Pope Francis, Breeding Bunnies and Ideological Colonization

In numerous posts I have slammed Pope Francis for his anti-gay batshitery while praising his pronouncements on wealth disparity and climate change.  The man, in short, confounds me, and it seems many others.  A piece in Religion Dispatches voices the same frustrations that I have and continue to experience.  Here are highlights:

Pope Francis confounds me. How can a man who is so eloquent and obviously heartfelt when he talks about global poverty and injustice and income inequality start spouting such a collection of reheated papal clichés and utter nonsense when he starts talking about women and sex?

His just-concluded trip to the Philippines was a virtual festival of such comments, some planned and some obviously off-the-cuff–and some even directly contradictory–but most just downright confounding.

In one of the impromptu inflight press conferences for which he has become famous, Francis told reporters in one breath that “[s]ome think that … in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits” but that Catholics should practice “responsible parenthood.”

Some saw this as a breath of fresh air or a major breakthrough for the Vatican. But who in the twenty-first century thinks Catholics “breed like rabbits”? That’s an offensive stereotype of Catholics that went out of date in the 1950s, when most Catholic women got on board with contraception—which the Catholic Church bans.

And he made his comments after saying Catholics shouldn’t use birth control and while criticizing a woman who was pregnant for the eighth time and facing a cesarean section: “Does she want to leave the seven orphans?,” he said, adding, “That is an irresponsibility."

So she’s irresponsible for getting pregnant eight times because she not using the contraception that you say she can’t use? . . . . Francis doesn’t seem to have the foggiest notion that the reason most people don’t use natural family planning is that it’s not reliable. It’s how you end up pregnant eight times.

In case this sounds familiar, it was a favorite theme of Pope John Paul II, who blasted efforts to expand access to family planning for women in the developing world as “contraceptive imperialism.” During the run-up to the historic 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development, which John Paul bitterly objected to for its emphasis on reproductive health care, all the Catholic cardinals met at the Vatican to denounce the conference as “cultural imperialism.”

The irony here is that the Philippines recently liberalized access to contraception that had been blocked by the Catholic bishops of the country in concert with the Aquino administration for more than a decade. The Reproductive Health law that restored government-financed family planning services was popularly supported by Filipinos but stymied for years by the politically powerful Catholic bishops. Who exactly was doing the colonizing here?

Women do have a lot of things to say in today’s society–like they want to use birth control to plan their families responsibly. To bad Pope Francis can’t hear them.

The Christofascists' Obsession with "Porn Addiction"

If one peruses any number of Christofascist cites in addition to seeing numerous promotions of "ex-gay" conversion programs one also sees many promotions for programs that will "cure" porn addiction.  Here's a sample "ministry."  Here is another.   I guess it should come as little surprise that these repressive Christofascists organizations should be obsessed with porn because (i) the Internet has made it harder to control the private activities of their sheeple, (ii) Internet porn usage is highest in the Bible Belt, and (iii) there is LOTS of money to be made - just like with "ex-gay" conversion programs (just ask Marcus, a/k/a Marcia, Bachmann) - by marketing fraudulent programs.  A piece in Salon looks at the topic and finds that there is no proof that "porn addiction" exists.  But you will never hear that from the Christofascists.  In the last analysis, with these folks it is ALWAYS about control of others and money. Also note the pathologization of being gay.  Here are some article highlights:

Porn addiction is arguably the diagnosis of our time. The idea has thrived in a time of anxiety about the proliferation of free, ever-intensifying adult material — and how it might be changing our relationships, our sex lives and our (zombie voice) braaains. . . . . But a new study suggests there is no evidence that it actually exists.

With the help of an addiction specialist and an expert in neurophysiology, clinical psychologist David Ley did a survey of the existing investigations into porn addiction. The resulting paper is published in the scientific journal Current Sexual Health Reports and concludes that research on “porn addiction” is hindered by “poor experimental designs” and “limited methodological rigor.” Ouch. The burns don’t stop there: The authors argue that the porn addiction model ignores the real issues underlying compulsive smut-watching, and that the “lucrative” treatment industry that has arisen to address this new diagnosis has no evidence of effectiveness.

