Trump's Latest Medical Quack Warns of Sex with Demons

Trump's Christofascist base of support - and sadly some otherwise decent Republicans I know - are always at the ready to believe whatever insane and far fetched story line that plays to their prejudices and/or ignorance embracing religious beliefs.  This is a reality that Trump has played like a violin as he has sought to grant Christofascists special rights and to exempt them from non-discrimination laws.  It is also why Trump seems to have a constant parade of whacked out "experts" who either support his endless lies or who will play well with the ignorant searching for "experts" to support their exist biases.  Now, Trump has found an unhinged physician who he is offering up as an expert to counter legitimate and sane medical experts.  The Washington Post looks at this loose canon who blames some medical conditions on having sex with demons (A piece in the Daily Beast also looks at her lunacy).  Why this individual still holds any medical license is baffling.  Here are article highlights:

        According to the Mayo Clinic, endometriosis is “an often painful disorder in which tissue similar to the tissue that normally lines the inside of [the] uterus — the endometrium — grows outside [the] uterus.”

    Not so, says Stella Immanuel, a Houston pediatrician and spiritual leader of Fire Power Ministries, a pronouncedly non-orthodox church. Endometriosis and other potentially dangerous gynecological conditions are the residue of sexual intercourse with demons, Immanuel teaches.

        They visit humans in sexy dreams, which aren’t dreams after all but spirit spouses making a booty call. The demons are responsible not only for diseases of the female reproductive system but also for male impotence, most financial troubles, marital discord and spiritual malaise.

        This is not Immanuel’s only diversion from the medical mainstream. She also maintains that alien DNA is a component of some therapeutic drugs and that government scientists are developing a vaccine to prevent religious faith. You can find these and other teachings of hers on YouTube.

        Or you can find Immanuel on President Trump’s Twitter feed, where she testifies to the power of hydroxychloroquine (yep! we’re back to that one) to cure covid-19 and assures the public that masks are not important to fighting the pandemic. More than 10 million Americans heard her advice, thanks in part to the president’s amplifying effect, before Facebook took down her page. In response, Immanuel threatened to have Jesus unplug Facebook’s servers.

        I guess there is no point in expressing my strong view that the president of the United States should not, in the midst of a deadly pandemic, pass along medical advice that undermines public health officials without good reason to believe that it comes from a qualified authority. The president doesn’t care.

        And I suppose it’s pointless to say to my Christian brothers and sisters in Trump’s dwindling camp that a man who raises the profile of a heretical preacher is not a friend of the faith. Many so-called evangelicals who stick with Trump gave up on evangelism — that is, winning people over through selfless acts of love and charity — long ago.

        [L]et me speak to those Republicans cowering in closets and hiding under stairs in Washington and the state capitals, muttering prayers that Trump might somehow calm the flames that threaten to consume them.

        Run away. Close your eyes and duck your heads and sprint as fast as you can away from Trump. Claim amnesia. Say you’ve been hiking the Appalachian Trail. Blame your spirit spouse — whatever. A fury is building in Middle America that has nothing to do with Russia or impeachment or “Access Hollywood.” It’s rising among people who managed to look past all of that to find something they liked about the president. And now he’s repaying them with a stubby middle finger in their faces.

        They understand that covid-19 is not a joke. They have children whose teachers are afraid to be in school with them. They have teenagers reeling from the mental health impacts of isolation and anxiety. They’ve lost their jobs, their businesses, their sense of safety. They’re worried about losing their homes.

        And they see what the president thinks of them and their concerns. Here, you dupes and dopes, Trump says — here’s a video from a woman who believes in demon dream sex. Or here’s one from a washed-up game-show host who says covid-19 is an election ploy. Or how about this idea: Drink some bleach.

        They’re worried and suffering, and their president might as well be saying: I don’t care if you live or die. And it’s coming through loud and clear. The political center is slow to anger. It’s also slow to forget.

