Thursday, December 17, 2015

Anti-gay publication uses CDC data as weapon against lgbt community


In the hands of the anti-gay right, a study created to help the lgbt community has become a weapon against it. According to the phony news site, One News Now:

After conducting an extensive study on homosexual behavior, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that those involved in such lifestyles experience a far greater amount of violence from one another than those in heterosexual relationships.


CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey is a first-of-its-kind study geared to determine the difference between the victimization of men and women by sexual orientation. The results show that men and women involved in homosexual behavior undergo much higher rates of sexual violence than men and women who are heterosexual. Surprising to many, homosexual women experience more violence than men. According to the study, a whopping 44 percent of lesbians were either raped, experienced physical abuse, and/or were stalked by their intimate partners during their lifetime. Even more shockingly, 61 percent of bisexual women endured such violence from their partners. 

It is also reported that 37 percent of bisexual women indicated they were stalked, which is more than double the rate that heterosexual women experience from their male partners. Furthermore, the CDC found that 37 percent of bisexual women were injured during the rape, physical violence, and/or stalking that they experienced at the hands of their sexual partners.Tragically, 48 percent of bisexual women who reported that they were raped said that their first experience of being raped occurred when they were adolescents between the ages of 11 and 17.The research also shows that 26 percent of homosexual men experienced rape, physical violence and/or stalking by their intimate partners. It’s even higher for bisexual men, who experience these types of assaults at a rate of 37 percent.

One News Now does, for a time, give objective reporting here. However the title of the article, CDC report: Homosexual lifestyle extremely violent, gives an indication as to what direction the article will end up. And after reporting the above facts, One New Now steers the article in the "homosexuality is a dangerous lifestyle" angle:

Refuting many of the claims by LGBT activists that homosexual behavior is a natural biological condition, the CDC report found that a large percentage of homosexual transgenders and bisexual women experienced sexual violence during their childhood years, which could have likely resulted in their choices in adulthood to adopt a homosexual lifestyle. Even though the government agency would not make an official determination that such early exposure to sexual violence was the cause of men and women ultimately choosing to engage in homosexual behavior, the statistics themselves appear to point to such a connection.

But at no time did the CDC report blame the so-called "homosexual lifestyle" for the violence.  In fact, the CDC makes no judgement on any of the sexual orientations of the perpetrators in its report, unlike One News Now, which was so quick to point the finger of "unclean" at the lgbt community, while not attacking heterosexuals for the amount of violence in their relationships.  

The fake news site merely took CDC numbers and extrapolated a false dichotomy against the lgbt community, i.e. the notion that homosexuality is unnatural because gay and bisexual relationships are fraught with violence; something which the CDC never even stated. Furthermore, One News Now omitted that fact the data here is from 2010. It also omitted that this report is a facet of a larger group of CDC reports,  Injury Prevention & Control : Division of Violence Prevention, which also looks at other issues, such as Elder Abuse, Global Violence, and Child Maltreatment.

The sad irony is that the way One News Now twists the CDC report could play a role in future problems with reporting violence in gay and bisexual relationships. By stigmatizing the victims for being gay or bisexuals, rather than assessing the incidents objectively, the false news site creates an atmosphere which would make it difficult for victims to report the incidents and also for the CDC and other organizations to create ways to combat it.

No comments: