Box Turtle Bulletin

Today In History, 1963: American Psychological Association Refuses To Meet With Gay Rights Groups

One of the top goals of the early gay rights movement was to get the mental health professions to remove homosexuality from their list of mental disorders. As long as homosexuality remained listed, governmental agencies and private companies had all the excuse they needed to discriminate against gays and lesbians.

The biggest problem was that the mental health community reached their determination about gays being mentally deficient based on all the prior research which had only studied people who were confined to mental hospitals or were seen in clinical settings. In 1957, Psychologist Evelyn Hooker began publishing the results of a series of tests which demonstrated that gays and lesbians who weren’t patients of mental health professionals were indistinguishable from heterosexuals (Aug 30). And if mental health professionals couldn’t pick gays and lesbians out from among their heterosexual counterparts, then there couldn’t be anything about homosexuality which made gays and leasbians inherrently mentally ill.

Despite the strength of this new evidence, it would still take many years for it to sink in. In 1963, the American Psychological Association was preparing to meet in Philadelphia for their annual convention. Leading gay activists, under the banner of the newly-formed East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) also planned to meet in Philadelphia at the same time, and they proposed a meeting with members of the APA. But the APA convention’s organizing committee declined the invitation. In a very brief letter to leading gay rights activist Frank Kameny (May 21) and the Washington, D.C., Mattachine Society, the APA simply said, “This problem” — yes, the APA saw the meeting as a problem — “has already been considered by the Convention Committee and it was decided that it was not in the best interests of the APA to meet with you, nor to publicize your meetings.”

Another nine years would pass before Kameny and Daughters of Bilitis New York activist Barbara Gittings would appear with Dr. John E. Fryer (as “Dr. H. Anonymous”) on a panel discussion on homosexuality with the American Psychiatric Association (the other APA, which is the keeper of the list of mental disorders known as the DSM) (May 2). That appearance would wind up being a key moment leading to the APA finally striking homosexuality from its list of mental disorders (see Dec 15).

Today In History, 1976: Toronto’s Gay Kiss-In

Left to right: David Foreman, Tim McCaskell, Ed Jackson, Merv Walker, David Gibson, Michael Riordon.

40 YEARS AGO: On February 12, Bill Holloway and Tom Field were in front of a Hudson Bay store in Toronto, posing for photos for an article on homophobia. The photos were to depict the two of them kissing, right there out in the open, on the streets, where anyone could see them. When a police officer saw them, right there out on the street, he arrested the two and charged them with committing an indecent act: kissing. On July 12, they were found guilty of committing an indecent act, kissing, and fined $50 each (CAN$210 today).

Gay leaders were outraged. “Gay people can kiss their rights good-bye,” said Tom Warne, president of the Gay Alliance Toward Equality (GATE). “It looks as if there’s now a legal precedent that can be used against gays who want to express their affection in public. I feel certain that a straight couple in the same situation would not have been charged.” As Tim McCaskell explained in 2015:

The two arrested men were part of this “Alternative to Alienation” collective, which was kind of flaky. They weren’t particularly a gay group, but they were sexual liberation, psychological stuff, anti-capitalist. It was all this primeval muck of that 1970s period.

But when it actually came down to it, they hired a lawyer who said we don’t want any kind of politics around this at all. So they were found guilty. And they said they were going to appeal. And they didn’t appeal, just paid the fine. And it was over. But for those of us in the gay liberation movement, that left this precedent on the law books that two men kissing in public was a crime, because they hadn’t fought it. So in order to be able to try to challenge that, we organized a kiss-in.

On July 17, GATE and The Body Politic, Toronto’s gay newspaper, went back to the scene of the crime, and committed that same crime again. As The Body Politic reported:

About 20 gays paraded in couples and triples, kissing as they walked. Occasionally, the group would stop and create a small circle of kissers

Reaction from passers-by was mixed. The group had prepared an attractive hand-bill which explained the situation, and those who look the time to read it seemed convinced of the injustice. Others were offended, a few were outraged. Although about a half dozen police arrived on the scene during the course of the hour-long event, they merely watched from the sidelines and did not interrupt. The kissers were careful to keep moving so that no one could be charged with obstructing the sidewalk.