The Right’s Grifter Problem

Having followed the far right for over two decades, one phenomenon has been constant: groups of bogus experts and supposed lobbyists who are little more than leeches who enrich themselves by fleecing the gullible and ignorant.  Evangelical Christians (who typically have the lowest levels of education) seem to be among the easiest marks for these grifters as exemplified by both scamvangelists - think Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham and a host of others - who live the lives of multi-millionaires as they cajole those struggling financially to tithe to their organizations and "ministries." In the far right political realm, things are little better.  The ignorant and gullible are played time and time again by appeals to their bigotry and/or extremism to hand over money so the scammers and con-artists can live the good life. This situation existed long before Trump, but he has played upon the ease with which much of the so-called conservative base can be suckered.   A piece in National Review and another in New York Magazine look at this ongoing phenomenon of the right.  The National Review piece begins by providing a list of political action committees and groups that have one thing in common: they take in tons of money and very little of it ever gets to the supposed cause. Here's a sampling of what follows:

Politico didn’t specify which 33 PACs they reviewed; if their list overlaps entirely with the RightWingNews list, then the total sum listed above would be $127 million; if they don’t overlap at all, it would be $177 million. That is money that could have gone directly to candidates’ campaigns or other actions that would have advanced the conservative cause in recent cycles. But instead it went into more fundraising expenses, more overhead costs, or into the pockets of those running these PACs.

Why is the conservative movement not as effective as its supporters want it to be? Because day after day, year after year, little old ladies get called on the phone or emailed or sent letters in the mail telling them that the future of the country is at stake and that if they don’t make a donation to groups that might as well be named Make Telemarketers Wealthy Again right now, the country will go to hell in a handbasket. Those little old ladies get out their checkbooks and give what they can spare, convinced that they’re making a difference and helping make the world a better place. What they’re doing is ensuring that the guys running these PACs can enjoy a more luxurious lifestyle. Meanwhile, conservative candidates lose, kicking the dirt after primary day or the general election, convinced that if they had just had another $100,000 for get-out-the-vote operations, they might have come out on top.

What’s more, most of these PACs thrive on telling conservative grassroots things that aren’t true. Clarke didn’t want to run for Senate in Wisconsin, Laura Ingraham wasn’t interested in running for Senate in Virginia, and Allen West wasn’t running for Senate in Florida. The PACs propagate a narrative in which they’re the heroic crusaders for conservative values, secure borders and freedom, up against corrupt establishment elites . . . when they’re in fact run by those coastal political operatives and keeping most of the money for their own operations.

We can apply this beyond the realm of politics, as well. Why is America not enjoying a widespread revival of Christian values? There are a bunch of reasons, but we can start with televangelist Kenneth Copeland attempting to justify his purchase of a third private plane, a Gulfstream V.  Copeland’s excuse was that flying commercial “like getting into a long tube with a bunch of demons.” I’m pretty sure I’ve sat next to the passengers he’s describing, and we all got through it okay.

Progressives ought to be cheering the ease with which those on the right get fleeced literally daily.  The New York Magazine continues the examination of this reality and the fact that the right complained about Obama era efforts to stop the frauds:

Republicans have long complained, usually in private, that their fundraising apparatus is overrun with fraudsters. National Review’s Jim Geraghty has a column, “The Right’s Grifter Problem,” saying what many of them have been whispering. Many of President Trump’s most publicly strident loyalists are in the business of raising money for political projects that spend virtually all their funds on operating expenses. 

An unstated irony behind Geraghty’s complaint is that there is an agency tasked with overseeing the kind of misconduct he denounces: the IRS. When the first wave of tea-party scam PACs appeared, the IRS did look into them. Republicans insisted the agency was “targeting” the right for political reasons, probably at the behest of the Obama administration. While they spent years investigating the agency and making wild charges, a series of investigations by the agency’s inspector general, the Senate Finance Committee, and the Department of Justice refuted all their claims. The Obama administration had no involvement in the IRS’s enforcement priorities, and the agency was not even targeting the right at all — its criteria for regulating donors included keywords to search for activists on the left as well as the right. It was in fact clear all along the tea-party fundraising apparatus was rife with grifters. Stephanie Mencimer reported a clearheaded analysis of this in 2013, at the height of the “targeting” hysteria. But Republicans did succeed in their goal of harassing the agency into leaving political donors almost totally unscrutinized. The ironic result is that it has left their own party vulnerable to the financial parasites they rallied to protect themselves from.

The fact Republicans have rejected the conclusions of all these investigations and clung to their targeting theory tells you a lot about the intellectual environment that has proved so welcoming for grifters.

Geraghty’s column lacks any operating theory as to why Republican politics in particular has attracted so many grifters. Such types have exploited two long-standing aspects of conservative thought: a tendency toward Manichaean thinking and a rejection of neutral expertise.