The literature is weighted with moral and cultural values. There are tons and tons of theoretical statements that are made but never evaluated. The exact same thing is true for what literature there is on porn addiction.

[W]e found what I expected to find, which is that the literature is so poorly organized and uncritically produced that there is not a lot of clinical or research usefulness to the concept of porn addiction. The overwhelming majority of articles published on porn addiction include no empirical research — it’s less than 27 percent. Less than one in four actually have data. In less than one in 10 is that data analyzed or organized in a scientifically valid way.

What we find is that individuals who are reporting or being reported as having problems with excessive porn use are likely to be male, gay or bisexual, have experienced negative life events in the past, have a high libido and a relationship mismatch around sexual desires.

Lastly, and this is one of the ones that is gonna be controversial, there is a large, lucrative industry that experiences tremendous secondary gain from the promulgation of this concept. As part of this paper we had a grad student call porn addiction facilities around the country and get an idea of the cost — and the costs were extraordinary. The average was $675 a day. These facilities were recommending or requiring stays anywhere between 15 and 90 days. Insurance doesn’t pay for this; it is cash only. The other thing that is really troubling is that there is no data to show that these very expensive programs generate positive results. There is an industry — and unfortunately I count the media in that as well, because the media makes lots and lots of hay by touting the issue of porn addiction, and even by raising the controversy of “is it real or not?” There is a lot of money to be made in keeping this thing alive.

What we’re finding more and more these days is that the claims of sex addiction are based on the pathologization of gay and bi males, . . . .  these are concepts that are turning being a gay or bi male into a disease again. Even with pornography, the research is very clear: gay and bi men use pornography much more than their heterosexual counterparts — but that use of pornography is not pathological, it’s part of their coming out process, their seeking out normative or consistent depictions of sexual behavior that meets and matches their internal desires, which isn’t present in the general media. Consistently, the research shows that gay and bi men are at far greater risk of being called porn addicts than are their heterosexual counterparts, and that is troubling.

University of Texas Investigating Regnerus Study

Readers will remember how the anti-gay hate groups and the National Organization for Marriage trumpeted the supposed findings of the study on the children of gay parents done by Mark Regnerus (pictured at right).  As this blog and many others have noted, there were many serious flaws in the study and now the University of Texas is investigating Regnerus' study for possible scientific misconduct.  No doubt the Christianists will somehow try claim that Regnerus is being persecuted for his religious beliefs rather than the fact that his study seemed to echo the type of "research" done by the long discredited Paul Cameron.  Here are highlights from the American-Statesman: 

Allegations of scientific misconduct have prompted the University of Texas to investigate a professor's study that found adults with gay parents reported significantly different life experiences than the children of married, heterosexual biological parents.

The study, authored by associate professor of sociology Mark Regnerus, made a splash when it was published last month in the journal Social Science Research. It has since drawn criticism from scholars at UT and elsewhere.

Bucking the consensus of the past decade of scholarship that the sexual orientation of parents does not negatively affect children in consequential ways Regnerus found that adults with gay parents tended to report lower levels of success in economic and romantic pursuits and struggled more with mental health issues.

The university began the inquiry after New York City freelance writer Scott Rosensweig,  .  .  .  .  sent a letter of complaint to UT President Bill Powers on June 21.
 
In his letter, Rosensweig alleged that Regnerus had committed scientific misconduct because he had created "a study designed so as to be guaranteed to make gay people look bad, through means plainly fraudulent and defamatory." Rosensweig also pointed out that the study was funded by the conservative Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation, writing that Regnerus had taken "money from an anti-gay political organization for his study."

The University of Texas defines scientific misconduct as "fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism" and "practices that seriously deviate from ethical standards."
A panel of UT professors is conducting the inquiry, and the process will be completed within 60 days of the complaint, said Gary Susswein, a UT spokesman. Ultimately, if a university investigation finds that Regnerus' work constitutes scientific misconduct, Provost Steven Leslie would decide how the administration will proceed, Susswein said.

Among the study's critics is UT sociology professor Debra Umberson.  "Regnerus' study is bad science. Among other errors, he made egregious yet strategic decisions in selecting particular groups for comparison," Umberson and three colleagues wrote in a June 26 editorial on The Huffington Post.

