Killer of Sacred Cows
Sunday, January 18, 2004
  Polls from another friendly neighborhood bigot coalition.
Would you vote for a presidential candidate who supports same-sex marriage or civil unions? YES NO

Homosexual marriage in America: I say.... YES NO

Should all laws against private consensual sex be abolished? YES NO

Do you support passage of the Federal Marriage Amendment? YES NO


Brought to you by the "friendly" people at the "Traditional" "Values" Coalition. Have fun, now.
 
  A rebuttal to a presentation made on sexual orientation in one of my classes.
This was done primarily because I had blown up at the people who presented on sexual orientation as a topic. I was appalled at how little research they had done and how many lies they were unwittingly spreading to the 30 kids in the class. Another classmate of mine had the gall to say "Well, what does it matter anyway? What's the big deal?" and I exploded at her. As a result, I was not allowed to present my rebuttal to the class.

However, I figured other people might be interested... so here it is:


REBUTTAL TO PRESENTATION
ON SEXUAL ORIENTATION



INTRODUCTION

First of all, I would like to apologize to the presenters and the rest of the class for the way I reacted to the presentation. I did not realize, at the time, that the presenters did not know that they were presenting spin as fact. Sometimes telling the difference apart can be difficult, and not everyone has had the background in research that I’ve had, so it’s hard to remember that “found on the internet” or “read it in a book” is often seen as “must be true.” But it’s not, always, and in the case of the Internet, it very often isn’t. This is one of the reasons that Critical Thinking is a required course to graduate or transfer, and this shows why it should be a mandatory first-semester class. It’s hard to research when you don’t know how to tell fact from spin, especially convincingly-presented spin.

However, I cannot find it in me to agree with the people who complained to Dr. C and had my rebuttal shut down simply because they didn’t like the way I present myself. The fact of the matter is that we’re in college to learn, and sometimes learning involves hearing points of view and facts that shake up our preconceptions and beliefs. That’s what being in college is about – what another student talked about in his presentation on Crime and Justice – opening the mind to new ideas and different people in different walks of life. Denying someone the right to rebut misinformation simply because you don’t like him personally is undemocratic and un-American.

Regarding research, the best advice I can give in distinguishing fact from spin is to follow the money trail. Who’s funding the study that you’re citing? Are they a group that’s known to be neutral, or do they have a position on the issue that the study is discussing? Are they known to have an agenda regarding the issue? If so, the study may very well be suspect. A group funding a study should be “neutral money.” Think of the studies about cancer that were funded by tobacco companies – would you believe it if a tobacco company’s scientists said that tobacco doesn’t cause cancer, when the American Cancer Society has found that it does? Who’s more credible?

In this rebuttal, I will attempt to show how the studies and citations used in the presentation on Sexual Orientation used flawed methodology to arrive at a pre-determined goal, rather than scientifically researched, and that they were funded by biased groups.

PROBLEMS WITH THE PRESENTATION

Let’s start with definitions. What is homosexuality?

Homosexuality is defined as an attraction to the same sex by most researchers and professional organizations such as the American Psychological Association. But most reactionary religious groups, such as the Family Research Council, will define homosexuality as the act of homosexual sex. Starting right there, we have a fundamental divide in how homosexuality is defined – are we talking about attraction, or action, when these studies are published?

Defining homosexuality as action allows reactionary groups to call homosexuality a choice. Certainly acting upon one’s sexual impulses is always a choice. However, attraction to the opposite sex is not a choice. Any reputable medical or psychiatric organization will say the same. And without an agreed-upon definition of what homosexuality is, any research that claims anything about “all homosexuals” must be suspect, because we don’t know how the study is defining “all homosexuals.”

I choose to use the definition which defines orientation by one’s attractions. And there we get to the second problem, which is: How many gay people are there, anyway?

