News, analysis and fact-checking of anti-gay rhetoric
Posts 
Posts via daily email:
Lt. Dan Choi, who was 
The Colorado Republican Candidate for U.S. Senate, Ken Buck, said in an interview on Meet the Press Sunday that he thought being gay was 
The FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics aren’t as complete as they ought to be, and their report for 2004 was no exception. In fact, their most recent report has quite a few glaring holes. Holes big enough for Daniel Fetty to fall through.The Real Rolling Stone: “African Impostor Spreads Hate Agenda”
Jim Burroway
October 21st, 2010
October 2, 2010 edition of the Ugandan tabloid Rolling Stone (Click to enlarge)
The real, genuine Rolling Stone– the venerable U.S. cultural, music and entertainment bi-weekly founded in 1967 by Jann Wenner — has weighed in on the upstart impostor from Uganda that has captured so much attention the past three weeks:
A new newspaper out of Uganda bearing the name Rolling Stone has published one of the most vile and hateful anti-gay screeds we have ever read. The article printed the addresses and photos of 100 homosexuals in the country, calling for them to be hanged. Not only are we not affiliated in any way with the Ugandan paper, we have demanded they cease using our name as a title. But there is a larger issue at stake: Homosexuality is still a crime in much of Africa, often punishable by life in prison. “Half the world’s countries that criminalize homosexual conduct do so because they cling to Victorian morality and colonial laws,” says Scott Long of Human Rights Watch. “Getting rid of these unjust remnants of the British empire is long overdue.”
"Hang Them; They Are After Our Kids", published in the October 2, 2010 edition of the Ugandan tabloid Rolling Stone (Names, places and photo obscured by BTB. Click to enlarge)
The fake Rolling Stone was shut down last week by Uganda’s Media Council over the failure of the tabloid’s owner to properly register the paper with the authorities. The Voice of America spoke with the Media Council’s Executive Secretary Haruna Kanaah, who said that the tabloid has also run afoul of the nation’s journalism code of ethics:
He says Uganda Rolling Stone, a weekly tabloid launched by a group of journalism graduates two months ago, is now being closely monitored.
“In Uganda, we have a journalism code of ethics, which is very clear,” said Kanaah. “The media should be balanced, accurate and fair. Intruding into people’s privacy, that is not journalism. It is witch-hunting.”
Ugandan LGBT activists say that at least four people, including one woman named in the Oct 2 article, have been attacked. Some have been forced to leave their homes and go into hiding.
Was The Uganda Outing Campaign A Precurser To “Kill The Gays” Bill Revival?
Jim Burroway
October 21st, 2010
That’s the harrowing possibility that Jeff Sharlet raised yesterday during his interview on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now.
Sharlet, author of C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy
Well, this article in Rolling Stone, the Ugandan Rolling Stone, what it marks is really an escalation. We’ve already seen this happening in Uganda. Rolling Stone is a new paper. The big national tabloid, you might say, is called Red Pepper, and they’ve been publishing so-called kill lists for some time now, with names, sometimes addresses, photographs, of gay people. You see also some Ugandans taking out ads in these papers to say, “Here’s this person I don’t like, arrival at work,” or something like this, “I have secret information that he’s gay.” This idea of sort of formalizing the list, naming the top hundred, this is a real escalation.
And I think what it shows us, and with what’s going on in the bill right now and what’s alarming, is the bill hasn’t been passed. It got stalled after it was introduced, in response to international pressure. But it’s still there. It’s, in effect, kind of a tiger on a leash that the regime can let off depending on its own fortunes in upcoming elections. And what I’m hearing from David Bahati, the author of the bill, with whom I remain in touch, that he is now being promised a second reading. And I think this new step in the press is a very alarming one, because it shows it moving right back to the forefront of Ugandan society.
Sharlet also expresses concern that Las Vegas-based Canyon Ridge Community Church, which is a financial backer of Ugandan pastor and staunch Anti-Homosexuality Bill support Martin Ssempa, has not only maintained ties to Ssempa, but is misleading their own congregation on what Ssempa stands for.
What’s interesting about it is it’s not even a far-right megachurch, and there’s a lot of members of Canyon Ridge who would be, I think, really outraged if they understood that their church was supporting one of the leaders of the anti-gay movement, Pastor Martin Ssempa, who’s also received US federal dollars, PEPFAR money. He has testified before our Congress. He’s held up as a champion in the fight against AIDS. His method has boiled down to “kill them.” The Canyon Ridge Church, there’s been a lot of pressure put on it, and I should say, by the way, by some evangelical activists. There’s a man named Warren Throckmorton, a professor at a Christian college, who’s been leading the fight to get Canyon Ridge to be accountable for the fact that they are financing part of this campaign. But, you know, even that is just one piece of this equation.
Warren Throckmorton has learned that the Las Vegas Steering Committee of the Human Rights Campaign met with Canyon Ridge more than a month ago. Throckmorton writes:
And I continue to wonder why the Human Rights Campaign of Las Vegas, who met with Canyon Ridge leaders over a month ago, have said nothing about a church in their community which indirectly supports a bill which is terrorizing GLBT people in Uganda.
This is beyond troubling. Supporters of the bill have disseminated tons of misinformation about what the bill would do if enacted (falsely claiming that it only affects pedophiles and rapists) and about its current status (falsely claiming that the bill has been withdrawn or shelved.) Both of those claims have been widely as fact by the mainstream press, and some of them have even entered into the LGBT press and held among advocates. This might help explain HRC-LV’s silence on their meeting with Canyon Ridge. If HRC officials were misinformed and accepted Canyon Ridge’s assurances, would anyone in the gay community be surprised?
I think it’s time for the HRC-LV to come forward with what they know about Canyon Ridge and join the effort to hold Canyon Ridge accountable. Failure to do so is not much different from collaboration. Surely the HRC can be a fierce advocate for something, can’t they?
Categories: International
COMMENT (1) | LINK
European Court on Human Rights Rules That Moscow Gays Have Right To Pride
Jim Burroway
October 21st, 2010
In a historic ruling today in the case of Nikolai Alexeev v. Russia, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia violated the European Convention on Human Rights with the banning of the 2006, 2007 and 2008 Moscow Prides. The court awarded 12,000 euros in damages to Moscow gay rights advocate and Pride organizer Nikolai Alexeev and a further 17,500 euros in costs.
Alexeev told Moscow News, “This is the first ever decision of the European Court of Human Rights which concerns freedom of assembly in Russia. It guarantees everyone freedom of expression without special permission.”
In a statement released earlier this morning, Alexeev hailed today’s verdict as cause for celebration. “We declare October 21, the Russian LGBT Liberation Day and we will celebrate it every year from now on with public demonstrations,” he said.
The European Court ruled that Russian authorities violated three specific articles of the European Convention, namely Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association), Article 13 (right to an effective remedy) and Article 14 (prohibition of discrimination). Of the last violation, the court wrote:
It has been established above that the main reason for the ban imposed on the events organised by the applicant was the authorities’ disapproval of demonstrations which they considered to promote homosexuality. In particular, the Court cannot disregard the strong personal opinions publicly expressed by the mayor of Moscow and the undeniable link between these statements and the ban. In the light of these findings the Court also considers it established that the applicant suffered discrimination on the grounds of his sexual orientation and that of other participants in the proposed events. It further considers that the Government did not provide any justification showing that the impugned distinction was compatible with the standards of the Convention.
