Asterisk

On April 1-2, 2011, Mission America and Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH) will be cosponsoring the second Truth* Academy in Columbus, Ohio. I thought it might be helpful to see what tone and substance attendees can expect from each of the instructors before the conference begins. You can find all of my Truth* Academy posts at this link.

Peter LaBarbera of AFTAH
(A Hate Group)

Peter LaBarbera will be giving a speech at the Truth* Academy in Columbus, but more importantly he’s the ringleader of this circus. He’ll certainly set the tone for the two half-days, so let’s look at his tone. But where in the world should we begin?

Do we start with how he defaced Good As You proprietor Jeremy Hooper’s wedding photo?

Do we start with the Box Turtle Bulletin’s LaBarbera Award, given for the “most outrageous, offensive, malevolent, crazy, or excessive statement or claim”?

Do we go back to 2009 and see how LaBarbera was so extreme and so hateful that the anti-gay forces gathered there asked him not to come, and when he came anyway, they denounced him before his press conference was even over?

How about we start with an interview LaBarbera did in July 2010 with radio host David Pakman. About six minutes into part one, LaBarbera starts scolding Pakman because the show‘s producer didn’t tell him that Pakman isn’t anti-gay. It’s a really weird interview, and LaBarbera lets his hood slip a bit.

One interesting tidbit that I was surprised Pakman got out of LaBarbera is that he really thinks that anal sex between consenting adults should be illegal in the United States. More on that in another post.

(Here’s a follow up interview the tragically heterosexual cutie pie David Pakman did with Truth Wins Out‘s Wayne Besen, who LaBarbera mentioned in part one.)

Then there’s Peter LaBarbera’s unabashed devotion to the work of Paul Cameron.

For those who don’t know, Cameron is chairman of the Family Research Institute, an SPLC-certified hate group like LaBarbera’s AFTAH. (Birds of a feather and all that.)

In 1983, Cameron put forth a booklet that soundly vilified gay people. For example, the lines about gay men having 100+ sex partners a year and a life span of 42 years come from Cameron. He’s behind the gerbil thing too.

Cameron’s claims have long since been disproved. Read more about that in this exhaustive 12-part series by Box Turtle Bulletin’s Jim Burroway. Importantly, Cameron’s research methods (such as they are) were revealed and soundly denounced by anyone with a passing knowledge of statistical methodology.

He was drummed out of the American Psychological Association the same year he brought his claims, in 1984 by the Nebraska Psychological Association, and in 1986 by the American Sociological Association. Even still, Cameron’s claims are a major source of material for anti-gay hate groups today.

Fast forward to 2010, when researcher Walter R. Shumm, an associate of Paul Cameron, claimed to have duplicated some of Cameron’s findings. While their claim that LGBT families are more likely to produce LGBT kids is patently ridiculous to reasonable people, it does perpetuate the deeply held right wing belief that gay people are predators and steal your children at night.

And for that reason, Peter LaBarbera and other hate group leaders got all tingly when they read the news.

It came as no surprise when we found out that Shumm had reused Cameron’s preposterously unscientific methods to reproduce Cameron’s findings, as detailed here, again by Box Turtle Bulletin.

Shumm’s results, in other words, are nonsense.

But that didn’t stop Peter LaBarbera from hailing Shumm’s work in a radio interview and deriding reasonable people for not accepting it at face value.

This just confirms what we already knew: Truth is irrelevant in Peter LaBarbera’s world. All that matters to Peter LaBarbera is the validation of his hatred of LGBT people.

Kind of makes the April Fool’s Day scheduling of LaBarbera’s Truth* Academy especially appropriate, don’t you think?

Much interweb ink has been spilled over Tim Tebow’s anti-abortion commercial scheduled to air during the Super Bowl. To be honest, I don’t have too much of a problem with it, even though CBS rejected a completely innocuous gay-inclusive United Church of Christ commercial six years ago. The real test will be next time a credible gay-positive ad is presented. Until they show us differently, I’m inclined to accept CBS’s statement that their standards have changed with the times.

