Apparently some organizations who are on the Southern Poverty Law Center's list and profiles of anti-gay hate groups aren't happy about it and their spokespeople are addressing the issue.
But the venue that they chose to address SPLC's list and the way that they are saying (or rather what they are not saying) raises some questions as to the accuracy of their complaints.
Coral Ridge Ministries's Robert Knight, Concerned Women for America's Wendy Wright, and Christian Anti-Defamation Coalition head Gary L. Cass all responded in outraged tones over SPLC's either profiling or designating their organizations as anti-gay hate groups.
The venue where they choose to address the charges was on the pages of World Net Daily, an online publication which is infamous for its anti-gay rhetoric.
A writer on the site, Les Kinsolving, has in the past referred to the LGBT community as the "sodomy lobby."
In October of this year, he called a judge's order to stop enforcement of the military's ban on gay and lesbian troops in the military as a "disease ridden judicial decision."
In August of this year, the publication dropped conservative writer Ann Coulter as a keynote speaker from a conference it held because she earlier spoke at a conference held by a gay Republican group.
And in February of this year, another writer on World Net Daily, Molotov Mitchell, spoke out in favor of Uganda's "Kill The Gays" bill, even evoking Martin Luther King Jr's name in defense of it.
Joining Cass, Wright, and Knight was Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council in an official statement, which may not have been put out to World Net Daily specifically but was still picked up by the publication.
The irony of appearing in an anti-gay online publication in order to complain about being unfairly targeted as anti-gay seemed to have escaped Perkins, Wright, Knight, and Cass. This is probably because they were too busy pleading victimhood.
Knight - "Smearing legitimate groups merely for disagreeing about homosexuality is a very hateful act."
Perkins - "The Left's smear campaigns of conservatives is being driven by the clear evidence that the American public is losing patience with their radical policy agenda as seen in the recent election and in the fact that every state, currently more than thirty, that has had the opportunity to defend the natural definition of marriage has done so..."
Cass - "We are going to form a coalition of organizations to lobby Congress to withhold funds from SPLC."
Wright - "If they were to judge according to actions, they would have to have a special section for homosexual groups that vandalize and threaten people who oppose the homosexual agenda. We've had death threats against us posted openly on websites because of our work to uphold traditional marriage."
Of course Wright did not say just which LGBT groups were threatening her organization. Nor did she, Knight, Perkins, or Cass directly address any of the charges lodged by the SPLC, which are listed in a detailed report.
For the record, Knight, whose name pops up several times in the report, is inaccurate when he said that groups are being smeared for voicing a mere objection to homosexuality. SPLC said the following in the report:
Generally, the SPLC's listings of these groups is based on their propagation of known falsehoods -- claims about LGBT people that have been thoroughly discredited by scientific authorities -- and repeated, groundless name-calling. Viewing homosexuality as unbiblical does not qualify organizations for listing as hate groups.
SPLC also gave a detailed description as to what these falsehoods are, including the claims that:
Gays molest children at a higher rate than heterosexuals,Same sex parents harm children,
Gays have a lifespan shorter than heterosexuals, and
Gays controlled the Nazi party in Germany and helped orchestrate the Holocaust
SPLC contends that these groups are knowingly pushing these falsehoods.
Now it would seem to me that through all of the whining and clinging to the cross of victimization done by Knight, Perkins, Wright, and Cass would be some type of declaration that these charges aren't true.
Maybe some type of short statement such as "we never said these things" or "we were misconstrued."
But none of the four denied the fact that their organizations are pushing these falsehoods.
So while it seems that these groups aren't ignoring SPLC's charges, it's obvious that they are doing a insanely poor job of refuting them.
UPDATE
And the lies continue.
Today on the news show Hardball, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council sought to defend his organization's claim that gay men molest children at a higher rate than heterosexuals.
In attempting to do this, Perkins cited research by the American College of Pediatricians. However, there are several things about this group that Perkins omitted:
The American College of Pediatricians is not a legitimate medical group. It is a sham organization dedicated to the laundering of junk science about the lgbt community, i.e. the kind of "science" which demonizes the lgbt community. One of its chief researchers was George Rekers, that is before he got caught coming from a European trip with a "rentboy."
Earlier this year, it tried to push a webpage, Facts About Youth, to American schools.
Among other things, this site made the following claims about gay men:
Some gay men sexualize human waste, including the medically dangerous practice of coprophilia, which means sexual contact with highly infectious fecal wastes
In addition, it also contained several errors in regards to research and other claims about the lgbt community.
But these things are irrelevant because the big story is how the American College of Pediatricians benefits people like Perkins.
Just as he did on Hardball, Perkins can cite the ACP without going into details about its errors. The official sounding name of the organization obscures all of that, and thus makes Perkins's position sound accurate.
The sad thing is that I think Perkins knows this.
And apparently this was not the only distortion Perkins committed during his Hardball appearance. Perkins said the following:
If you go back to the Archives of Sexual Behavior, a peer-reviewed reviewed journal, that stated that in self-identified... 86% of men, homosexual men, or who engage... or men who engage in molestation of children, 86% of them identified as homosexual or bisexual. That study has not been refuted.
However, according to the site Box Turtle Bulletin:
The study was not "refuted," in Perkins' terminology, simply because the finding was not considered to be significant, not even by its authors. The study, "Behavior patterns of child molesters" by W.D. Erickson, N.H. Walbek, and R.K. Seely which appeared more than twenty years ago (1988, to be exact), didn't set out to determine the sexual orientation of child molesters. The study, of 229 convicted child molesters in Minnesota, (which, by the way, was never intended to be nationally representative in any way) was focused on the types of sexual contact the men engaged in with their victims -- vaginal or anal penetration, oral contact, and so forth. In this particular sample, 63 victims were male, and 166 victims were female. The "finding" that Perkins and company found so exciting is encapsulated in just one sentence: "Eighty-six percent of offenders against males described themselves as homosexual or bisexual."
That's right, one lone sentence out of a ten page document, buried deeply within the text. In other words, the authors themselves didn't see it as a significant finding. And it may be because the authors didn't delve into the adult relationship makeup of these offenders, or what criteria the offenders used in their self-labeling. Nor did they attempt to investigate whether there was any validity to their self-labeling.
Related posts:
Ignoring your hate group status won't make it go away
Family Research Council, American Family Association named as anti-gay hate groups
18 Anti-Gay Groups and Their Propaganda
10 Anti-Gay Myths Debunked
The Family Research Council should be apologizing to the gay community
Michael Zimmerman, Ph.D.: Religious Freedom is Only for Christians?
Rev. Dr. Cindi Love: How to Stop the Perfect Storm of Hate in Uganda
Wayne Besen: Addressing Religion-Based Bigotry
Wayne Besen: Anti-Gay Hate Groups Waiting in the Wings
http://m.dailykos.com/stories/2010/11/26/923486/-.html