Gerald Hannon was one of the kissers:

It’s hard to imagine now, when it’s pretty easy. You were supposed to be ashamed of yourself. This was a good way of showing that we weren’t. … U think we felt mostly exhilaration that we were doing it. You know, the exhilaration you get when you go out on the edge of a building, where you’re both excited and you feel slightly in danger. It was that kind of mix of feelings. We didn’t really expect anyone would come and beat us up. (But) the police (charging us was) also a possibility. I mean, they’d already done it once.

No one was arrested, but because there was now documented evidence that police did not intervene to bring a halt to those indecent acts, kissing, it established a kind of precedent that would make any more such prosecutions difficult. A week later, protesters were back again, this time for an old-fashioned picket in front of old City Hall, which housed the court room where the convictions took place. “Again, the event attracted a crowd of interested bystanders,” reported The Body Politic. “Ironically, the demonstration played itself out against a background of wedding parties being photographed on the steps of the historic building.”

[Additional source: “Kiss-In Protests Conviction of Kissers.” The Body Politic (September 1976): 3. Available online here.]

Methodists Elect First Openly Gay Bishop

In defiance of a United Methodist ban on ordaining “self-avowed practicing homosexuals,” delegates of the Western Jurisdictional Conference meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona, selected Rev. Karen Oliveto to be the denomination’s first openly gay/lesbian bishop. Ovieto is the senior pastor of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, which has a pro-LGBT history that goes back nearly six decades. Ovieto’s election came after two days and seventeen ballots. Two other contenders withdrew just before the seventeenth vote:

“I think at this moment I have a glimpse of the realm of God. I want to thank the candidates who I have journeyed with these past few days, for the grace with which we walked with each other. And know I stand before you because of the work and prayers of so many, especially those saints who yearned to live for this day, who blazed a trail where there was none, who are no longer with us, and yet whose shoulders I stand on,” Oliveto said after her election.

She especially thanked the delegates of the Western Jurisdiction “who dared to live into this Kairos moment. Today we took a step closer to embody beloved community and while we may be moving there, we are not there yet. We are moving on to perfection,” Oliveto said.

She said as along as people “walk by our churches and wonder” if they belong, because of race, sexuality orientation, ethnicity, social class or immigration status, then “we have work to do.”

Bishop Bruce R. Ough, president of the United Methodist Council of Bishops, responded in a statement:

Rev. Oliveto has been described as “an openly lesbian clergyperson.” This election raises significant concerns and questions of church polity and unity.

Our Book of Discipline has clearly delineated processes in place for resolving issues even as complex and unprecedented as this election.

The authority to elect bishops is constitutionally reserved to the jurisdictional and central conferences. Any elder in good standing is eligible for election as a bishop of the church. An elder under an unresolved complaint is still considered to be in good standing. Being a self-avowed, practicing homosexual is a chargeable offense for any clergyperson in The United Methodist Church, if indeed this is the case.

The Council of Bishops is monitoring this situation very closely. The Council does not have constitutional authority to intervene in the election or supervisory processes at either the annual conference, jurisdictional or central conference levels. And, we are careful to not jeopardize any clergy or lay person’s due process by ill-advised comments.

Ough cautioned that “an endless cycle of actions, reactions and counter-reactions is not a viable path and tears at the very fabric of our Connections. …Our differences are real and cannot be glossed over, but they are also reconcilable.”

The United Methodist Reporter provided some background:

Most Annual Conferences in the Western Jurisdiction passed resolutions that said sexual orientation should not be a consideration for qualifications to be bishop. The 2012 Discipline only indicates that “Elders in good standing” are eligible to be Bishop, and many Annual Conferences interpreted that as not a bar to sexual orientation. All of the episcopal candidates in the West are in good standing.

However, some are wondering the implications of this election, given the United Methodist Book of Discipline’s proscriptions against homosexual clergy being ordained as ministers in the UMC. While a complaint could be made, it would have to be filed with the Western Jurisdiction College of Bishops and they generally been more inclusive of LGBTQ persons in ministry in the past.

Rev. Oliveto was formally consecrated this afternoon at Paradise Valley UMC in Scottsdale.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

From The Blade (Washington, D.C.), December 1976, page 13.

