One of the favorite lies of the far right and the perpetually lying professional Christian organizations is the ongoing effort to depict LGBT individuals - gay men in particular - as sexually promiscuous and constantly looking for sexual hook ups and trysts in public parks as well as similar public venues. All too frequently the irresponsible and incredibly lazy media reporters and talking head news anchors merely parrot the bullshit being mouthed by the Christianists and never bother to make any effort to fact check the claims to see if the alleged facts support by objective facts. That after all would require some effort and would likely result in less sensational and titillating stories. Matt Comer - another 2008 Blogger Summit participant I had the honor of meeting - decided to check out the sensationalized stories carried by WBTV-TV in Charlotte, North Carolina against the actual police records. Low and behold, it turns out that the WBTB-TV stories were NOT supported by the facts. Oh, and of the men arrested, the majority are married men on the down low. In short, if any problem of promiscuity and prostitution exits in Charlotte, by a vast majority of cases it is HETEROSEXUAL prostitution. NOT GAY SEX. Here are some highlights from Matt's post on QNotes:*
If Charlotte news station WBTV or Republican Mecklenburg County Commissioner Bill James were your only sources of information, you’d likely be led to believe the Queen City has a significant problem with men engaging in illegal sexual activities in the city’s and county’s public parks.
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Fortunately, real journalism uncovers hard numbers — facts backed up by police records — that show an astonishingly low rate of arrests for men soliciting so-called crimes against nature in public places.
The myth that gay men are predators is nothing new. . . . . Armed with nothing more than anonymous online postings from a hook-up website, [WBTV reporter Steve] Crump took to southwest Charlotte’s James Boyce Park to interview concerned parents and community members.
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Crump’s report included interviews with parents and the leader of a nearby neighborhood patrol, accompanied by several video images of young children playing on swing sets and other playground equipment, on a baseball field and with their parents. Copies of the website postings were shown to parents during interviews. In one scene, the reporter mentions the name of the website, “Cruising Gays,” followed by a parent’s, “Oh no!” Later, a young woman is heard saying, “This is awful.”
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Following their initial report, WBTV aired another story after County Commissioner James publicly questioned how recreation officials were dealing with “sexual predators” and the “moral scourge” in Mecklenburg County parks. James claimed the parks had become home to “homos-xual infestations” and that the police still “arrest about 250 homosexuals a year.”
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Following WBTV’s report, Qnotes decided to do what Crump and his colleagues chose not to. We immediately undertook an investigation of arrests and charges for solicitation of a crime against nature and requested information from CMPD for all of 2010 and 2011 through the end of February. According to CMPD’s Rob Tufano, a total of 325 people were charged in 2010 and 2011 with soliciting a crime against nature. Of the total, only 69 [21%] were men. Forty-seven men were arrested and charged, and the remainder were issued citations. . . . Only 15 cases [out of 325 in total] involved men charged with a non-prostitution-, non-drug-related solicitation of a crime against nature.
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“What we generally, mainly enforce is the [heterosexual] prostitution. We have a proliferation of it on the internet. It used to be Craigslist; now it is Backpage. We also have a decent sized street prostitution problem here in Charlotte and at back massage parlors.” . . . The majority of arrested men, Hollar said, are either married or haven’t publicly acknowledged their sexual orientation.
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The lopsided numbers all point to heterosexual prostitution as the primary issue of concern among sexual crimes in Charlotte — not men who have sex with men. Upon further investigation and upon being exposed to the public, these facts are clear to even the most casual of observers. Yet, reporter Steve Crump and WBTV opted to ignore calls for accuracy, chose to distort and mislead the few facts they cared to report and played into decades-old prejudices and stereotypes of gay men.
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Such behavior is a clear violation of journalistic ethics and can do irreparable harm to LGBT people. That’s why Qnotes, unlike our colleagues at WBTV, opted to engage in real journalism, investigate the issue and report solid facts. We also sought to hold our colleagues at WBTV accountable.
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The evidence points Charlotte — and, in particular, County Commissioner Bill James and WBTV — in one clear direction: stop scapegoating gay men and start looking in the mirror. Misbehaving heterosexuals are your problem. Leave us gay folk alone.
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Kudos to Matt for exposing the lies of WBTV=TV and Commissioner James. Lies are lies whether or not the liar pretends to be a godly Christian like Commissioner James or not. As is so often the case, the real facts are so inconvenient to the Christianist agenda. When need to be constantly vigilant so that lazy journalists do not get away with regurgitating Christianist lies.
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