We can’t know. Certainly the Kinsey study of the 1950s had flaws – Kinsey only interviewed men for his study – but Kinsey’s number of 10% of the population has been hotly contested by anti-gay groups. Their estimate was the one presented on Wednesday – 1 to 2 percent. How they arrived at that number, they don’t say. Reasonable people would take the difference between Kinsey’s numbers and those of the religious right and say that it was probably more like 4 to 6 percent of the population.

But we can’t know for sure. Why? Because in today’s society, being gay is still a stigma. Remember the tape on Measure 9 in Oregon? The No on 9 offices were broken into and a list of gay men and women was stolen from that office. Those people began getting harassed right afterwards. I will guarantee you that even in a closed research setting, there is always a danger that answering the question “Have you ever had sexual relations/attraction with or to a member of the same sex?” with an answer of yes will put your name with that yes answer somewhere on a piece of paper or a database that can be accessed by people you don’t know. Would you risk that in today’s society? Many wouldn’t. It would be like admitting to having black ancestry in the 1950s South. The stigma is not all that different.

Since a lot of people won’t answer honestly in these kinds of studies, especially studies conducted by the reactionary right, who have an agenda against gay people, we cannot be sure of accurate raw data. And because we cannot be sure of accurate raw data, any conclusions drawn from the inaccurate data we do have available must be viewed as suspect.

The statistics cited by the presenters are a third problem. Mark Twain once said that there are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Statistics can be and often are skewed to favor whichever organization is presenting them. It’s like choosing a jury for a trial – the voir dire process allows attorneys to pick and choose to get a jury that will be favorable to their case, based on the jurors’ biases and beliefs.

As an example, here’s the same question worded two ways:

Do you believe that gays should have the right to marry?
Do you believe that homosexuals should have special rights to marry their same-sex partner?


Notice the differences between those two questions, which ask for the same information. The use of “homosexuals” is a way of bringing sex to the forefront. It’s a hot-button word designed to get people emotionally upset. The buzzword “special rights” is another problem. Casting the issue as one where “they want rights that heterosexuals would never want – they want to marry someone of the same sex, and they claim they don’t have the right to marry, but it’s really a special right because they have the same right to marry an opposite-sex partner that we do” is a common tactic among reactionary religious groups that dislike gays. The issue is not about being able to do the same thing straights do in a literal sense (marry someone of the opposite sex) but in terms of the spirit of what marriage means (marry the person you love, regardless of gender). “Same-sex partner,” as a phrase, is yet another problem. Of course gay people are going to want to marry same-sex partners, but the second question brings up the word “sex” twice in one sentence, pushing people’s minds not toward loving relationships but towards what they cannot comprehend – gay sex. It does skew the results.

Unbiased, neutral polling groups such as Rutgers or Gallup will use the first question in their polls. Biased groups like Focus on the Family are much more likely to use the second wording, because it’s more likely to give them the results they want.

Let’s look now at the sources of some of the statistics that were cited by the presenters last week.

The “Obituary Study,” which determined that bogus age-of-death number for gay men, has significant problems. It was created by a man named Paul Cameron, who founded and is funded by the Family Research Council, an anti-gay religious group. The flawed methodology employed by Paul Cameron to reach the conclusions he did quickly becomes obvious when you look at his raw data. In 1983 and 1984, during the height of the AIDS crisis, he surveyed gay newspapers and used the obituaries of gay men to determine an average age of death. The problem is, he only determined the average age of death for one specific, very small segment of the gay population and tried to apply that finding to all gay men. When we look at how many people were excluded from each of these groups (all the closeted gays who were not male who did not die between 1983 and 1984 whose obituaries were not published in gay newspapers) the flaws in the study become blatantly obvious. The study tried to draw conclusions about the large group (gays) by looking at one specific subset of the group (out gays who are male who died between 1983 and 1984 and whose obituaries were published in gay newspapers). This is flawed methodology.

