Earlier this month, Exodus executive director Alan Chambers charged into Berkeley, Calif., determined to thwart hordes of hateful and violent liberals.
What he found, but still fails to acknowledge, is that his stereotypes about “liberals” and Northern Californians are untrue.
Read more…
Rhea County, Tenn., made headlines a couple weeks ago when it sought to pass laws to arrest the county’s homosexual residents and run them out of town. Ex-gay activists saw the news, and found an opportunity to promote a kinder, gentler form of discrimination and prejudice.
I spent the weekend catching up on matters at “the other site” that I work on. I’ve got plenty of XGW e-mail and news to catch up on tomorrow. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, check out John Aravosis’ new blog, AmericaBlog.
Focus on the Family must be satisfied with what little scientific study has been done on gays and ex-gays.
What makes me say that? Well, Focus on the Family has been lobbying for the shutdown of federally funded and hosted research into sexual orientation. It has also sought recently to halt studies into the means and extent to which sexually transmitted diseases spread among high-risk populations, such as male truckers who have unsafe sex with other male truckers.
Here are some of the recent Focus on the Family public appeals to stop scientific research that might result in sexual knowledge, public education, and disease-prevention methods that extend beyond Focus’ abstinence-only prescription.
NIH Chief Defends Sex Studies, Feb. 2, 2004
Funding for Sex-Habits Studies to Proceed, July 14, 2003
Feds Fund Sexual Arousal Conference, June 25, 2003
Efforts to give people knowledge and choices in how to protect themselves seem to anger Focus on the Family. The abstinence-or-death rallying cry reflects poorly on James Dobson’s organization, which we are told is dedicated to Christian values such as compassion, mercy, and good health.
In response, the American Psychological Association is helping to circulate a petition by the Coalition to Protect Research. The petition seeks support among health-care professionals for research into sexual health, orientation, and disease prevention.
The Exodus media blog cites a new press release promoting the Gay and Lesbian Atlas, an almanac of facts and figures about gays in America.
The information contained in the Atlas, derived from the U.S. Census, reminds the public that exgay facts and figures do not add up. Here’s why.
Exodus and its allies periodically assert that barely one percent (or 3 million) of the U.S. population is same-sex-attracted, or “gay.”
But the 2000 U.S. Census counted 594,000 gay couples and 59,000,000 heterosexual couples.
The gay couple count coincidentally happens to be 1 percent of the heterosexual couple count. This suggests one of the following: Either (1) gays have no greater difficulty forming couples, proportionate to their share of the population, or (2) more than 1 percent of the population is gay.
Calculated in other ways, the math looks equally bad for the exgay movement.
If there are 600,000 gay couples in America, then there are approximately 1,200,000 gay individuals comprising the coupled gay population — in other words, 40 percent of the alleged 3 million gay population. As it happens, the same percentage of the heterosexual population is coupled.
Does anyone believe that nearly half the gay population is coupled? In order for them not to be, the percentage of Americans who are gay must be many times higher than that claimed by the exgay movement.
Among the other stereotype-bending factoids shared in the Atlas press release:
For more information
Gay and Lesbian Atlas
gaydemographics.org
The impact of these numbers is likely to prompt some antigay activists to say, “Numbers don’t matter.” But if numbers don’t matter now, then why did they matter before the Census data came to light?
But they are right: Numbers don’t matter.
Constitutional rights matter. Civility, equality and respect matter. Truth matters.
That newspaper is The Washington Times, of course.
And Kevin Drum notices that something is amiss with the policies on accurate reporting at Exodus’ favorite newspaper.
In an April 8 news release, Exodus International executive director called upon the “true Body of Christ” — fundamentalists — to sign a petition demanding that ex-gays be included on a Lutheran task force on sexuality:
Read more…
Exodus International executive director Alan Chambers appears today at a symposium on same-sex marriage at the University of California-Berkeley.
The symposium program places Chambers on a panel of “legal scholars, practitioners, and experts exploring the legal and constitutional issues associated with same sex marriage.”
In an April 16 issue of “Media Spotlights” that contains numerous errors of basic grammar as well as fact, Exodus International says:
1) The American College of Pediatricians (ACP) published a position statement titled, “Homosexual Parenting: Is It Time For Change?
From the ACP statement:
A couple months ago, Focus on the Family exgay operative and Exodus chairman Mike Haley begged a gay-tolerant, largely Christian audience at Vanderbilt University for acceptance. He admitted that people can be gay and Christian, and said, “It is not a hateful message, we are not saying you don’t have a right to be gay.”
Unfortunately, a string of Focus articles published last week serves as a reminder of the organization’s inability to defend its paranoia rationally, to maintain a logically consistent message, and to convey love toward rival people of faith.
In Gay ‘Marriage’ Only the Beginning, Focus spends 800 words arguing, without a shred of evidence or cause-and-effect reasoning, that a vast conspiracy of overpaid gay Americans views marriage as a necessary stepping stone to a totalitarian takeover of the United States in which “God’s truth” is illegal. Focus assumes that gay couples are not only anti-Christian and anti-God, but implicitly racist. And Focus describes a Federal Marriage Amendment as the only hope for stopping the slippery slide to a godless totalitarian takeover of America.
In another article, discussed elsewhere at XGW, Focus argues that gay workers should not have the same health-benefit rights as other workers. And in yet another article, Focus protests that Minneapolis businesses should be allowed to use city taxpayer dollars to discriminate against their gay workers.
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