Lambda Rising opened in 1974 in a tiny 300 square foot space with 250 titles, and it quickly became a kind of an informal community center for Washington, D.C.’s gay community. From those humble beginnings, it moved in 1984 to a larger 4,800 square foot, two-story space on Connecticut Avenue and expanded to three other locations in Baltimore, Richmond, and Rehoboth Beach. In 2003, Lambda Rising bought the venerable Oscar Wilde Book Shop in New York and saved it from certain closure. But the rise of Amazon.com and the willingness of general bookstores to carry LGBT titles cut into Lambda Rising’s business. Lambda Rising sold Oscar Wilde in 2006, and closed its three expansion bookstores between 2007 and 2009. The main store on Connecticut Avenue finally closed its doors for good on December 31, 2010.

Born On This Day, 1943: Reinaldo Arenas

(d. 1990) His background would have made him  tailor-made for Fidel Castro’s revolutionary Cuba. Arenas was born to a destitute family in the rural Oriente province, Castro’s native province and the cradle of the revolution that Arenas joined as a teenager. Arenas moved to Havana in 1961, and became a researcher at the José Martí­ National Library from 1963 to 1966. His 1965 semi-autobiographical novel, Singing from the Well, was the first novel of his five-part Pentagonia (The Five Agonies) series, which he described as “the secret history of Cuba.” Singing From the Well was awarded a first honorable mention by a committee of Cuban writers, and the Prix Médicis in France four years later.

Singing From the Well would be Arenas’s only novel to be published in Cuba. And because of his open homosexuality, its printing in Cuba never extended beyond its initial run of 2,000 copies. Cuba’s benefactor, the Soviet Union, saw homosexuality as a product of a decadent capitalist society, ideas which easily took root in Cuba which already had its own entrenched homophobic qualities. Castro regarded regarded homosexuality as a bourgeois decadence. “In the country, there are no homosexuals,” he once said, and declared that “we would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true Revolutionary, a true Communist militant.” New laws were passed and concentration camps were opened to house Cuba’s homosexuals, particularly effeminate men, who were believed to have violated the ideal of Cuba’s “new man.” Those prison camps were supposed to turn these men into the New Man through forced labor, scarce food, shaved heads, and physical mistreatment.

Arenas avoided that fate and managed to find work as a journalist and editor for the literary magazine La Caceta de Cuba. Meanwhile, he was prohibited from publishing any more novels abroad while the government refused to publish his books at home. His second novel, Hallucinations, published abroad in 1968, violated that ban. In 1970, Arenas was officially branded a “social misfit” and sentenced to a labor camp to cut sugar cane. When he still managed to get his works smuggled out of Cuba and into the hands of foreign publishers, the Cuban government branded him a counterrevolutionary and sent him to the notorious El Morro Prison from 1974 to 1976. But Arenas kept writing, both in and out of prison. He wrote Farewell to the Sea three times because the authorities kept confiscating it. He dedicated his epic poem, El Central, to “my dear friend R., who made me a present of 87 sheets of blank paper.” He tried to escape Cuba, but the attempt ending in failure and more imprisonment. He was finally able to escape during the 1980 Mariel boatlift thanks to a bureaucratic snafu.

On arriving in the United States, he settled to New York and launched a frenzied period of writing: novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and newspaper articles. The two decade saw the publication of the rest of Pentagonia, with The Palace of the White Skunks (1982), Farewell to the Sea (1987), The Color of Summer, (1990), and The Assault (1992). The last major work he wrote was his autobiography, Before Night Falls, which was posthumously published in 1992. Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian author, praised Before Night Falls and Arena’s uncompromisingly frank — some may say explicit — depiction of his homosexuality in defiance of the homophobia of his Spanish-speaking audience: “This is one of the most moving testimonies that has ever been written in our language about oppression and rebellion, but few will dare to acknowledge this fact since the book, although one reads it with an uncontrollable appetite, has the perverse power of leaving its readers uncomfortable”

Weak with AIDS, without health insurance and living in poverty, Arenas killed himself in his Hell’s Kitchen apartment on December 7, 1990. He titled his final poem Self-Epitaph:

A bad poet in love with the moon,
he counted terror as his only fortune:
and it was enough because, being no saint,
he knew that life is risk or abstinence,
that every great ambition is great insanity
and the most sordid horror has its charm.