Five UT faculty members also signed a letter, along with 200 scholars at multiple universities, to the editor of Social Science Research, James Wright, pointing out what they said were flaws in Regnerus' methodology and saying the journal's review process took five weeks, when most take between two and three months.

Pro-LGBT Religious Voices Absent In Mainstream Media

I often complain about the laziness of much of the mainstream media and its willingness to give a platform to the leaders of registered hate groups such as FRC's Tony Perkins who besides being vitriolically anti-gay has white supremacist associations that somehow never get mentioned by anchors and commentators who typically allow Perkins and those of his ilk to spew anti-LGBT lies unchallenged.  A new study from GLAAD and the University of Missoui Center on Religion & the Professions confirms that I'm not imagining the bias and confirms the slanted coverage of religious views on LGBT individuals and our legal rights.  Pro-LGBT religious views are almost completely absent from news coverage while the anti-LGBT coverage is far over represented in comparison to the percentages various denominations bear to the total population.  Here are highlights from Think Progress on the mainstream media's flawed coverage:

A new study from GLAAD and the University of Missoui Center on Religion & the Professions finds that pro-LGBT people of faith are the “Missing Voices” — severely underrepresented in mainstream media. In fact, three out of four religious messages about LGBT issues over the past three years have come from people who identify with anti-gay faith traditions. Evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics were by far the most represented in the media, with mostly negative messages to share.  .   .  

The study also notes that the proportion of these messages does not reflect the U.S. population. Evangelicals appear more often (34 percent) than their presence in the population should warrant .  .  .  .  and the frequency of anti-LGBT Catholic messages (over 50 percent) conflicts with the strong LGBT support among American Catholics (over 71 percent).

Perhaps the most troubling result of the study was the discovery that the media constructs a conflict between religion and the LGBT community. Those hostile to LGBT people were often identified with their religious identity, while those who were supportive or neutral were not.  ThinkProgress similarly documented that progressive voices of faith were completely absent from the Sunday morning political shows’ conversations about religion.

Servicemembers United to Pentagon: Refund $4.4 Million Spent on Homophobic Survey

I have to hand it to Alex Nicholson and his comrades at Servicemebers United - they are keeping the abortion also known as the DADT survey disseminated by the Pentagon in the news and on the blogosphere. Now, a petition is online demanding a refund of the $4.4 Million squandered on the biased and homophobic survey orchestrated by DOD and the Pentagon. I urge readers to sign the petition - I already have - and encourage them to urge friends to do likewise. Again, the petition can be found here.

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Aiding them are other bloggers like Pam Spaulding and John Aravosis who have picked up on the possibility that LGBT servicemember - if allowed to serve openly - would be segregated. That's right, a black president backing a plan of separate and unequal. Will there be drinking fountains like the ones in the photo above except relabelled as straight and gay? And Obama wonders why the LGBT increasingly cannot stand him - well in addition to the fact that he's a liar who does not keep campaign promises.

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Apparently, the senior brass at the Pentagon doesn't like being shown to be not only homophobes - which many of them clearly are - by down right stupid. Did they seriously believe that this survey would not create a firestorm? Do they seriously believe that long term Westat will fall on its sword, if you will, and take full responsibility for the outrageously insulting and homophobic questions? The more we see of the incompetence and stupidity at the Pentagon, the more it looks like it's the senior bras and not gay service members who need to be discharged. John Aravosis sums it up well:
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In a briefing this past Friday, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell appeared to allude to the possibility of segregating gay troops if and when the ban is lifted . . . Today, Morrell - who has been less than truthful about Pentagon efforts on DADT in the past - took umbrage at our post.
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Morell said the suggestion the survey could lead to segregation is "inflammatory nonsense" from groups trying to discredit the survey, which is "not helpful" for the Defense Department.
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With all due respect to Mr. Morrell, a Bush appointee, it's not my job to be "helpful" to a Defense Department that treats my community as second class citizens, and regularly undercuts its own commander in chief. As for Morrell's assertion that we are responsible for this notion that the Pentagon might be considering segregating gay troops, the idea didnt come from me, it came from the Secretary of the Army last October.
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It's been nine months since the Army Secretary's comments created a mini firestorm of concern that the Pentagon was seriously considering segregating gay troops, as an option for how to implement a repeal of DADT. Perhaps the deafening silence from Mr. Morrell about the Secretary's comments, and his decision to let such concern fester for nine months, in addition to his rather in-artful wording at the briefing last Friday, played a small role in people's concerns.