Cameron was looking only for confirmation of his theories, which is not valid research. He only gathered data that would support his theories, not data that would disprove them. Valid research of this nature involves taking a theory and trying to find data to disprove it. If you can’t disprove it, then it must be valid. That’s the sort of research that’s accepted by peer-reviewed professional journals and associations such as the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and American Pediatric Association, among others.

Paul Cameron was expelled from the American Psychological Association, American Sociological Association, and several other professional organizations because of his biased methodology and research. No reputable professional organization will associate itself with him or his findings. His funding is from the Family Research Council, a group he headed himself, which is funded mostly by reactionary religious groups.

The Pew Research Centers, which were also cited heavily by the presenters, are likewise biased. Here is their mission statement regarding religion: “The Pew Research Centers seeks to advance a deeper public understanding of religion's contribution to the ideas, beliefs, morals and institutions that shape American society, and to help people of faith make a positive contribution to contemporary public life.” The Family Research Council’s statement is even more heavily biased: “The Family Research Council (FRC) champions marriage and family as the foundation of civilization, the seedbed of virtue, and the wellspring of society. FRC shapes public debate and formulate public policy that values human life and upholds the institutions of marriage and the family. Believing that God is the author of life, liberty, and the family, FRC promotes the Judeo-Christian worldview as the basis for a just, free, and stable society.”

These statements, boiled down, essentially say: “We like things the way we think they have been, and we don’t want them to change, and we want to be the boss. We want our religious ideals to set the standard.”

Another problem is the definition of “all religious people.” How do you define “religious people”? Is that only Fundamentalist Christians? Only Christians? Christians and Jews? Christian, Muslims and Jews? Which “religious people” were actually surveyed for those polls?

WHY DOES THIS MATTER?

Laws and political campaigns draw from statistics for their messages and purposes. Policymakers are influenced very strongly by statistics when making laws or policies. For many years, the statistic that was used to justify equating gays with pedophiles (a misperception that still exists today, and is actively encouraged by anti-gay groups) and therefore classifying us as criminal was taken from another Cameron “study,” where gay men were asked if they had ever had sex with a partner below the age of eighteen. Many said yes. However, what was left out of the published statistics is that many of those men were underage themselves at the time! Now, be fair: would we take a survey of straight men and ask them if they had ever had sex with an underage girl and use their teenage romances as evidence of pedophilia? Of course not. But this bogus statistic has been bandied about for years, and gays are still saddled with it.

As last Wednesday’s presentation showed, gays are still perceived as the only carriers of AIDS. AIDS, even after almost thirty years, is still seen as a “gay disease.” But look at the CDC statistics. 33% of all new AIDS infections in this country are from heterosexual sex, and another 25% are from intravenous drug use – this is hardly a gay-only disease. Over half of the new AIDS infections in this country are not from gay sources! But we’re still blamed for it.

Being gay and participating in gay relationships has finally been taken off the law books of this country as a crime. But gays in this country still do not have equal rights. And the more misinformation that’s out there, the more difficult it will be for us to ever obtain the equal rights that should be ours by birthright as American citizens. Much of that misinformation is out there precisely because of the spin that anti-gay rights groups produce. The words “special rights,” “family values,” “destroying the traditional family,” “a choice,” “sinful,” “pathological,” “sick” – these words are more than words. They’re ideas. They’re accusations. They’re weapons used to keep gays from obtaining full citizenship.

Remember that the next time you hear someone call an idea “gay,” or accuse one of us of being a child molester. It’s not true. It’s not right. And it’s completely un-American.

REFERENCES

http://www.frc.org/

http://www.apa.org/pubinfo/answers.html?CFID=2903202&CFTOKEN=73642557#whatis

http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_cameron_obit.html

http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=4211

http://pewtrusts.com/about/index.cfm?image=img2

http://www.frc.org

http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_molestation.html

http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/pubs/facts.htm#Surveillance



 
Thursday, January 08, 2004
  Notes to myself... things to blog about when I have the brain available....
The Iraqi "WMDs" that were found. Doodles in a notebook, apparently.