He lived for life’s sake, which means seeing death
as a daily occurrence on which we wager
a splendid body or our entire lot.
He knew the best things are those we abandon
— precisely because we are leaving.
The everyday becomes’ hateful,
there’ s just one place to live, the impossible.
He knew imprisonment offenses
typical of human baseness;
but was always escorted by a certain stoicism
that helped him walk the tightrope
or enjoy the morning’s glory,
And when he tottered, a window would appear
for him to jump toward infinity.

He wanted no ceremony, speech, mourning or cry,
no sandy mound where his skeleton be laid to rest
(not even after death he wished to live in peace).
He ordered that his ashes be scattered at sea
where they would be in constant flow.
He hasn’t lost the habit of dreaming:
he hopes some adolescent will plunge into his waters.

Born On This Day, 1956: Tony Kushner

60 YEARS AGO: He is most acclaimed for his Pulitzer prize-winning play, Angels In America, the seven-hour epic about the AIDS crises in the Ed Koch-era of New York. Kushner wrote the play for eight actors, but stipulated that each of the actors was to play multiple roles (including multiple genders) throughout the production. When he adapted the play for an HBO miniseries starring Meryl Streep and Al Pacino, the same construct was applied. In addition to the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Kushner won the Tony Awards for Best Play in 1993 and 1994 (Angels In America is actually in two parts, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, each having its own separate Broadway debut.)

After the turn of the new millennium, Kushner began writing for film, co-writing the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s Munich. Most recently, he was the screenwriter for Spielberg’s Lincoln, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, for which Kushner won an Academy Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA, and a Writers Guild award for best adapted screenplay. In 2013, Kushner was one of twenty-four recipients for the National Medal of Arts and Humanities from President Barack Obama.

Earlier This Week, The GOP Platform Committee Declared Porn a Public Health Crisis

I scoffed the time, but now I have to apologize. It looks like the crisis is way worse than I thought:

Twitter, naturally, is having a field day:

@JohnDingell I don't know but I'm fairly sure Pence will want to make it illegal.

— Tom Davidson (@DPTomDavidson) July 15, 2016

Trumppence logo suggests that before this is all over, Mike Pence is going to bleeding out of his wherever.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) July 15, 2016

#ThatAwkwardMoment when the #TrumpPence logo gets to third base on itself. pic.twitter.com/LbSwF3RsLp

— Eric Wolfson (@EricWolfson) July 15, 2016

"When two people love each other very much and want to start a campaign together…" pic.twitter.com/OkOncMsbth

— Ellie Hall (@ellievhall) July 15, 2016

Hypocrtical liberals mocking the #TrumpPence logo haven't even asked poor @GovPenceIN if he needs a safe space! https://t.co/Lxld2lhmWr

— Scott Wooledge (@Clarknt67) July 15, 2016

.#TrumpPence New Logo explodes on Twitter – pic.twitter.com/oMlq0rPkNv

— Puesto Loco (@PuestoLoco) July 15, 2016

How are we supposed to explain the new Trump logo to our children??

— Will Rahn (@willrahn) July 15, 2016

The Trump Pence logo is what happens when you can't find a single gay graphic designer willing to work for you.

— Craig Mazin (@clmazin) July 15, 2016

trump: perfect logo. it's not gay if you're the one giving.

— kimplesimple (@kept_simple) July 15, 2016

It’s Trump-Pence

I am pleased to announce that I have chosen Governor Mike Pence as my Vice Presidential running mate. News conference tomorrow at 11:00 A.M.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 15, 2016

You, of course, remember Indiana Gov. Mike Pence for his bumbling, bungling handling of Indiana’s ill-fated right-to-discriminate law. Pence has positioned himself as political poison among LGBT voters and many women, while Trump’s name is poison to African Americans and Latino voters. Which I guess makes this the ultimate Republican diversity ticket.

