Posts Tagged As: Main

That “Maine Teacher” Is No Stranger To Anti-Gay Lies

Jim Burroway

September 23rd, 2009

Charla BansleyAs Jeremy Hooper pointed out yesterday, that teacher in Stand for Marriage Maine’s latest TV ad is no ordinary run-of-the-mill concerned teacher.  She’s actually Charla Bansley, state director for Concerned Women for America for Maine. In 2005, she was a signatory of a letter to the Southern Baptist Convention demanding that they act on a proposed “Resolution on Homosexuality In Public Schools.” That resolution calls on Southern Baptists to remove their children from public schools and send them either to conservative Christian schools or home-school their children. This resolution, of course, would have the effect of drumming up more business for her own school, Calvary Chapel Christian School, which is near Bangor, Maine.

A look at fellow signatories give you an idea of what kind of crowd Bansley runs in. They include such ardent anti-gay extremists as Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, Peter LaBarbera, Michael Heath (who resigned this weekas director of the Christian Civic League of Maine after 15 years at the helm), and Exodus International Board member Phil Burris. Many other signatories have also been heavily involved with their respective state’s bans on marriage quality, including Burris (Ohio), Gary Glenn (Michigan), Len Munsil (Arizona), John Stemberger (Florida) among many others.

Charla Bansley was also a guest speaker at last Sunday’s Stand for Marriage Maine closed-door rally at the Augusta Civic Center, where she described homosexuality as “a public display of psychosis.” In a partial transcript provided to BTB, she also repeated a popular distortion of scientific research by anti-gay activists when she told that crowd:

A study in the Netherlands found that the average duration of a homosexual marriage was just one and a half years certainly nothing to build a society upon. The same study found that committed homosexual couples were also intimate with an average of eight extra marital partners per year this is not anti-gay rhetoric this are statistics published in Journal of the International Aids Society.

 Three years ago we examined this “Netherlands Study” claim in our report, “What the ‘Dutch Study’ Really Says About Gay Couples,” and found anti-gay claims about it it to be a wholesale misrepresntation of what the study actually found. We also examined how that study has been distorted through the years by anti-gay extremists like Bansley. So her statement at the rally combined with their first television ad, which those associated with Stand for Marriage Maine have already admitted to be a lie and not to be taken seriously, tells us everything we need to know about Stand for Marriage Maine’s moral fiber and Bansley’s credibility. She calls herself a teacher. God help her students.

Update: Charla Bansley also spoke at a tea-party rally in Augusta on July 4, and repeated the same “Dutch Study” falsehood there.

    

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