Sunday, October 26, 2014

The anti-gay religious right has been running a bad con game on America

The idea forged by religious right groups that this so-called cultural war is an onslaught on Christian values by an aggressive gay community is a big lie. But it has always had traction because of the aggressive pushing by these groups and the laziness of the American media.

All one has to do is remember history in order to refute the charges of religious right groups that gays hate Christians or gays are pushing to force people to accept their supposed"lifestyle."

If anything, gays have been fighting to keep from being thrown off the proverbial cliff by the onslaught of homophobic propaganda and junk science hurled at them for over two and a half decades.

Junk like these images were perpetuated in the 80s with the help of discredited science:





The irony is that many of these images mirror the ones put out today by religious right groups:






 And far be it from me to forget religious right "social science" about the gay community which claims that homosexuality is a dangerous lifestyle fraught with disease, despair, and untimely death. Religious right groups repeat it ad naseum and many take it as fact. That's only because they are not aware of the hoops religious right groups jump through to create these "social science facts," i.e. the history of rebukes and complaints they have received from the scientific community such as:

National Institute of Health director Francis Collins, who called out religious right groups for falsely claiming that he stated sexual orientation is not hardwired by DNA.

Six researchers of a 1997 Canadian study (Robert S. Hogg, Stefan A. Strathdee, Kevin J.P. Craib, Michael V. Shaughnessy, Julio Montaner, and Martin T. Schehter), who complained in 2001 that religious right groups were distorting their work to claim that gay men have a short life span.

The
authors of the book Unequal Opportunity: Health Disparities Affecting Gay and Bisexual Men in the United States (Professors Richard J. Wolitski, Ron Stall, and Ronald O. Valdiserri), who complained that their work was being distorted by Focus on the Family.
University College London professor Michael King, who complained that the American Family Association was distorting his work on depression and suicide in LGBT individuals.

University of Utah professor Lisa Diamond, who complained that religious right groups distorted her research on sexual orientation.

Dr. Kyle Pruett, Ph.D., a professor of child psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, who has also complained that Focus on the Family distorted his work.

Dr. Robert Spitzer, Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University, who has consistently complained that religious right groups distorted his study to claim that the LGBT orientation is easily changeable. In 2012, Spitzer apologized to the gay community for the original study which religious right groups were distorting.

 
Judith Stacey, Professor of Sociology at New York University, who has had to, on more than one occasion, cry foul over how religious right groups distorted her work on LGBT families.

Greg Remafedi, Professor  at the University of Minnesota, who has complained several times about how religious right groups have distorted his work.


Here is the serious problem I have - while the media goes gaga and the lgbt community plays defense over the latest phony moral outrage that religious right groups have drudged up, the truths of this entire so-called culture war have been obscured for an obscenely numerous number of years.

And the main truth is this - the lgbt community have never sought to harm Christians or supposed traditional values. Heck, some of us embrace the Christian religion.  It  has been religious right groups (not lgbts and definitely not any individuals who embrace the Christian religion)  who have been doing the aggressive defaming, demonizing, and humiliating for all of these years.

Religious right groups claim to act against lgbt equality because of their belief in traditional morality. But apparently this "morality" includes lying, bearing false witness, and cherry-picking social science at their leisure.

But here is the saddest truth of them all - they are rarely called out for it on a scale so large that it would make them acknowledge the evil they have done.

And I doubt that they ever will be.

Related:

How They See Us: Unmasking the Religious Right War on Gay America - the webpage

How They See Us: Unmasking the Religious Right War on Gay America- the Scribd site