Today’s Agenda Is Brought To You By…

Today In History: 1962: New York’s WBAI Radio Broadcasts Talk Show Featuring Eight Gay Men

Randy Wicker

There had long been an inherent tension among the various local chapters of the Mattachine Society between those who, because of their experience with the McCarthy-led Lavendar Scare witchhunt in the early 1950s, feared public scrutiny and exposure, and those who argued for greater visibility. Randy Wicker (see Feb 3) was among the latter. To get around some of the group’s objections, Wicker established a separate entity he called the Homosexual League of New York, an organization that consisted solely of himself, and which gave him the freedom to act independently while giving others a sense that there was an organization behind him.

Earlier in 1962 WBAI, New York’s listener-supported progressive Pacifica radio station, aired an hour-long special, “The Homosexual In America.” It was typical for its day, featuring a panel of psychiatrists describing gay people as sick and in need of a cure — a cure that they could provide with just a few hours of therapy. Wicker was incensed, not only at the ignorance of these so-called “experts,” but also because, once again, there was a panel of straight people talking about gay people with nary a gay person in sight.

Wicker marched into the WBAI studios and confronted Dick Elman, the station’s public affairs director. “Why do you have these people on that don’t know a damn thing about homosexuality? They don’t live it and breathe it the way I do. … I spend my whole life in gay society.” Wicker demanded equal time and Elman agreed, as long as Wicker could find other gay people willing to go on the air as part of a panel.  When plans for the program were announced, the New York Journal-American went ballistic. Jack O’Brian, the paper’s radio-TV columnist, wrote that the station should change its callsign to WSICK for agreeing to air an “arrogant card-carrying swish. …We’ve heard of silly situations in broadcasting, but FM station WBAI wins our top prize for scraping the sockly barrel-bottom.”

WBAI went ahead despite the controversy and the program, titled “Live and Let Live,” featured Wicker and seven other gay men talking for ninety minutes about what it was like to be gay.  They talked about their difficulties in maintaining careers, the problems of police harassment, and the social responsibility of gays and straights alike. The program’s host guided the programs with questions to the panel. “Is there harassment?” he asked. One panelist described a policeman who “roared up, jumped out of the car, grabbed me, and started giving me this big thing about ‘What are you doing here, you know there are a lot of queers around this neighborhood.’ He said, ‘You know, there’s only one thing worse than a queer, and that’s a nigger’.”

The following morning, The New York Times’s Jack Gould called the program “the most extensive consideration of the subject to be heard on American radio” — a statement that betrays his own unawareness of several similar programs which had already aired on radio and television in San Francisco and Los Angeles years earlier. Nevertheless, he wrote that “it succeeded, one would think in encouraging a wider understanding of the homosexual’s attitudes and problems.” Newsweek called the program “96 minutes of intriguing, if intellectually inconclusive listening.” A group of listeners lodged a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission and challenge the station’s broadcast license. When the FCC recognized the broadcast as a legitimate exercise in free speech, it signaled to other radio and television stations that homosexuality was an acceptable topic for broadcast (see Jan 23).

Born On This Day, 1903: Samuel Reber, Jr.

(d. 1971) He was a well-regarded American diplomat with twenty-seven years’ experience in the Foreign Service. During World War II, Reber scored a significant diplomatic win by getting Vichy France to agree that French colonies and possessions, ships and planes in the Caribbean would not be used by the Axis powers, an agreement which underscored Vichy’s weakness as a French power. Reber then joined the Allied Control Commission in Italy, and from there he served as the U.S. representative to the Allied French government in 1944. By 1946, he was a political adviser to the U.S. delegation at the Council of Foreign Ministers Conference in Paris. In 1947 he was director of the State Department’s Office of European Affairs, and in 1950 he joined in the Allied High Commission as an adviser for the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany.

Beginning in 1948, Reber faced his greatest diplomatic challenge while working for an Austrian peace treaty after enduring years of threats and insults from the Soviet Union. His work ultimately laid the groundwork for an independent Austria remaining outside of the Soviet block. But the treaty guaranteeing that independence wouldn’t come about until two years after Reber was forced out of the State Department in 1953. That’s when Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare — and the accompanying Lavender Scare — was in full force in the U.S. Senate. McCarthy charged that the upper ranks of the State Department were filled with communists and homosexuals, prompting a wide-ranging witch hunt within the department. Reber was called in for a polygraph test and interrogations on March 17 and 19, 1953. That investigation uncovered “a lot of admissions” about homosexuality. When McCarthy threatened to reveal allegations of Reber’s homosexuality, Reber announced his retirement in May 1953, effective July 15 when he turned 50.