Every victory for the Democratic Party or incremental extension of the welfare state is a twilight struggle to safeguard the last flickering hopes for freedom from the ravages of socialism.

These predictions are not just scare tactics. They reflect the authentic ideology of the American right, which treats liberalism as either indistinguishable from, or an unstoppably slippery slope toward, Bolshevistic central planning. But these beliefs are also very effective as scare tactics. Conservative fears that Democrats will usher in total societal collapse are good ways to scare conservatives into buying gold (an especially lucrative Obama-era conservative grift) or guns.

The right hardly has a monopoly on fearful predictions, of course. But their impact is magnified by the conservative distrust of the intellectual elite. Conservatives have spent decades training their supporters to reject the authority of bureaucrats, professors, the media, or any institution not explicitly committed to the right-wing agenda. Thus kook notions like the Laffer curve and climate-science denial have become cherished precepts of Republican Party thought.

The most supreme unstated irony of Geraghty’s complaint is that Trump himself is a grifter. This is true not only in the general sense of Trump’s lying constantly and exploiting his supporters’ loyalty, but also in the specific sense that Trump ran fraudulent business enterprises.

So it seems a little strange for Geraghty to complain that Republican grifters are letting down President Trump. Donald Trump grifted his way to the presidency and has kept on grifting. It seems positively unfair that his fellow grifters should have to stand down while he keeps wetting his beak. Geraghty complains that many tea-party groups are a “pyramid scheme,” but the essence of a pyramid scheme is that they connect a partnership of con artists with the greatest share of profits flowing to the person at the top.

The fact that the conservative media can publish a column entitled “The Right’s Grifter Problem,” and that the column will depict Donald Trump as a victim rather than a perpetrator, tells you most of what you need to know about why the phenomenon exists in the first place.

Let's hope the right never wises up! 

LGBT Equality Bill Sends Christofascists into Hysteria

The usual liars and charlatans from the "Christian Right" are beside themselves over the Democrat backed LGBT Equality Act that would bar discrimination against LGBT individuals in employment, housing and public accommodation on a national basis. And true to form, they are trotting out the same tired lies that have been their stock in trade for decades, including the lie that gays can change their sexual orientation through fraudulent ministries operated by, you guessed, the Christofascists.  Spouting this latter lie is Peter Sprigg of Family Research Council ("FRC") - a certified hate group - who has ZERO credentials when it comes to medical and mental health issues despite his title of "senior fellow" at FRC.  Indeed, until he became a hate merchant at FRC, Sprigg's longest career stint was as a "professional actor and unit leader in Covenant Players, an international Christian drama ministry."  Sadly Sprigg epitomizes the norm of FRC - and Christofascist organization in general - experts, meaning they have no legitimate credentials.   

In a piece in the Christian Post - which discredits itself by carrying article by fraudulent experts - Sprigg cites old, discredited studies claiming conversion therapy has some minimal level of success and ignores more recent studies, and, of course, the findings of all legitimate medical and mental health associations.  Based on this bad science, Sprigg rants about the Equality Act and maintains:

In light of this evidence, the public would be wise to question whether the efforts of the LGBT movement to ride on the coat-tails of “civil rights” can any longer be justified. 

It should be noted that in 2008 when the Obama administration moved to allow LGBT Americans to apply for visas for foreign partners, Sprigg declared that it would be better to “export homosexuals from the United States.”

Joining Sprigg in his conniption fit is Mike Huckabee, who has a long history of anti-gay lies, and whose daughter lies daily for the Trump regime.  In another piece in the Christian Post Huckabee rants as follows:

Redefining gender and sexual identity is the “greatest threat” to the moral fiber of America, said former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, and the fault lies with the Church.

“The biggest threat to biblical principles today is the failure to apply a biblical standard of maleness and femaleness,” Huckabee told The Christian Post during a sit-down interview last week in Anaheim, California. “We are creating this illusion that there is no gender, there is no identity, and I'm blaming the Christian Church.”

“The gender dysphoria we're seeing today is largely due to the fact that the Church has failed to present very clearly the words of Jesus and Genesis 5:2: ‘Male and female He created them.’” 

Huckabee also goes on to equate allowing children to learn about the existence of LGBT individuals much less LGBT inclusive sex education with allowing one's child to play in a busy street. 