On the issue of freedom of assembly, the court took a particular slap at former Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov:
The mayor of Moscow, whose statements were essentially reiterated in the Government’s observations, considered it necessary to confine every mention of homosexuality to the private sphere and to force gay men and lesbians out of the public eye, implying that homosexuality was a result of a conscious, and antisocial, choice. However, they were unable to provide justification for such exclusion. There is no scientific evidence or sociological data at the Court’s disposal suggesting that the mere mention of homosexuality, or open public debate about sexual minorities’ social status, would adversely affect children or “vulnerable adults”. On the contrary, it is only through fair and public debate that society may address such complex issues as the one raised in the present case. Such debate, backed up by academic research, would benefit social cohesion by ensuring that representatives of all views are heard, including the individuals concerned. It would also clarify some common points of confusion, such as whether a person may be educated or enticed into or out of homosexuality, or opt into or out of it voluntarily. This was exactly the kind of debate that the applicant in the present case attempted to launch, and it could not be replaced by the officials spontaneously expressing uninformed views which they considered popular. In the circumstances of the present case the Court cannot but conclude that the authorities’ decisions to ban the events in question were not based on an acceptable assessment of the relevant facts.
The foregoing considerations are sufficient to enable the Court to conclude that the ban on the events organised by the applicant did not correspond to a pressing social need and was thus not necessary in a democratic society.
The Moscow Times also notes that this ruling comes on the first day in which Moscow’s new mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, replaced outgoing mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who was fired last month by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Luzhkov had previously denounced Gay Pride parades as “Satanic” and vowed that he would never allow one to take place during his administration.
Ninth Circuit Court Stays DADT Injunction
Jim Burroway
October 20th, 2010
I’ll bet you just had a feeling that this was too good to last, didn’t you? The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has granted the Justice Department’s request for a temporary stay of a lower court’s injunction ordering the Defense Department to halt all enforcement of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
In a very brief order, Justices Diarmuid O’Scannlain, Stephen S. Trott and William A. Fletcher wrote (PDF: 24 KB/1 page):
This court has received appellant’s emergency motion to stay the district court’s October 12, 2010 order pending appeal. The order is stayed temporarily in order to provide this court with an opportunity to consider fully the issues presented.
Appellee may file an opposition to the motion for a stay pending appeal by October 25, 2010. To expedite consideration of the motion, no reply shall be filed.
“Appellee” here are Log Cabin Republicans, which brought the successful suit against the U.S. government in which Federal District Judge Virginia A. Phillips declared DADT unconstitutional. This is a temporary stay, allowing the court time to consider whether there should be a longer-term stay for the duration of the appeal.
It’s unclear what immediate effect this stay will have. Chris Geidner points out that the Defense Department memorandum requiring compliance with the injunction states (PDF: 96KB/1 page):
In the interim, the Department of Defense will abide by the terms of the injunction. It is possible that a stay of the injunction could be issued very soon, perhaps in a matter of days. In that event, I will issue additional guidance.
In other words, DADT remains suspended until the Defense Department issues a new memorandum. If a longer-term stay is granted sometime after October 25, then the Defense Department will probably issue a new memorandum requiring enforcement of DADT again for the duration of the appeals process. That process will likely take the better part of a year.
Update (Oct 21): A new memorandum may come sooner than first thought:
The Pentagon says it’s working to come up with new guidelines regarding gays serving in the military after a court ruling restored the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, at least for now. Defense Department spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said Thursday that he expects the guidelines be announced later in the day.
Categories: Military (Don't Ask, Don't Tell)
COMMENTS (8) | LINK
It Gets Better: From Perry, IA
Jim Burroway
October 20th, 2010
If you’ve never seen the web site I’m From Driftwood, you really owe yourself a heart-warming visit. The site is made up of stories submitted by people from all over. Each story’s title says where they come from — “I’m from Sheboygan Falls“, “I’m From Lake Charles“, you get the picture — and they talk about what it was like growing up there, before they were out and as they were coming out. In many ways, it could be seen as a forerunner to Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project, which was begun in response to the rash of LGBT suicides we saw in September.