As I see it, the real problem is that millions of people will be tuned in on Sunday not knowing that Tim Tebow is lending his credibility (such as it is) to Focus on the Family (FoF), a dangerous, homophobic organization built on a doctrine of prejudice and fear.

Here is a short, incomplete list of positions that Tim Tebow supports through his association with FoF and by extension FoF’s sister organization Family Research Council (FRC). (FoF and FRC were split in 1992 solely for tax reasons.)

• In February 2009, FoF official affiliate Family Policy Council of West Virginia ran a commercial that said that same sex marriage was “attacking” marriage while showing a heterosexual family in crosshairs.
• In March 2009, FRC President Tony Perkins said that the United States should sign an anti-gay rights statement offered in the United Nations, thereby joining with GWB’s “Axis of Evil”.
• In May 2009, FoF founder James Dobson claimed that the Matthew Shepard Act (now Law) protects pedophiles because the law doesn’t define “sexual orientation”. Of course, current law already defines the term, so there was no need for a new definition. This was explained in committee before an amendment ordering definition was rejected as unnecessary.
• In July 2009, FoF celebrated the “findings” in a “study” by NARTH that said that Ex-Gay treatments are “beneficial”, a statement that every credible source rejects outright.
• In September 2009, FoF organized a rally in support of Maine’s anti-gay civil rights campaign. They were so frightened of having their words on the record, they barred the press from the event.
• Not only that, they refused tickets to people who didn’t fall in lock-step with their agenda.
• In February 2010, five days before the Tebow commercial was set to air, FRC Senior Vice President for Policy and Government Affairs Peter Sprigg told Chris Matthews’ audience that gays should be thrown in jail. Two years earlier, Sprigg told a reporter that he wanted gays “exported”.
• In February 2010, three days before the Tebow commercial was set to air, FRC Senior Vice President for Policy and Government Affairs Peter Sprigg unambiguously advocated kidnapping if a non-custodial parent doesn’t like the judge’s order.

These positions and more (I’ve barely scratched the surface) are supported by Heisman Trophy-winning Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow through his association with FoF. And don’t give me any guff on the harshness; we’d say the same thing if he did a commercial for any other supremacist group.

Hopefully next time Tebow’s on the field he’ll put Matthew 23:23-28 under his eyes. He (and they) could use the reminder.

P.S. Another reason I’m in favor of CBS running the commercial: That’s $2.8 million they won’t have to spread more vitriol against the LGBT community.

The civil rights movement has seen some remarkable losses in the last few months. In early November, voters overturned a marriage law in Maine. A month later, the New York Senate voted against civil rights in marriage. Then yesterday, after a brief period of debate, the New Jersey Senate voted against a similar civil rights bill. David Badash of The New Civil Rights Movement was good enough to put some of the speeches online. Below are four of them.

NJ Sen. Bill Baroni:"Unequal treatment by government is always wrong."

NJ Sen. Nia Gill: "I believe in the constitution."

NJ Sen. Gerald Cardinale: Straight people are "disenfranchised."

NJ Sen. Bill Kean: The Worst Kind Of Hypocrite

And so to the question: What can we gain from this experience? I think we can use this failure (theirs, not ours) as an opportunity to reconsider our strategy.

We need to remember that we never chose this war. Remember, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) came about 14 years ago because the Hawaii Supreme Court ordered that the state must show compelling reasons to exclude lesbians and gays from marriage. Anti-gay forces recognized the repercussions if that battle didn’t go their way, so they got DOMA passed to preempt a potential loss.

Then they got busy on individual states. In every single case (someone correct me if I’m wrong), the Religious Right pushed us into a marriage battle, most notably in 2004 under the direction of twice-divorced Karl Rove. Now Maggie Gallagher uses lies to continue their assault on civil rights.