What is frightening is that both Sprigg and Huckabee have the ear of those in the Trump/Pence regime who are waging war against the LGBT community.  On the positive side, 40% of Millennials have left organized Christianity in large part due to the Christofascists' non-stop screeds against gays. Hopefully, the exodus will accelerate and individuals like Sprigg and Huckabee will become increasingly irrelevant outside of stagnant backwaters.  Meanwhile, more states are barring conversion therapy.

The Christofascists' New Anti-LGBT Rallying Cry

Mitch McConnell with hate group leader/white supremacist linked Tony Perkins.

Over the weekend Family Research Council ("FRC") - a certified hate group - held it disingenuously named "Value Voters Summit" in the nation's capital.   The key note speaker was Mike Pence - a religious extremist in his own right.  Also addressing the group was Mitch McConnell who disgustingly praised FRC Tony Perkins, a man with well documented ties to white supremacy organizations.  Such is the state of today's GOP that someone like Perkins could have Trump's ear and have McConnell basically groveling to Perkins and assured the Bible thumpers that Kavanaugh would be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court no matter what issues or damning facts might arise. As is the norm for such gatherings of Christian extremists, abortion and gays were the topics of rants and lies.  This year, a new anti-LGBT rallying cry was formulated pursuant to which lies and disinformation will be disseminated.  A piece in Rewire looks at this latest nastiness.  Here are excerpts:

“Gender ideology” took center stage at this weekend’s Values Voter Summit (VVS) in Washington, D.C. And side stage. And student mixer. In each instance, it was used as a handy catchall: Objecting to “gender ideology” allows Christian conservatives to consolidate all their objections to treating LGBTQ people with dignity into one scary talking point.

 This year, Vice President Mike Pence gave the keynote address following evangelical and conservative darlings like the Benham Brothers (house flippers and sons of Operation Save America’s Flip Benham), Michele Bachmann, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, David Daleiden (of Planned Parenthood hit-video fame), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Masterpiece baker Jack Phillips, and many others. The turn to “gender ideology” marks a change for this conference and for conservative talking points in general, which in the past have focused more directly on bathroom bills and specious fears for the safety of children. If you’re not familiar with the term, that’s not surprising. More popular with European conservatives, “gender ideology” as a conservative rallying cry has only grown in domestic U.S. circles in the past year or two. Among conservatives, “gender ideology” encompasses a broad range of horrors: LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination laws, transgender-inclusive school and ID-document policies, and comprehensive sex education, to name a few. Rather than ginning up support around specific topics, the broader lens of “gender ideology” allowed speakers to talk about a range of theoretical harms to religious freedom if politics are permitted to be overrun by the “new secular orthodoxy” of sexual orientation and gender identity, as Emilie Kao of the Heritage Foundation called it during her presentation on religious liberty.

[O]n Saturday, moderator Peter Sprigg—researcher at FRC and author of many a [anti-gay] blog about LGBTQ people and policies—introduced the panelists to talk about “How Gender Ideology Harms Children.” First up was disreputed former head of Johns Hopkins Department of Psychiatry head Dr. Paul McHugh. In 1977, Dr. McHugh ended Johns Hopkins’ groundbreaking trans-affirmative medical program. Johns Hopkins reversed the ensuing decades of anti-trans pseudo-scientific rhetoric in 2017, when it reopened its Center for Transgender Health. At VVS, Dr. McHugh gave the same speech he’s been giving at conservative conferences since his retirement, comparing transgender people to people with eating disorders: “We work not to affirm their belief [that they are transgender], but to correct it.”

Throughout his remarks, Dr. McHugh cited discredited research, misrepresented data on trans children, and flat-out lied.

Elizabeth Johnston, known for her Activist Mommy blog and her campaigns against comprehensive sex education, was the last to speak from the stage on Saturday morning. Johnston is a fiery speaker who was the perfect closer for an audience primed to hear her lies and misinformation. Schools are teaching our kids “gender confusion” and how to have oral and anal sex, she claimed. She described comprehensive sex education as “sexual abuse and grooming.”

The week before last, a similar panel was held at the World Congress of Families, in Moldova. Peter Sprigg was there too, giving a PowerPoint presentation on “Five Myths of Gender Identity.” Sprigg was joined by several European anti-transgender activists, and the talking points they shared were very similar to those sprinkled throughout VVS on Saturday.