Brittney Spears and the issue of gay marriage.

Man who posted anti-gay signs at work deserved to be fired, according to the courts.

 
Wednesday, January 07, 2004
  AFA poll redux - from Planetout.com News
In anti-gay poll, same-sex marriage gains

Eric Johnston, Gay.com/PlanetOut.com Network

SUMMARY: An Internet poll conducted by the anti-gay American Family Association showed on Tuesday more than two-thirds of respondents favor legalizing gay marriage or civil unions.


Here's some choice quotes from the article (the full article is at the URL on this entry).

With more than 700,000 votes cast, "America's Poll on Homosexual Marriage" showed 59.55 percent of respondents voting in favor of legalization of gay marriage, with 32.51 percent opposing it. Another 7.94 percent voted to favor civil unions with the full benefits of marriage.

Great, great numbers, folks. Lopsided, yes, but I don't think the AFA realized that they would get this kind of response. Sources tell me that only the anti-gay marriage votes get spam mail, at least so far, and that the mail has been interesting to say the least. With a two-to-one majority against them, you can bet that they're scrambling for any support they can get at this point.

The survey is conducted by an organization whose mission is to "expose the misrepresentation of the radical homosexual agenda and stop its spread though our culture."

Well, with this poll being in the national news, showing its skewed and biased methodology, I think that they've shown how they misrepresent the gay population of this country... and if they wanted to stop the misrepresentation from spreading, this will do a pretty good job of it.

Tim Wildmon, president of the AFA, did not respond to interview requests from the Gay.com/PlanetOut.com Network.

Of course Wildmon didn't respond to a request for an interview. He's running scared. He can't believe that his pet poll which was supposed to show how nasty and ickybad gay people really are backfired and was broadcast to the world without his particular spin on the results. Even a retarded monkey can see that the wording of the poll is inherently skewed and biased -- and now everyone knows how his "results" were supposed to lean. Bad move, Tim, very bad. You've shot yourself in the foot (and incidentally destroyed your credibility to boot).

They're trying to spin this for themselves, too. A person on the AFA mailing list recently reported receiving a letter from the AFA saying, essentially, "It's so wonderful that so many people voted against us because they came to our site and so they will have taken the time to be exposed to the gospel of blahdyblah etc. and so forth." Sounds like overcompensation to me. I looked at their site and all it did was reinforce my disdain for idiots who use their religion as a weapon.

In November, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that prohibiting same-sex couples the right to marry violated the state's Constitution. The court gave the Massachusetts Legislature six months to rewrite the law to allow same-sex marriage. Under the Full Faith and Credit Clause of Article IV of the U.S. Constitution, same-sex marriages performed in Massachusetts may have to be honored in other states.

No, dears. It's not "may have to." It's WILL have to. The FFCC doesn't allow for exceptions based on judgmental idiocy. This is why the religious right is pushing so hard for an anti-gay marriage amendment, because then that pesky old FFCC would stop being so pesky.

"The lopsided nature of the vote shows we're a community that can mobilize and make its point of view known," said Witeck, who is also CEO of Witeck-Combs Communications in Washington, D.C. "Now what has to happen is we have to translate these votes on the American Family Association's Web site into political commitment, by registering to vote and going out and voting."

Yes. Absolutely. Get out there, get registered, and vote. Get politically active. Run for city council or school board positions. Start getting known. Start getting into local politics as well as national.

The AFA operates a Christian radio news service from its home base in Tupelo, Miss. According to its Web site, the organization "represents and stands for traditional family values" and takes credit for pressuring ABC to cancel the "pro-homosexual show 'Ellen.'"

I have to laugh at this. The AFA thinks that their protests were what caused "Ellen" to be removed from the airwaves? No, dears. It was that after Ellen came out, her show ceased to be all that funny. I know. I watched it. It became preachy. Nobody watches a comedy show to get preached at. I love Ellen, don't get me wrong, but I'm glad that her new show is a talk show, where it's okay to get a little preachy.

