Even as the Pentagon rolled out its detailed and many month long study on DADT, the gay-haters at Family Research Council ("FRC") rolled out their own doctored and fraudulent poll of the military which purports to find the exact opposite of the Pentagon study. Never mind, of course, that FRC had to skew and hand pick its poll sample to favor much older and retired military and "family members" in order to rig a result that would on its face seem to support its religious based opposition to DADT repeal. Jeremy Hooper at Good As You summarizes the flaws of the FRC "poll":*
A new Family Research Council survey purports to show that "almost 63 percent of active duty and retired military families oppose overturning the policy prohibiting open homosexuality in the military." But honestly, about all we need to know can be found in these two lines:
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43% [of respondents] are supporters of the Tea Party movement (3,691 people).
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Demographically, 62% are pro-life, 70% support traditional marriage 70% are historical contributors, 45% are male and 71% are 50 years of age or older.
FULL POLL DATA: http://downloads.frc.org/EF/EF10K46.pdf
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Nearly 3/4 are over fifty? 43% support the Tea Party? 70% support the code-worded concept of "traditional marriage"? Plus retired and active, servicemember and family member, are all tossed together as one big block of respondents? Puh-leeze! This is nowhere near a fair sample.
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Combine this sample with the weighted questions about "open homosexual behavior," and what you have is more of the same kind of obfuscation that landed FRC on the Southern Poverty law Center's latest hate groups list. The mainstream media should accept it in the same way.
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Then, of course there is more on the details of the lies that Tony Perkins put out on Hardball earlier in the week. Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin demolishes Perkins' dishonest effort to fool viewers into thinking there was any even remotely legitimate study to back up FRC's lies. Here are some highlights: *
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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.
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Perkins completely misquoted it. Perkins said that 86% of men who abused children -- without regard to gender -- said they were gay or bisexual, a claim that the authors specifically did not make.
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FRC, however, took a single sentence from a study that did not try to investigate the sexual orientation of offenders, and amplified a throw-away line as though it were the entire study’s reason for being. And because it didn’t investigate sexual orientation, it’s illegitimate to to amplify one lone throw-away sentence into “overwhelming scientific evidence” — those are Tony Perkin’s words — that gays are a threat to children.
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The reason the FRC is legitimately a part of the SPLC’s list of hate groups is their penchant for taking one line from a study out of context, and present that single sentence as being somehow more significant than the tons of studies that experts in the field of child sexual abuse have conducted through the ages.
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Once again, lies, bogus studies and polls and bearing false witness against others are FRC's principal stock in trade. If FRC represents what a Christian is like, then I surely want to run screaming away from Christianity. As recent studies show, I am not alone in that assessment as younger generations increasing identify as having no religion.
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