Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbySearch Results
July 24th, 2006
By now this is all very old news. In the online world, anything more than a few weeks old is ancient history, but I experienced a sort of deja vu this weekend as I re-read Richard Cohen’s 2000 book, Coming Out Straight. Interesting reading, I know. Let’s just say it’s what I do on my afternoons off.
July 13th, 2006
The “ex-gay” therapy group People Can Change have issued a press release touting a survey they conducted to understand what motivates gay men who undergo sexual reorientation therapy.
July 12th, 2006
The Advocate just posted this news item: “Approximately 10% of gay men in London have used the recreational drug methamphetamine, according to a study published in the online edition of the journal Addiction.” Well, er, no. It’s bad enough when anti-gay extremists get research wrong to portray gays as drug-fueled sex fiends. We don’t need our own media outlets feeding the myths.
July 6th, 2006
The Board of Directors of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) commissioned a study last year on the challenges same-sex couples and their children face as a result of a public policy that excludes them from civil marriage and (in most states) second-parent adoption rights. That study appears in this month’s edition of the journal Pediatrics. This report is highly readable, and provides an excellent rundown on all the reasons why marriage and civil unions are crucially important to the children of gays and lesbians.
June 23rd, 2006
This month’s edition of the American Journal of Public Health is dedicated to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the CDC’s first report of AIDS. In one of the lead editorials, Drs. Ronald Stall and Thomas Mills provide a brisk overview of the public response to the epidemic, and emphasize the special difficulties that come with combating a heavily stigmatized disease.
June 15th, 2006
This article appeared on the National Review’s website today. Eve Tushnet reports on the June 10th “Love Won Out” conference, a gathering of evangelical “ex-gay” ministries, held in Washington D.C. These ministries are an important part of social conservatives’ ongoing efforts to oppose gay rights in the public square, especially in the areas of same-sex marriage, adoption, and anti-discrimination measures.
June 13th, 2006
About three weeks ago, I received an E-mail from Anna Carlsson. Anna went by the pseudonym “Greta” (she’s Swedish) in Abigail Garner’s book, Families like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is. Paul Cameron used one of her quotes for his article “Children of Homosexuals and Transsexuals More Apt To Be Homosexuals.” But in this crude propaganda piece, Dr. Cameron took Anna’s words out of context and twisted their meaning far beyond anything that she ever intended to say. Not that this is anything unusual for Paul Cameron. But what’s unusual this time is that Anna decided to do something about it.
June 9th, 2006
We live in a society that operates under what’s called a “heterosexual presumption” — in other words, we tend to assume that someone is straight unless we notice something to suggest otherwise (or unless that person comes right out and tells us). But since many gay people don’t exhibit traits that are stereotypically “gay” — and many others try to pass as straight — learning that someone in fact is actually gay can be quite a shock. Only then do we try to remember clues that we might have missed in the past to try to understand how we might have missed it. David Aveline examines this phenomenon in the June 2006 issue of the Journal of Family Issues.
June 5th, 2006
AIDS is twenty-five years old today. It was on June 5, 1981 that the CDC first reported a puzzling new disease that we would come to know as AIDS. The intervening twenty-five years has been searing experience for the gay community. Discovering that one had AIDS was to receive an automatic death sentence, and over those twenty-five years an estimated half a million Americans died in the worst epidemic of modern times.
June 2nd, 2006
In an act with impeccable timing, President Georgw W. Bush will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the first report of AIDS with a quiet ceremony in which he will announce his support for the proposed constitutional amendment to prohibit gay couples from marrying.
May 15th, 2006
A survey from the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy suggests that only 1-5% of Massachusetts’ gays and lesbians have married so far. Dale Carpenter offers five reasons for the low numbers and an observation: if so few gays marry when given the option, then it’s very difficult to see exactly what kind of harm they would pose to the institution.
May 13th, 2006
We well know Paul Cameron’s penchant for misrepresenting the works of others. But in flogging his latest effort (“Children of homosexuals and transsexuals more apt to be homosexual”) , he’s really outdone himself. He now misrepresents his own article.
January 9th, 2006
It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right… Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife.1 Sen. John Cornyn’s […]
Featured Reports
In this original BTB Investigation, we unveil the tragic story of Kirk Murphy, a four-year-old boy who was treated for “cross-gender disturbance” in 1970 by a young grad student by the name of George Rekers. This story is a stark reminder that there are severe and damaging consequences when therapists try to ensure that boys will be boys.
When we first reported on three American anti-gay activists traveling to Kampala for a three-day conference, we had no idea that it would be the first report of a long string of events leading to a proposal to institute the death penalty for LGBT people. But that is exactly what happened. In this report, we review our collection of more than 500 posts to tell the story of one nation’s embrace of hatred toward gay people. This report will be updated continuously as events continue to unfold. Check here for the latest updates.
In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that “[Paul] Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany.” What the SPLC didn”t know was Cameron doesn’t just “echo” Nazi Germany. He quoted extensively from one of the Final Solution’s architects. This puts his fascination with quarantines, mandatory tattoos, and extermination being a “plausible idea” in a whole new and deeply disturbing light.
On February 10, I attended an all-day “Love Won Out” ex-gay conference in Phoenix, put on by Focus on the Family and Exodus International. In this series of reports, I talk about what I learned there: the people who go to these conferences, the things that they hear, and what this all means for them, their families and for the rest of us.
Prologue: Why I Went To “Love Won Out”
Part 1: What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Part 2: Parents Struggle With “No Exceptions”
Part 3: A Whole New Dialect
Part 4: It Depends On How The Meaning of the Word "Change" Changes
Part 5: A Candid Explanation For "Change"
At last, the truth can now be told.
Using the same research methods employed by most anti-gay political pressure groups, we examine the statistics and the case studies that dispel many of the myths about heterosexuality. Download your copy today!
And don‘t miss our companion report, How To Write An Anti-Gay Tract In Fifteen Easy Steps.
Anti-gay activists often charge that gay men and women pose a threat to children. In this report, we explore the supposed connection between homosexuality and child sexual abuse, the conclusions reached by the most knowledgeable professionals in the field, and how anti-gay activists continue to ignore their findings. This has tremendous consequences, not just for gay men and women, but more importantly for the safety of all our children.
Anti-gay activists often cite the “Dutch Study” to claim that gay unions last only about 1½ years and that the these men have an average of eight additional partners per year outside of their steady relationship. In this report, we will take you step by step into the study to see whether the claims are true.
Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council submitted an Amicus Brief to the Maryland Court of Appeals as that court prepared to consider the issue of gay marriage. We examine just one small section of that brief to reveal the junk science and fraudulent claims of the Family “Research” Council.
The FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics aren’t as complete as they ought to be, and their report for 2004 was no exception. In fact, their most recent report has quite a few glaring holes. Holes big enough for Daniel Fetty to fall through.
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