a Nazi skinhead club than the Gazette seems to realize. Perhaps the editors of the Gazette needs to look over his 1999 article in which he admires how Nazi Germany (and specifically Rudolph Höss) “handled homosexuals” in Dachau and Sachsenhausen.

Instead of casting aspersions against the Southern Poverty Law Center and coming to the defense of a man who proposes similar draconian “solutions” for homosexuality in this country, the Gazette ought to consider engaging in a practice we like to call journalism. A hate group like a Nazi skinhead club? It’s exactly like a Nazi skinhead club.

The editorial board of the Colorado Springs Gazette is the latest to join our growing list of Cameron supporters. And I’ll once again ask the question I ask everyone who joins the list: Do the Gazette’s editors agree with Cameron’s draconian agenda?

Hat tip: Mike Airhart.

Janelle Hallman Cites Paul Cameron

Jim Burroway

April 26th, 2008

Also joining the list of Cameron supporters is Janelle Hallman. She’s the ex-gay therapist who reached for discredited “researcher” Paul Cameron in her brand new book, The Heart of Female Same-Sex Attraction: A Comprehensive Counseling Resource.

Hallman is a frequent speaker at NARTH and Exodus conferences. When social conservatives like Hallman reach for Cameron, they breath new life into his Nazi sympathizing agenda. At the very least, when they confuse his unethical and illegitimate faux “research” for the real thing, it rightly calls into question their own judgment as professionals.

LifeSite Continues to Cite Paul Cameron

Jim Burroway

April 26th, 2008

The unofficial Roman Catholic LifeSiteNews is an amazing piece of work. They managed to turn a study about large families into an anti-gay tract. And Paul Cameron was right there to help them:

While the UM study shows the health benefits of the traditional large family, other recent studies have revealed the health dangers of non-traditional social relations.

A recent study found that individuals taking part in legal same-sex “marriages” in Norway and Denmark lived 24 fewer years than individuals in traditional marriages, Drs. Paul and Kirk Cameron reported at the 2007 annual Eastern Psychological Association convention.

The man has no shame whatsoever. Not only was his so-called “study” completely bogus and easily refuted, Cameron is still repeating the lie that he “reported” his study at the 2007 annual Eastern Psychological Association convention. You may remember we obtained a statement from EPA president Dr. Phil Hineline exposing Cameron’s boldface lie just a little over a year ago.

But LifeSite really seems to like Cameron. This is the eighth time they’ve turned to him. Like I said, they’re a real piece of work.

The Real Threat Of Same Sex Marriage

Jim Burroway

April 26th, 2008

The New York Times Magazine has a very illuminative story on young gays getting married. It turns out that they have a lot of goofy and ordinary similarities to their straight counterparts. They meet, fall in love, and then they start to figure out what that means to them. For many, that means “settling down,” which comes as a surprise to those who had no intention of settling down — just like a lot of straight couples.

And I think that this the real “threat” that social conservatives find in same-sex marriage: it humanizes us.

They’ve established a massive multi-million dollar industry to convince Americans that gays and lesbians are evil monsters threatening western civilization. Focus On the Family has 1300 employees. Think of it: that’s larger than many factories. And they use their massive resources — their broadcast outlets and their print publications — to portray us as being a part of an evil agenda bringing America to its knees. And until now, they’ve had free reign to say whatever they want about gay people. When few Americans were able to see real world examples to counter their false stereotype, it represented a very powerful wedge.

But gay couples getting married and setting up households couldn’t be more conventional. It is tangible evidence that we’re not all that different in many important ways. We get together for all the same reasons — good and bad — that straight couples do. Some of our relationships are long lasting and monogamous (something that social conservatives say is impossible) and some fall apart or experience a series of affairs (just like straight couples’ marriage.) Some should never have gotten together in the first pla