The similarity is no coincidence: Right-wing and Christian conservatives have been trading tactics and talking points across the ocean for several years now as they try to fight the gains made by the LGBTQ community. And the broadening of their rhetoric is also not a coincidence: Framing support for the LGBTQ community as “gender ideology” allows anti-LGBTQ activists to scare, confuse, and galvanize their voters as we move into an important election season here in the United States, and into a crucial moment in political history across the world.

I dealt with and corresponded with Peter Sprigg some years ago.  He has NO legitimate credentials, continually disseminates deliberate lies about LGBT individuals, and has covered up for "ex-gay" frauds whom he knows are not "cured" of their homosexuality.    Combine Sprigg and other bogus "experts" with Tony Perkins' white supremacist ties, and the only values upheld by "values voters" are lies, bigotry, racism and homophobia.

Pence Secretly Drafted Trump’s Latest Transgender Ban

Hate group leader Tony Perkins with Trump and Pence

As much as I despise Donald Trump and view him as a clear and present danger to America, in some way Mike Pence presents an even more insidious danger.   Pence - like Rick Santorum, Ken Cuccinelli and some other virulently anti-gay Republicans - is a religious fanatic and will go to any lengths to quell his inner demons.  One of his main demons concerns homosexuality due to, in my belief, the fact that he, like Santorum and Cuccinelli, is a self-loathing closeted gay who somehow thinks that make life a living hell for other LGBT individuals makes amends for his own secret lusts.  (Pence also spent his early years as a Catholic, which I know first hand screws one up unbelievably if you are LGBT).  The only positive thing Pence did is not have seven children like Santorum and Cuccinelli did as they tried to convince the world - and most importantly themselves - that they aren't really gay.  Thus, it is no surprise to learn that Pence along with a group of professional gay-haters  was behind Der Trumpenführer's latest anti-transgender military ban.  Among this cabal was hate group leader Tony Perkins, in my view one of the most dishonest individuals on the planet.  A piece in Think Progress looks at this latest attack which is based on the usual Christofascist lies.  Here are excerpts:

Then President Trump announced a new ban on transgender people serving in the military late Friday, it was somewhat of a surprise — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had reportedly recommended in February that Trump allow transgender people to serve. It turns out that Vice President Pence and some of the country’s most prominent anti-LGBTQ activists had a role in reversing the outcome, which explains why the report explaining the decision is rife with anti-trans junk science.

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern reported Friday night that, according to multiple sources, Pence played “a leading role” in creating the report, along with Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation, which has been dubbed “Trump’s favorite think tank,” and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (FRC), an anti-LGBTQ hate group.  Both Heritage and FRC praised the report Friday. According to Stern’s reporting, it was true that Mattis favored allowing transgender military service, but Pence “effectively overruled” him.

A separate source independently confirmed to ThinkProgress Saturday that Pence was involved, characterizing him as forming his own ad hoc “working group,” including Anderson and Perkins, separate from the panel of experts Mattis had assembled.

Mattis’ original document is not currently publicly available, but it was widely reported that Mattis favored an inclusive approach that resembled what had originally been proposed by Defense Secretary Ash Carter under President Obama in 2016. [T]he report features numerous anti-trans talking points that FRC and other anti-LGBTQ groups have used in various campaigns favoring discrimination against transgender people. It also attempts to distort the research on transgender health in ways that directly parallel Anderson’s recently released book, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. One of the most obvious biases in the new report is an emphasis on concerns about how transgender people in the military might somehow infringe on the privacy of other soldiers — particularly women. These are the same arguments Perkins, Anderson, and others have made in justifying overturning LGBTQ protections in Houston or defending North Carolina’s HB2, a law that mandated discrimination against transgender people.

According to the report, transgender people would violate other troops’ privacy simply by sharing a space with them . . . . Not so subtly, the report concludes that unit cohesion will deteriorate if the anti-transgender prejudices of other service members are not catered to.

“[U]nit cohesion” is the same hollow argument that was previously used to defend “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT), a law that prohibited lesbian, gay, and bisexual people from serving openly in the military. Such warnings even included near-identical concerns about shared shower use. Following DADT’s repeal, a study showed that LGB inclusion had no negative impact on military morale, despite similar warnings. Nowhere does the report even mention that every major medical organization in the U.S. has arrived at a consensus that transgender people should be affirmed in their gender identities and supported in their transitions. The American Medical Association has even explicitly expressed support for lifting the military’s ban on transgender service. The report likewise makes no mention of the widely-used standards of care developed by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), which recognize the benefits of affirmative care.