Senator Lindsay Graham Denounces Glenn Beck

South Carolina's closeted princess Senator Lindsay Graham took the unusual move of condemning Faux New's Glenn Beck and the birther movement. Would that more members of the GOP leadership - gay or straight - would wake up to the lunacy of the majority of the current GOP base. Ms. Graham is hardly a favorite of mine, but it is perhaps encouraging that even he is waking up to the fact that the public perception of the GOP is being severely damaged by the mindless and bigoted behavior of the base, including the birthers and the tea party crowd. Here are some highlights from Huffington Post:

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Sen. Lindsey Graham, (R-S.C.) offered unusually blunt assessments of the fringe elements of his party and conservative media on Thursday, calling the popular and bombastic Fox News host Glenn Beck a "cynic" whose show was antithetical to American values.

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Appearing before a crowd of Washington's elite power players and opinion-makers, Graham spoke largely without filter, offering acidic takes on subject well beyond Beck. The Senator called the birther community that questions the president's U.S. citizenship "crazy" and implored them to "knock this crap off" so the country could get on to more important matters. I'm here to tell you that those who think the president was not born in Hawaii are crazy," said Graham, who went on to dispel another myth: that Obama is a closet Muslim.

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Graham also ventured to call "crazy" a recent article on Newsmax, laying out how a military coup could overtake the Obama administration.

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Reflecting comments made earlier in the day by his colleague and close friend, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Graham said he was deeply worried about "the passions of cable TV" whipping up the emotions of the public. "If you get rewarded for being a jerk you are going to keep doing it," he said, before labeling "Talk radio, MoveOn.org, and the 24-hour news cycle" as the main culprits in polarizing the nation.

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Unless and until a majority of the GOP Congressional leadership likewise grows some balls and condemns the lunatics and bigots within the GOP base, I suspect the slide in the Party's image with the general public will continue.

GOP Base Increasingly Losing Touch With Reality

UPDATED: Related to this post from earlier today is a new Washington Post/ABC News poll which shows that those identifying as Republican has fallen to only 21% of respondents thus illustrating just how posionous the Christianists and extremists of the far right have made the GOP brand. Here are a few highlights from the Washington Post:

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The new Washington Post/ABC news poll has all sorts of intriguing numbers in it but when you are looking for clues as to where the two parties stand politically there is only one number to remember: 21. That's the percent of people in the Post/ABC survey who identified themselves as Republicans, down from 25 percent in a late March poll and at the lowest ebb in this poll since the fall of 1983(!). In that same poll, 35 percent self-identified as Democrats and 38 percent called them Independents

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The Post poll numbers show the challenge for Republicans in stark terms. The number of people who see themselves as GOPers is on the decline even as those who remain within the party grow more and more conservative. That means that the loyal base of the party has an even larger voice in terms of the direction it heads even as more and more empirical evidence piles up that the elevation of voices like former vice president Dick Cheney does little to win over wavering Republicans or recruit Independents back to the GOP cause.

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It truly is remarkable watching as the rank and file base of the GOP base become increasingly deranged and utterly out of touch with reality. Of course, leading the way are the "social values" voters who cannot or will not grasp the concept of separation of church and state. Last night while channel surfing I came across a show on MSNBC entitled "Survivors of Jonestown" which looked at the murders and mass suicide that took place years ago now in Jim Jone's cult in Guyana. The mind set of Jones' followers was all to akin to that of today's GOP Christianist activists for whom reality has become something based on the hallucinations of their own psyches as opposed to anything based on objective reality. Politico has an article that looks at the increasing derangement of today's rank and file Republicans. The Democrats can only sit back and salivate as this faction seems Hell bent on dragging the Party yo oblivion. Here are some highlights:

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A quick tour through the week’s headlines suggests the Republican Party is beginning to come to terms with the last election and that consensus is emerging among GOP elites that the party needs to move away from discordant social issues.