In a few of the I’m From Driftwood posts, you can see considerable overlap between the two projects. This one, “I’m From Perry, IA”, begins with Samuel describing his harrowing experience with a brutal and punitive ex-gay conversion therapy experience. Watch it:
Samuel’s experience is not altogether rare. If his story ended there — conditional love as long as he pretended to be straight — we would see the perfect setup for a life of torment. But there’s another ingredient involved that, for now, is making the story’s ending different from where it could have gone. That ingredient is Sam’s fortitude. Things still aren’t any better with his parents — they still insist that he “change” before they allow him back into the home. But now that he’s in college at Kansas State, things have somehow started to get better for him. But in a very different way and on his terms:
…But, I do recognize that I will give them that chance. What my parents did was part of what they believed. They thought they were losing their child and they wanted to help him, so I have to forgive them, I have to move forward. But I think the reason why I was so excited to be able tell the story was that if there’s other people who have gone through conversion therapy, who are having those feelings of, “I’m the only one alone”, you need to know that there are people who have made it through and, you can’t change what I never chose.
The sad tragedy to all of this is that Sam’s story is both unique and not uncommon. There’s hardly a month that goes by that I don’t get an email from someone asking for advice. Either they are trying to recover from an ex-gay experience or, more commonly, a friend or relative asks what they should do when someone they know enters some kind of “treatment” program. These are hard stories to deal with, but one good resource is Beyond Ex-Gay, a network of ex-gay survivors. It’s not only for survivors themselves, but also their families and friends. I know that they have provided valuable support to those who are coming out of the ex-gay experience.
Categories: Conversion Therapy & the Ex-Gay Movement
COMMENTS (5) | LINK
Justice Dept. Files Emergency DADT Stay Request With 9th Circuit
Jim Burroway
October 20th, 2010
The Justice Department today has filed an emergency request with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, asking that the court issues a stay of U.S. Federal District Judge Virginia A. Phillips’ injunction preventing the Defense Department from enforcing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
In today’s filing (PDF: 156 KB/25 pages, via Politico), the Justice Department argues that “if not stayed immediately, the district court’s order precludes the administration of an Act of Congress and risks causing significant immediate harm to the military and its efforts to be prepared to implement an orderly repeal of the statute.” The Justice Department then asks:
We respectfully request that the Court enter an administrative stay by today October 20, 2010, pending this Court’s resolution of the government’s motion for a stay pending appeal, which would maintain the status quo that prevailed before the district court’s decision while the Court considers the government’s stay motion.
In giving the reasons for requesting the stay, the Justice Department repeats the reasons they gave to the District Court, except this time they chose to omit the “evidence” of the Rolling Stone interview with President Barack Obama, which Judge Phillips derisively dismissed as “hearsay.” The Justice Department argues:
The worldwide injunction also threatens to disrupt the ongoing efforts to fashion and implement policies to effect any repeal of § 654 in an orderly fashion. The President strongly supports repeal of the statute that the district court has found unconstitutional, a position shared by the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Although the Administration has called for a repeal of the statute, it has made clear that repeal should not occur without needed deliberation, advance planning, and training. To that end, the Secretary of Defense established the Comprehensive Review Working Group, which is currently nearing completion of a comprehensive review of how best to implement a repeal of § 654. The Working Group has visited numerous military installations across the country and overseas, where it has interacted with tens of thousands of servicemembers on this issue. The Working Group has also conducted an extensive, professionally developed survey that was distributed to a representative sample of approximately 400,000 servicemembers. An abrupt, court-ordered end to the statute would pretermit the Working Group’s efforts to ensure that the military completes development of the necessary policies and regulations for a successful and orderly implementation of any repeal of § 654. The significant impairment of the Department’s efforts to devise an orderly end to the statute would cause irreparable harm.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon has complied with the injunction barring enforcement of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Former New York Guardsman Lt. Dan Choi yesterday successfully re-enlisted in the U.S. Army at a recruiting station in New York, while the Pentagon has announced that they have called a halt to all ongoing discharge procedures underway under DADT.
Karen Ocamb puts it nicely:
Obama, the DOJ and the Pentagon should acknowledge that DADT is broken and unfixable like Humpty Dumpty.