The AFA is an ostrich. Ostriches stick their heads in the sand when there's danger. They are like children who think "If I can't see you, you can't see me." What Wildmon and his associates are failing to realize is that their shenanigans are now on national display for everyone to see, and boys, you've been caught with your pants down and your hands in the cookie jar, all at once. Naughty, naughty.

It never ceases to amaze me that people who claim to follow a man who taught that "doing unto others as you would have them do unto you" is the right way to live still continue to follow a program of hate, lies, indifference and violence against us and our rights. It looks like someone got the translation garbled somewhere along the line -- the AFA and other fundamentalists seem to follow the rule of "do unto others before they do unto you, and make sure they can't do anything back to you afterwards."

This is not a Christian attitude by any stretch of the imagination.

I often wonder what motivates people to hate, and more so, what motivates them to hate without even looking into all the facts about a person or a group or an idea they hate. People hate blindly, it seems, and resent anyone trying to help them see.

Socrates' vision of the cave was right. We laugh at those who see sunlight and call them crazy, because we're so convinced that the shadows we're seeing are the only real things.


So, where do we go from here? Keep on keepin' on, folks. Do what you've been doing. Stay active. Stay alert. Stay aware.

Stay with it.
 
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
  Pass It On
This is going around LiveJournal, so I thought I'd repost it here, as well.

I would like to go on the record regarding the following subjects:

1. I do not support the "War on Drugs." I think it is not only misguided but in fact poorly planned and executed.

2. I do not support the "War on Terror." I think it is going to cause more terrorist activity than it will ever suppress. Further, I think it to be laughably conceived and executed, even the slipshod version we have now as opposed to what one might term to be a more applicable solution involving rather larger weapons than we've used thus far.

3. I do not support the current Federal administration as it is being chiefed by a moron who thinks a C grade average is something to be proud of and who could not locate Afghanistan on a map, let alone spell it. I yearn for the days when a President would have had to impress the people with his erudition and record of success, not what we have now, where failures, coverups, and choked-back laughter in the face of sheer stupidity is all we can hope for on the campaign trail.

There. Someone call Tom Ridge of Fatherland... I mean Motherland... I mean DAMMIT Homeland Security and let him read this. Yes, according to Mr. Ridge, I too may be a terrorist. (I'm not, but I doubt that means anything.) Do I support replacing the current nightmare with a new regime? Damn right I do, worldwide to boot.

Okay. If I disappear, you all know what happened. Sad that it's even conceivable in America, isn't it?

Repost if you agree. Let's give the Homeland Insecurity!



My own comment on the above: I love my country, but I fear its government, which is why I'm doing this.
 
I'm an activist. I'm a progressive. I'm probably a conservative's worst nightmare.

ARCHIVES
12/01/2003 - 01/01/2004 / 01/01/2004 - 02/01/2004 / 02/01/2004 - 03/01/2004 / 11/01/2004 - 12/01/2004 / 01/01/2005 - 02/01/2005 / 02/01/2005 - 03/01/2005 / 04/01/2005 - 05/01/2005 / 05/01/2005 - 06/01/2005 / 06/01/2005 - 07/01/2005 / 07/01/2005 - 08/01/2005 / 11/01/2005 - 12/01/2005 / 03/01/2006 - 04/01/2006 / 08/01/2006 - 09/01/2006 / 09/01/2006 - 10/01/2006 / 10/01/2006 - 11/01/2006 / 01/01/2007 - 02/01/2007 / 04/01/2007 - 05/01/2007 / 05/01/2007 - 06/01/2007 / 08/01/2007 - 09/01/2007 / 08/01/2008 - 09/01/2008 / 10/01/2008 - 11/01/2008 / 06/01/2010 - 07/01/2010 / 11/01/2013 - 12/01/2013 /


Powered by Blogger