Because of Reber’s high profile, the reasons for his sudden resignation quickly spread through diplomatic and political circles. In 1954, McCarthy used Reber’s resignation against Reber’s brother, Major General Miles Reber, who was called to testify on the first day of the Army-McCarthy hearings. According to Time magazine:

Returning to twist the dirk already thrust into the Reber brothers, McCarthy asked General Reber: “Are you aware of the fact that your brother was allowed to resign when charges that he was a bad security risk were made against him as a result of the investigation of this committee?” Jenkins roared in protest. McClellan roared in protest. McCarthy talked on, stuck to his question. General Reber sat in silence, gripping the edges of the witness table until his knuckles showed white. Finally, McCarthy, having made his point over radio and television, dismissed the entire question as unimportant, and grandly said he would withdraw it.

But West Pointer Reber would not have it so. In a voice thick with emotion, he asked to be allowed to answer the “very serious charge” made against his brother. After another long argument, Reber said simply: “. . . As I understand my brother’s case, he retired, as he is entitled to do by law, upon reaching the age of 50 … I know nothing about any security case involving him.” With a sigh of relief, Chairman Mundt dismissed Reber, thanking him for his frank manner—a remark to which McCarthy, who seemed determined to resent any civility, made a formal objection.

After retirement, Reber served as Executive Secretary of the New York City Goethe Haus, a German cultural exchange association. In 1958, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) warded him its Knight Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit. He died in Princeton, New Jersey, on Christmas Day of 1971.

Born On This Day, 1961: David Cicilline

55 YEARS AGO: When he was elected mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, in a landslide in 2002, David Cicilline became the first openly gay man to become mayor of a state capital. He held that position until 2011, when he went to Congress to represent Rhode Island in the U.S. House of Representatives after a surprisingly close race against his Republican opponent in what was supposed to be a safe Democratic seat. When he joined Congress, he became one of four openly gay representatives in the House. Cicilline was re-elected in 2012, despite falling approval ratings which were partly due to Providence’s near bankruptcy in the wake of Cicilline’s eight years as mayor.

In Congress, Cicilline has been a strong advocate for gun control, so much so that the National Rifle Association gave him an F- lifetime score. He has also declared his support for veterans access to health care, mental health services, housing and education. He co-sponsored the Veterans Dog Training Therapy Act which provides trained therapy dogs for veterans suffering from PTSD.

David Barton Claimed His Anti-Gay Remarks Were “Taken Out of Context and Mischaracterized.” Here’s the Context.

I’ve decided that no one in the English-speaking world has more fun telling tall tales than fourth- and fifth-generation West Texans. My partner hails from Fort Stockton. His brother loves telling tall tails. And when he does, there’s his mother revealing another fine talent that it seems Texans of all stripes posses: the pithy putdown. Think Ann Richards. After another tall tale, Chris’s mom always chimes in. “Ricky! You’d climb a tree to tell a lie!” In other words: Even when telling the truth is much, much easier, Ricky would rather exert the added physical effort to avoid doing so.

Which, of course, brings us to David Barton, another Texan from Aledo, just west of Ft. Worth. A fake historian who got his Bachelor’s degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University, Barton has climbed an entire rainforest of trees in his adult lifetime. Barton also happens to be a member of the Republican National Convention’s platform committee which just approved what the Log Cabin Republicans call the “most anti-LGBT platform in the party’s history.” On Monday, when the platform committee was about halfway through its work, The Daily Beast’s Tim Mak confronted Barton over just a couple of his anti-gay statements:

And David Barton, a committee member from Texas, believes that God is preventing the medical profession from finding a cure for HIV/AIDS, and claimed that gay people die “decades earlier” than others and have more than 500 partners apiece in their lifetimes.

Barton told The Daily Beast that these statements did not represent his views, and this was “an example of something taken out of context and mischaracterized. I’m an advocate for faith-based conservative values, which include love, grace, and truth, focusing on traditional family values.”