Categories: Military (Don't Ask, Don't Tell)
COMMENTS (5) | LINK
AP Notices Ugandan “Hang Them” Tabloid — Two Weeks Later
Jim Burroway
October 19th, 2010
October 2, 2010 edition of the Ugandan tabloid Rolling Stone. Chances are, you read it here first. (Click to enlarge)
If you’re a BTB regular, you might be forgiven if you thought you experienced a bit of déjà vu while reading this morning’s paper. The Associated Press today published a pretty good account of the Ugandan tabloid, Rolling Stone(no relation to the U.S. magazine by the same name), which outed several dozen private LGBT citzens as part of their “Hang Them!” campaign.
That hint of recognition you experienced may have come about becuase we were on this story two weeks ago, as we reported on the Rolling Stone’s unfolding anti-gay campaign with its October 2 issue. The front cover of the tabloid promised “100 pictures of Uganda’s Top Homos,” but the story beginning on page two only included eight photos gleaned from Facebook and Gaydar profiles along with personally-identifiable information — names (sometimes including full names), residences and employers — of about a couple dozen LGBT individuals. The article also said that it was to be the first of a four part series. It’s widely believed that a well-known anti-gay activist may be connected to the campaign, although he denies any involvment.
The Associated Press fills in a few extra details:
In the days since it was published, at least four gay Ugandans on the list have been attacked and many others are in hiding, according to rights activist Julian Onziema. One person named in the story had stones thrown at his house by neighbors.
"Hang Them; They Are After Our Kids", published in the October 2, 2010 edition of the Ugandan tabloid Rolling Stone (Names, places and photo obscured by BTB. Click to enlarge)
That single article alone was damage enough, but Rolling Stone threatened three more installments and everyone wondered what would come with the expected appearance of the October 9 edition. Fortunately the government stepped in to shut down Rolling Stone before the second installment of their “Hang Them” campaign could hit the streets. It turns out that Rolling Stone failed to properly register itself with the authorities. In a country where heavy governmental interference with the press is commonplace, that was a big no-no.
The AP article confirms our suspicions that Rolling Stone may start publishing again once they get their registration issues resolved. However, that, too, is only conjecture, since the lack of official registration probably wasn’t the only problem. I’m told that the October 2 issue, which was the fifth edition since Rolling Stone’s late August debut, carried only two advertisements in its entire 24-page edition. One was a quarter-page ad for Uganda Telecom and the other was a small front-page ad for Blue Magic, Inc,. the printing house which printed Rolling Stone. Five weeks on, that’s not much of an advertising base. The AP puts their circulation at 2,000 issues, but at only 1,500 Uganda Shillings a pop (US$0.65), this paper was not destined to last — unless there are some very deep pockets backing it.
Update: I missed it, but Warren Throckmorton caught something that the AP story got wrong. The AP said:
A lawmaker in this conservative African country introduced a bill a year ago that would have imposed the death penalty for some homosexual acts and life in prison for others. An international uproar ensued, and the bill was quietly shelved.
In fact, the bill has not been shelved. It was referred by Parliament to two committees: the Committee on Legal and Parliamentary Affairs and the Committee on Presidential Affairs. As far as I know, neither committee has returned a report back to Parliament. Warren’s sources confirm to him that it is still in committee as well. After the committee(s) report back to Parliament, the bill would then have to undergo a second and third reading before a final vote.
Parliamentary elections are slated for February and March of 2011, and in anticipation of breaking for campaigning, Parliament issued what they said was its agenda for the final session. The Anti-Homosexuality Bill did not make it to that agenda, and it has not appeared on the daily order papers.
“Children of Homosexuals” Researcher More Apt To Ape Paul Cameron
Jim Burroway
October 17th, 2010
There’s a study out that’s causing quite a stir. It’s by Walter R. Schumm, a professor Kansas State University whose paper has appeared in latest issue of the Journal of Biosocial Science. (JBS was formerly The Eugenics Review from 1909 to 1968, at which time the Eugenics Society changed its journal’s name.) Schumm’s paper, titled “Children of homosexuals more apt to be homosexuals: A reply to Morrison and to Cameron based on an examination of multiple sources of data,” essentially picks up where a very similar 2006 paper by Paul Cameron left off, which claimed that 33% to 47% of children of gay parents wound up being gay. Schumm’s paper claims that children of gay parents were 1.7 to 12.1 times as likely to become gay as children of straight parents, “depending on the mix of child and parent genders.” The implication behind Schumm’s paper, as it was with Cameron’s, is that gay parenting can somehow influence a child’s sexuality, with the implication that homosexuality itself is not biological but determined according to how a child is raised.