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But outside Washington, the reality is very different. Rank-and-file Republicans remain, by all indications, staunchly conservative, and they appear to have no desire to moderate their views. GOP activists and operatives say they hear intense anger at the White House and at the party’s own leaders on familiar issues – taxes, homosexuality, and immigration. Within the party, conservative groups have grown stronger absent the emergence of any organized moderate faction.

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There is little appetite for compromise on what many see as core issues, and the road to the presidential nomination lies – as always – through a series of states where the conservative base holds sway, and where the anger appears to be, if anything, particularly intense. . . . And it is perhaps most tangible in Iowa, where same-sex marriage will become the law this month in response to a state Supreme Court ruling. There, Republican activists and officials say the party is as resolute as ever, if not more so, on cultural issues – regardless of the soundings of some party elites.

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"I’ve never seen the grass-roots quite as motivated, concerned and angry," said Steve Scheffler, the head of the Iowa Christian Alliance and the state's RNC committeeman. The marriage issue and other traditional conservative litmus tests aren't likely to fade before the state's next presidential caucuses, either. Asked about how a presidential candidate urging the party toward the middle on cultural issues would fare, Scheffler said flatly: “They’re not gonna go anywhere.”

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The party will be shaped most clearly, however, when its presidential hopefuls begin their early state pilgrimages after the 2010 midterms. And they’re unlikely to emerge convinced that courting gay and Hispanic voters, in particular, is politically saleable within their parties.

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Personally, I believe the best thing that can happen for the country is that the Christianists destroy the GOP and in the process make themselves so radioactive that they will ultimately be shunned by anyone with a hope of winning in a general election. It will take time and no doubt be a very messy process getting to that point, but when it happens, then perhaps sanity will return to politics and the lunacy can stay confined within the church walls.

Does Antonin Scalia - And Do Other Judges - Hate Gays?

While some have criticized Barney Frank for his interview in which called Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia a homophobe, I, in contrast, applaud Frank's comments that should help expose a serious problem in the judicial system today: bigoted, homophobic judges who instead of applying the law impartially take out their personal animosity towards gays on LGBT litigants appearing in their courts. The bigotry can range from far harsher treatment in divorce cases where aone spouse has come out of the closet to allowing those who have used violence against gays to use bogus defenses like the "gay panic" defense. These judges truly need to be removed from the bench if they cannot leave their own religious based bigotry outside the courtroom. As I have indicated before, LGBT rights organizations need to do far more to challenge homophobic judges either through the election process or by lobbying legislative committees in states where judges are appointed by the legislature. Having practiced law now for nearly 32 years, I have very limited faith that most LGBT citizens receive equal treatment in the nation's courts. Here are some highlights from a Los Angeles Times editorial on this issue:

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Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has been widely criticized for referring in a recent interview to "that homophobe Antonin Scalia," an injudicious exercise in name-calling that obscures Frank's larger and more valid point: that the opinions of the tart-tongued Supreme Court justice leave little doubt of his utter lack of sympathy for gays and lesbians.

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Frank thinks there is more to Scalia's attitude than pure constitutional scruples. The language of the justice's opinions, he said, "makes it very clear that he's angry, frankly, about the existence of gay people." While anger is hard to prove, the opinions certainly show that Scalia has little enthusiasm for expanding gay rights.

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Responding to the idea that the Colorado amendment [in Romer v. Colorado]reflected an "animus" toward gays, Scalia wrote: "I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible -- murder, for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals -- and could exhibit even 'animus' toward such conduct."

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In 2003, the court struck down a Texas law [in Lawrence v. Texas] criminalizing same-sex sodomy. In his dissent, Scalia noted that the court "has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct." . . . How Scalia feels about gays and lesbians is not just an academic question.

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In a nation where there is supposedly the right to freedom of religion, it is a travesty that homophobes like Scalia - and many other judges - dispense justice under the civil laws based solely on their own personal religious beliefs and make a mockery of the Constitution.