One might wonder what kind of context could possible render those arguments reasonable. Barton, of course, doesn’t explain. But he’s right: context is always important. Which is why Right Wing Watch re-posted the full context of those remarks:

In the case of his claim that gay people die “decades earlier” and have hundreds of sexual partners, Barton said that on his radio program back in 2010, when he was somewhat facetiously making the case that the government should regulate gay people’s sex lives.

Barton argued that since the government seeks to regulate all sorts of things that are unhealthy, it should also regulate consensual sex between members of the same gender because it is not only dangerous for those who practice it but bad for society as well:

Homosexual/bi-sexual individuals are seven times more likely to contemplate or commit suicide. Oooh, that doesn’t sound very healthy.

Homosexuals die decades earlier than heterosexuals. That doesn’t sound healthy.

Nearly one-half of practicing homosexuals admit to five hundred or more sex partners and nearly one-third admit to a thousand or more sex partners in a lifetime.

Those statistics are not only stale — invented in the late 1980s — but they were invented out of whole cloth by Paul Cameron, using methods that got him barred or censured by every relevant professional professional organization in North America. Birds of a feather and all that.

As for Barton’s claim that God was preventing the medical profession from finding a cure for AIDS, let’s go to the videos. Here’s Barton at Charis Bible College in Woodland Park, Colorado, in March 2015:

…anything the Bible says is right, there is scientific basis for it now. It’s fun to be able to show that. So, these guys, homosexuals — I’ll say guys, I’m from Texas, that’s guys and girls. Everybody’s “guys” in Texas . So these guys, homosexuals, lesbians, they want AIDS stopped. You saw the prevalence: sixty times higher than the general population, et cetera. And what they’re looking for is a vaccine. So the federal government in the last several years as spent tens of billions of dollars looking for a vaccine for AIDS — HIV/AIDS. And I don’t think they will ever find a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. And I say that based on a particular Bible verse. If you look at what Romans 1:27 says. This is what the Scripture says. It says, “Men, leaving natural relations with the woman, lusted toward each other and did that which is wrong receiving in their bodies the penalty due them.” And notice this: homosexuals receive in their bodies the penalty due them. The Bible says that if you engage in homosexuality, your body will do things that will penalize you. So if you can have a vaccine for AIDS, then you’re keeping your body from penalizing you. I don’t think they’ll ever find a vaccine for AIDS.

And that was not just a one-off thing. A month later, Barton gave the same talk at Faith Baptist Church in Knightdale, North Carolina:

The population where AIDS is increasing is the homosexual population, and that’s why these guys are looking for a vaccine. They’ve spent about 26 billion dollars of federal money to find a vaccine and so far they have not found a vaccine. There’s been no vaccine that they have found for AIDS. Now in my opinion I don’t think they ever will find a vaccine for AIDS. Well that’s pretty callous isn’t it? No. Actually, I’m just using what the Bible says here. Romans 1:27, this is what the Scripture says: “Men, leaving natural relations with the woman, lusted toward each other and did that which is wrong receiving in their bodies the penalties (sic) due them.” Notice the last phrase: homosexuals receive in their bodies the penalties due them. If you can find a vaccine for AIDS, then you’re not receiving in your body the penalty.

Now, you know why they haven’t found a vaccine for AIDS so far? [It] is AIDS is the fastest known transmuting virus in the history of mankind. It is. Every time they get right on the verge — “Oh we finally have a discovery!” — AIDS is like dominos on the board. They just reshuffle and it comes out, “Oh my gosh, we’ve to to start from ground zero again.” They get real close to a vaccine and then it reshuffles — and every time they get close it just reshuffles. It’s a transmuting virus. They can’t identify it. Every time they get close, it becomes something new and they have to start again.

Now, that was my position that I don’t think you will find a cure for it based on Romans 1:27. But I acknowledge that I make mistakes. And so when this article came out: “for the first time ever, an HIV vaccine shows success in trial.” You go, well I must have misinterpreted because, you know, this… And then about six weeks later, this article came out and says “NIH halts trial of HIV vaccine after it fails to work.” They made a big splash, “Oh we finally have one that works!” And then they went back and tested it and said, “That doesn’t work! It’s just like all the others.” So, to this point, there is still no cure for that behavior which is the result of their body’s penalizing them for what they do in homosexuality. That’s just what the Bible says.