Schumm’s study is currently making a big splash on AOLNews, where, according to an article by Paul Kix, Schumm has supposedly conducted a new “robust” study examining whether Cameron was right: Do gay parents make gay children? Cameron’s paper, also published in JBS, was just another example of the shoddy “scholarship” and deliberate distortion of other publications that we’ve come to expect from him. Schumm’s paper seeks to replicate Cameron’s work while acknowledging some of the criticisms of Cameron’s 2006 paper. It’s important to emphasize however that Schumm only acknowledges someof the criticisms. The most important criticism — the completely non-random nature of the so-called “dataset” that Cameron used — Schumm not only ignores, but he repeats that same flaw and embellishes it in a grandly enlarged form.
Schumm, like Cameron, calls his study a “meta-analysis” of ten smaller samples. (Cameron used only three.) When researchers use the term “meta-analysis,” they mean that they collected a bunch of data from a collection of other studies. And typically, these studies are drawn from what are called “convenience samples.”
To obtain a convenience sample, a researcher defines the type of population he’s looking for and recruits his sample according to eligibility requirements that he defined ahead of time from among people who are more or less conveniently available to him — hence the name. But critically, that researcher would have accepted everyone who volunteered and met the predefined criteria. While this isn’t a representative sample, it is, at least for the most part, a relatively random one, even if it is often very far from being a perfectly random one. Putting together nationally-representative samples is extremely costly and, therefore, extremely rare. Convenience samples are much more common. Good researchers, however, are very mindful of the limits of their sample and would never extrapolate their findings to the population as a whole.
Convenience samples have many weaknesses, and one of the weaknesses is that they tend to be small. A “meta-analysis” is intended to correct that problem. To perform a meta-analysis, a researcher collects a bunch of other studies and combines all of the data from their samples, re-crunches the data, and sees which trends hold up in the much larger sample. This too, is valuable, although it also has its pitfalls. It’s not important to go into them here, but for our purposes it’s fair to say that meta-analysis techniques are useful — as long as the studies gathered for the meta-analysis contain samples that were similarly constructed and were meant to examine the same set of questions. And that also means that the smaller samples were somewhat similarly random, even if they were not statistically representative. The larger meta-analysis retains the same weakness of the smaller random-but-not-representatives samples, but with the larger combined sample, it can tend to diminish some of the quirks (or “outliers”) of the smaller samples. These kinds of studies can be useful in identifying trends and correlations, but they cannot be used to extrapolate behaviors or conditions to the population as a whole.
But Schumm’s “meta-analysis” (and Cameron’s before him) doesn’t even have the benefit of being built off of random convenience samples. There were no convenience samples in any of the ten prior works that Schumm used for his meta-analysis. In fact, they weren’t even professional studies. They were popular books!
That’s right, each of the ten sources that Schumm used to construct his “meta-analysis” were from general-audience books about LGBT parenting and families, most of which are available on Amazon.com. Schumm read the books, took notes on each parent and child described in the book, examined their histories, and counted up who was gay and who was straight among the kids. The ten books were:
- Abigail Garner’s Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is
- Andrew Gotlieb’s Sons Talk About Their Gay Fathers: Life Curves
- Noelle Howey and Ellen Samuels’ Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up with Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Parents
- Maureen Asten’s Lesbian Family Relationships in American Society: The Making of an Ethnographic Film
- Mary Boenke’s Trans Forming Families: Real Stories About Transgendered Loved Ones
- Jane Drucker’s Families Of Value: Gay and Lesbian Parents and their Children Speak Out
- Peggy Gillespie’s Love Makes a Family: Portraits of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Parents and Their Families
- Louise Rafkin’s Different Mothers: Sons and Daughters of Lesbians Talk About Their Lives
- Myra Hauschild and Pat Rosier’s Get Used to It!: Children of Gay and Lesbian Parents
- And Lisa Saffron’s What About the Children: Sons and Daughters of Lesbian and Gay Parents Talk About Their Lives
The first three were also used in Cameron’s 2006 paper. Schumm comments these books, saying:
The authors of these ten books have done important data collection for the entire scientific community. While their samples may not be random, they may be no worse than the convenience and snowball samples used in much of previous researcher with gay and lesbian parents; certainly their combined dataset is far larger than that of the early studies on gay and lesbian parenting.