Understand, even if civil rights were to win at the ballot box, you can bet they would be ready to drop another load of lies that we would waste another couple million dollars defending against, and then we’d lose. Again, that’s not because we’re doing something wrong, but because bigotry and fear are easy sells, especially when the opponent has no relationship with the truth.

My point is that we’ve been on the defense from the start. That’s a losing plan. After 31 popular votes and I-don’t-know-how-many state legislature votes, it’s time to start playing offense.

And that’s not the only reason.

The biggest problem is that when the votes from the legislature or the people are counted up we’ve still encouraged either the legislature or the people to vote on someone’s rights, regardless of who wins. That’s not just unethical, it’s downright Unamerican.

You know what I’d really like to see? The next time the question goes to the public, we make one ad, not telling people to vote for us, but telling them not to vote on the issue at all. We should acknowledge up front that we anticipate a loss but have made that sacrifice in favor of the greater constitutional principle. Then we take the millions we would have spent on a losing campaign and give it to the homeless or some other worthy cause.

In other words, stop playing the game. Opt out.

I think we win something if we opt out of their battle and lose. We’re 0-31 in the popular vote, and the last one in Maine was lost by a nearly perfectly run campaign. We will continue to lose that battle regardless of what we do, so why not turn that energy toward a different battle, one of our choosing?

We should pour some money and effort into finding the best attorneys to fight the best court cases, like the upcoming challenge to Prop 8 (more on that later) and the case being brought by Lambda Legal and Garden State Equality against yesterday’s decision in the New Jersey Senate.

In the end, that’s where we’ll win.

Simplistic arguments sometimes call for simplistic responses. Such is the case with the argument that lesbians and gay men don’t take marriage as seriously as do their straight counterparts.

With that in mind, I offer this comparison.

Straight wedding:

Gay wedding:

Which of these couples takes marriage more seriously?

(Thanks to Dorian for letting me use his wedding video. And yes, that is Matt Alber singing at their wedding. It was a surprise gift from one groom to the other.)

 

(D’awwwwww.)

Jeremy Hooper of Good-As-You posted an article this afternoon pointing out some similarities between our struggle now and the women’s suffrage movement in the early 20th century. It’s a great post focusing on the Maine suffrage vote (which they lost) in September 1917. Go here to read it before reading on here.

Of course, when I saw it I did a quick face palm. I’ve had a similar post roaming around in my head for the last few weeks. So at the risk of looking like a big copycat, take a look at what I found a few weeks ago on the National Woman’s Party. As in Jeremy’s research, the parallels are startling.

The National Woman’s Party (NWP), was a women’s organization founded in 1916 that fought for women’s rights during the early 20th century in the United States, particularly for the right to vote on the same terms as men. In contrast to other organizations, such as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which focused on lobbying individual states and from which the NWP split, the NWP put its priority on the passage of a constitutional amendment ensuring women’s suffrage. Alice Paul and Lucy Burns founded the organization originally under the name the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage in 1913; by 1917, the name had been changed to the National Woman’s Party.

1917 NWP protest for the right to vote
Click for full and high resolution photograph

Women associated with the party staged a suffrage parade on March 3, 1913, the day before Wilson’s inauguration; they also became the first women to picket for women’s rights in front of the White House. The picketers were tolerated until 1917, but when they continued to picket after the United States declared war in World War One, they were arrested by police for “obstructing traffic”.

Many of the NWP’s members, upon arrest, went on hunger strikes; some, including Paul, were force-fed by jail personnel as a consequence. The resulting scandal and its negative impact on the country’s international reputation at a time when Wilson was trying to build a reputation for himself and the nation as an international leader in human rights may have contributed to Wilson’s decision to publicly call for the United States Congress to pass the Suffrage Amendment.

Burning President Wilson's speeches in January 1919
Click for full and high resolution photograph

So buck up, fellow LGBTs. We can learn from our nation’s history. We can be successful as they were by fighting as they did. It’ll take work, but we’re on our way.