As has become inevitable in just about every attempt to justify anti-trans discrimination (including Anderson’s book), the study also wildly distorts studies about the suicidality of transgender people.

The report essentially manufactures doubt about the health outcomes of transgender people to justify the very kind of discrimination that is the most significant factor for trans people’s negative experiences.

But as the report largely reflects the views of Pence, a longtime opponent of LGBTQ equality, and some of the top anti-LGBTQ activists in the country, it’s easy to see how it arrived at such discriminatory conclusions.

It is very difficult to lie more than Tony Perkins who, like Trump, should be assumed to be lying if his lips are moving. 

Anti-Gay Christofascists Find a New "Expert" on Gay Parenting

For a group of people who claim to worship the Bible - including supposedly the Ten Commandments - and wear their feigned religiosity on their sleeves, no one seemingly lies more often or trots out more utterly bogus "experts" to bolster their hate-filled views than the Christofascists.  Indeed, I often remark that with these peoples' lips are moving, the safest assumption is to believe that they are lying.  You will likely be right 99.9% of the time.  Now, after Mark Regnerus was discredited by many experts and called a fraud by a federal judge, the Christofacscist have found another false expert willing to disseminate lies and bogus research on gay parenting.   This latest faux expert is Donald Paul Sullins, a Catholic priest, who has put out anti-LGBT pieces on a pay to publish website.  Like Regnerus, Sullins is a fraud and his research is bogus.  A piece in Slate looks at this latest unscrupulous attack on LGBT parents.  Here are excerpts:

The religious right is at it again. Despite the Supreme Court having settled the question of whether same-sex couples can marry and, by extension, raise families, we continue to see research studies popping up that claim to find correlations between having same-sex parents and suffering from a variety of ailments including depression, anxiety, suicidality, problems with intimacy, and even risk of parental abuse.

The latest is from Catholic University scholar Donald Paul Sullins, a Catholic priest who already has under his belt several studies that make related claims. Sullins’ most recent study was published in an Egyptian-based open access journal that requires authors to pay for publication, creating a conflict of interest since publishers who ought to perform quality control have a financial incentive to accept papers, regardless of quality. The journal’s publisher has been criticized for a lax peer-review process that isn't even overseen by a real editor.

It’s not hard to see why someone like Sullins would turn to a subpar journal to get his paper accepted. For years now, religious and social conservatives have made claims, citing research, that children are harmed by having gay, lesbian, or bisexual parents. The familiar network of anti-LGBTQ behemoths, including the Family Research Council, American Family Association, and several other groups, then spread those claims across the internet, breathlessly asserting they had proof that children need a mom and a dad to thrive and that it’s both immoral and bad public policy to allow gay people to parent—or marry. In [Sullin's study] it, he claims “adults raised by same-sex parents were at over twice the risk of depression” developing later in life as those raised by different-sex couples. He calls it the “first study to examine children raised by same-sex parents into early adulthood” and claims it “contribute[s] new information for understanding of the effects of same-sex parenting through the life-course transition into early adulthood.”

Except, as with the other studies making similar claims, it does no such thing. Sullins found 20 cases of what he calls “adolescents with same-sex parents.” Yet we know nothing about how long these subjects lived with a same-sex couple, much less whether they were “raised” by one. . . . . Sullins thus has no grounds on which to define his subjects as having been “raised” by “same-sex parents,” which would be essential for his entire anti-LGBTQ claim to make any sense.

Indeed, one wonders why this small group of anti-LGBTQ articles published since 2012 is even considered research. Each author is a highly religious man who has made it abundantly clear that his work is driven by his religious faith.

Because their transparent efforts to commandeer an entire social science field to advance a religious agenda makes their scientific claims—and them—into laughing stocks. One thing we can thank God for is the federal court system, which forced them to admit that leaps of faith, not good science, were driving their conclusions.

By contrast, the What We Know Project, which I run at Columbia Law School, has collected 74 peer-reviewed studies concluding that having a lesbian, gay, or bisexual parent causes no harm.