This is utter nonsense. None of the books contained any semblance of a sample — not even a convenience sample, and the authors certainly didn’t do anything approaching an ”important data collection” by any stretch of the imagination. What they did was tell stories, or, rather, helped the families themselves to tell their own stories. The people chosen in each of these volumes were were not picked according to a pre-defined criteria in the manner in which a researcher would construct a sample. They were chosen solely because the authors and editors thought their stories were compelling. In 2006, Abigail Garner, an advocate for children of LGBT parents, was particularly incensed at Cameron’s misuse of her book and implying that the people selected to appear in it were in any way random. In fact, Abigail said that her book was intentionally non-random:
In fact, I had made a point of having a roughly even number of straight kids and second generation [gay, bisexual or transgender] kids so that both views would be evenly represented in the book. In other words, because of the goals of my book, I deliberately aimed to have 50% of the kids interviewed to be queer. Not because it is statistically reflective of the population, but to give it balance of perspective.
Schumm used Abigail’s book in precisely the same illegitimate way that Cameron did. Despite the fact that Abigail expressly said that she intentionally made her balance of gay kids to straight kids at about 50/50, Schumm used that sample as part of his “meta-analysis” to conclude that gay parents are more likely to create gay kids. Schumm doesn’t say how many of his 262 “samples” he derived from Abagail’s book. Cameron said he used “over 50″ of Abigail’s interviews, so it is likely to be a considerable chunk of Schumm’s “dataset” as well.
But even if the “dataset” from Abigail’s book was minimal, the other books won’t make up for the flaw. The books that Schuum chose are best characterized as literary works, many with essays and stories of kids “speaking out” about having gay parents. (Gotlieb’s Sons Talk About Their Gay Fathers is something of an exception. But here, too, his work is descriptive and not statistical. He also only talks about twelve young men.)
These stories were chosen for their literary and illustrative qualities, and for the compelling nature of each of their situations. The method for collecting the stories for these books is anything but random. In fact, the process is best described as anti-random. Sticking to a rule for randomness would have likely rendered these books both boring and unmarketable. The goal of these authors and editors was not to examine their subjects in a statistical sense, but in a literary sense — to explore issues and perspectives and different points of view, with each story chosen because it illustrates an issue that isn’t touched on by the other stories. And no matter how great or small the so-called “samples” were (Gotlieb’s consisted of only twelve young men), it’s a given that these authors and editors ensured that the experiences of LGBT children were well-represented alongside their straight compatriots, without regard to whether their numerical presence were in any way statistically representative.
That is how good stories are gathered, but it most certainly is not how a sample is collected for statistical purposes. To run statistics on this non-statistical (or anti-statistical) sample would be like judging the ratio of giraffes to chimpanzees in Africa by comparing the populations selected by the zookeepers at your local zoo. Whenever a non-random selection process is used, any attempt at statistics on that process is completely meaningless — and an abuse.
But to add further insult to that injury of statistics, Schumm needed a control sample of children from straight families. For that, he turned to a population-based representative sample from 1994: Edward O. Laumann, et al’s, The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States
Which means that he’s now comparing elephants to oranges.
Before I end this critique, I have another surprise: In his JBS paper, Schumm actually cited me by name and included a complete block-quote from my 2006 criticism of Cameron’s study – while blithely ignoring the main point of that very criticism. Of course, he had to, because the main point of my criticism of Cameron’s work can be multiplied three-and-a-thirdfold for Schumm’s.