So, so many trees. Barton had actually trotted out those vaccine headlines a month earlier in Colorado, and Grove City College professor Warren Throckmorton tracked them down:

The problem with Barton’s presentation is that the second headline didn’t come out “six weeks later.” Rather it came out four years later in 2013 and was about an entirely different attempt to create a vaccine.

The Yahoo News article Barton referred to (the second headline) is only available via Internet Archives and is dated April 26, 2013. The Yahoo article linked to the NIH announcement that the HVTN 505 clinical trial had been halted. The HVTN 505 trial results had nothing to do with the earlier success of RV 144. The RV 144 trial was reported in 2009, the same year that the HVTN 505 started. The NIH has more on the HVTN 505 trial on the NIH website.

Barton got the time frame wrong and made it appear that the two headlines were related to each other.

When the second video came out, Throckmorton added:

Barton’s use of the headlines is extremely deceptive. In fact, progress continues to be made which builds upon the modestly successful vaccine already available. In fact, R144 vaccine does offer protection from HIV infection. An extension of the success of R144 is being conducted in South Africa now.

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Today In History, 1999: Vatican Orders Priest and Nun To Halt Pro-Gay Ministry

Sr. Jeannine Gramick, Fr. Robert Nugent

New Ways Ministry, founded in 1977 by Sr. Jeannine Gramick and Fr. Robert Nugent, was (and still is) “a gay-positive ministry of advocacy and justice for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Catholics, and reconciliation within the larger Christian and civil communities.” The ministry’s name was inspired by a 1976 pastoral letter by Bishop Francis J. Mugavero of Brooklyn which, while emphasizing “chastity is a virtue which liberates the human person,” nevertheless “pledge[d] our willingness to help you bear your burdens, to try to find new ways to communicate the truth of Christ because we believe it will make you free.”

Free from what, exactly, the letter didn’t say. (This was before the religious ex-gay movement was founded in 1976.) But Sr. Gramick and Fr. Nugent saw that the clearest path to freedom was to create wider acceptance for gay and lesbian Catholics within the Catholic Church. Sr. Gramick came by her advocacy for gay people a few years earlier while working on her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, where she befriended a gay man and began ministering to those who had left the Church because of its stance toward gay people. Fr. Nugent had been involved with pastoral ministry and counseling to gay Catholics since 1971. When Fr. Nugent and Sr. Gramick co-founded New Ways Ministry at Mt. Rainier, MD., they attracted almost immediate attention from the Church’s hierarchy. Archbishop of Washington James Cardinal Hickey’s criticisms led the Vatican in 1984 to order Fr. Nugent’s and Sr. Gramick’s resignation from New Way. They complied, but continued speaking and writing about gay and lesbian issues within the church.

On July 14, 1999, the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, published a “Notification regarding Sr. Gramick and Fr. Nugent“, from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), which is charged with enforcing adherence to Catholic doctrines. The CDF, under the leadership of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (who would later become Pope Benedict XVI), “permanently prohibited” Sr. Gramick and Fr. Nugent “from any pastoral work involving homosexual persons and are ineligible, for an undetermined period, for any office in their respective religious institutes.”

Fr. Nugent responded with a lengthy statement describing his experience with Vatican officials during the previous two decades. That prompted a further order from the Vatican prohibiting him from speaking any further “about the Notification itself, about the ecclesiastical processes that led to it or about the issue of homosexuality.” Fr. Nugent then decided to return to parish-based ministry. He retired at age 75 in 2014, and passed away the following year.

Sr. Gramick refused to complying with the silencing. “I choose not to collaborate in my own oppression by restricting a basic human right [to speak]. To me this is a matter of conscience.” She then transferred from the School Sisters of Notre Dame to the Sisters of Loretto, where she has continued her work for social justice and outreach to LGBT people. In 2004, Sr. Gramick became the subject of a documentary film, In Good Conscience: Sister Jeannine Gramick’s Journey of Faith, directed by Albert Maysles of Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter fame. New Ways Ministry continues its work of independent advocacy for LGBT Catholics.