And having become a subject of Schumm’s highly selective citation, I can’t help but notice that Cameron often did the same thing. He was famous for picking out a small paragraph of other researchers’ work while ignoring that researcher’s primary findings in the hope that nobody would notice.
But I noticed with Cameron and I’m noticing it again with Schumm. And I’m not surprised. Back in 2007 when Cameron tried to launch an online “journal,” Schumm agreed to be part of Cameron’s editorial board. Cameron’s “journal” failed to get off the ground, but Schumm continues on. More recently he served as an “expert” witness alongside George “Rentboy” Rekers in Florida’s gay adoption trial. As far as I can tell, Schumm comes off appearing more “sciencey” than Cameron, but his methodology is exactly the same. And when you use the same methodology, you end up with the same result: junk science.
Stay tuned. I’ll have more later.
Categories: Anti-Gay Activists
COMMENTS (42) | LINK
Mother of Bullied 11-Year-Old Who Committed Suicide Last Year Calls on President Obama to Do Something to Protect America’s Youth
Jason Cianciotto
October 16th, 2010
First, watch this video from CNN in Atlanta.
The epidemic of bullying in schools has been close to the top of the news cycle for over a month now. The American attention span, often reduced to 30-second sound bites, remains focused on the heart-wrenching stories of young people and their families from around the country. The youth in these stories have ranged in age from 11 to 19 and they have come from all manor of background and socio-economic status.
What they all share in common is the tragic impact of bullying and a lack of successful intervention by those tasked with ensuring the protection of students in school on a daily basis. Inconsistency in action by school teachers and administration is matched by inconsistency in laws and policies designed to address and prevent bullying in schools.
As of September 2010, only 14 states and the District of Columbia have laws that addresses discrimination, harassment and/or bullying of students in school based on sexual orientation and gender identity: California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington.
In addition to those states, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin ban discrimination and/or harassment based on sexual orientation (gender identity is not included as a protected category).
A number of additional states have anti-bullying laws that do not enumerate categories of protection, including sexual orientation or gender identity. No doubt these laws were created, in part, to allay the concerns of social conservatives who fight tooth and nail to prevent sexual orientation and gender identity from being included in legislation.
However, as former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy said in the landmark ruling against Colorado’s Amendment 2, “Enumeration is the essential device used to make the duty not to discriminate concrete and to provide guidance for those who must comply.”
In other words, nondiscrimination and anti-bullying laws should absolutely include sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as other categories of protection.
In an earlier post, I wrote about unique opportunities that arise to create legislative and social change, often without some coordinated plan by activists and pressure groups focused on a particular issue. This is one of those opportunities to address bullying and discrimination in schools.
I applaud and honor Masika Bermudez-Carrasquillo, in memory of her son, for appealing directly to President Obama to do something to force schools to better care for bullied students and ensure accountability for those who fail to do so, including the parents of bullies.
Leading up to and post the mid-term election, Congressional leaders and President Obama have a historic opportunity to take leadership on an issue that the overwhelming majority or Americans will support: Protecting our nation’s youth.
There is an opportunity to revisit legislation already languishing in Congress – the Student Nondiscrimination Act (SNDA) and the Safe Schools Improvement Act (SSIA) - to see whether their provision adequately address the need to protect students. For example, many Box Turtle Bulletin readers, commenting on a previous post about those laws, called for more explicit provisions that allow parents to take legal recourse against school districts and administrators who fail to protect students.
While the tragic affects of bullying will likely continue, at some point the American consciousness will move on. Our major news outlets will be enraptured by the outcome of the mid-term election and momentum to create change on this issue will diminish.
NOW is the time for the President and Congress to act. I encourage you to contact your Senators, Representatives, and the President to ask them to take leadership on this issue.
I also encourage you to contact the leadership at HRC (202.628.4160), the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (202.393.5177), and GLSEN (212.727.0135) to voice your hope that they are doing everything they can to seize this moment to protect our nation’s youth.