That debate has now been settled by the Supreme Court. There was something reprehensible about spending millions of dollars to try to hijack a scholarly discourse in an effort to advance an extremist religious ideology, especially by claiming to help kids while actually supporting policies that would deny them legal ties to their parents. Now that they have lost the battle, the fact that these social conservatives continue to gratuitously berate LGBTQ families is simply unconscionable.

New Research Further Debunks Mark Regnerus Study On Gay Parenting

One of my last posts on Mark Regnerus involved efforts by students at the University of Texas to have him disciplined - read fired - in the wake of his bogus research on gay parenting being rejected by a federal judge in Michigan last year and the University's sociology department formally distancing itself from Regenus and his "research" which was funded by far right anti-gay groups.  Now, two researchers who have been reviewing Regnerus' fraudulent study are about to release a study of their own which concludes that when all of the false data is stripped from Regnerus' work, it actually supports gay parenting.  Right Wing Watch looks at the coming release:

In an upcoming article, a pair of sociologists are putting what they call the “final nail in the coffin” of the much-criticized study by University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus that purported to show that being raised by gay and lesbian parents harms children. The Regnerus study has become a favorite tool of Religious Right activists seeking to show that households led by same-sex couples are bad for children. At the same time, the study has come under scrutiny for the funding it received from anti-gay groups and for its lack of respondents who were actually raised in same-sex parent households.

Indiana University's Brian Powell and the University of Connecticut’s Simon Cheng didn’t just find methodological flaws in Regnerus’ research — they took the data he collected, cleaned it up, and redid the study, coming to a very different conclusion about families led by same-sex couples. Their article will be published in “Social Science Research,” the same journal that published the Regnerus study.

By eliminating suspect data . . . . and correcting what they view as Regnerus’ methodological errors, Cheng and Powell found that Regnerus’ conclusions were so “fragile” that his data could just as easily show that children raised by gay and lesbian parents don’t face negative adult outcomes.

“[W]hen equally plausible and, in our view, preferred methodological decisions are used,” they wrote, “a different conclusion emerges: adult children who lived with same-sex parents show comparable outcome profiles to those from other family types, including intact biological families.”

In other words, as University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen put it, “when you clean the data and fix the things that are fixable, the results just don’t hold up.” 

[O]ver one-third of the 236 people whom Regnerus classified as having been raised by a lesbian mother or gay father “should absolutely not have ever been considered by Regnerus in this study.”

Reanalyzing Regnerus’ data after eliminating respondents who offered dubious biographical information and recategorizing people who clearly were not raised by gay parents, Cheng and Powell found only three statistically significant differences between  the respondents raised by a lesbian mother and those who reported having been raised in “intact biological family” households. Only one of those differences could be considered a negative adult outcome — those respondents were more likely to have had an affair while married or cohabitating.

If the University of Texas cares about its reputation, Regnerus needs to be sent packing.  He is a liar and a fraud - which, of course, is why he's a darling of the Christofascists.

Pundit Fact: Ralph Reed is a Liar When It Comes to Gay Parenting

As some readers will recall, Ralph Reed's version of an Easter message of love was to appear on ABC’s Easter Sunday edition of This Week proceed to lie about gays and gay parenting.  Reed - who I suspect is a self-loathing closet case based on our meeting years ago when I was active in the GOP - among other things stated "Social science is irrefutable" that children are better off being raised by a mom and a dad.  Like so much else that comes out of the mouths of the "godly Christian" crowd, Reed's statement was patently untrue.  Thankfully, Pundit fact has taken Reed to task.  Here's the take down via Politifact.com:

Faith and Freedom Coalition founder Ralph Reed told Raddatz he doesn’t support gay couples raising adopted children.

"This is about what's best for children here in the United States. And the social science is irrefutable," Reed said. "And it is that a child who grows up in a home without the mother and father present and they both play very unique procreative, nurturing and socializing role, they're nine times more likely to end up dropping out of high school. They're five times more likely to end up in poverty. And they're three times more likely to end up addicted to drugs and alcohol."

PunditFact wanted to know what social science has to say about the effects gay parents have on children compared to straight parents.

The social science statistics Reed called "irrefutable" actually have nothing to do with gay couples raising kids. Instead, they’re focused on the effects of children who grow up without a father in a one-parent household. Put another way, the studies focus on the quantity of parents and not their gender.

We decided not to investigate further the specific stats Reed cited once we realized they weren’t measuring what he said they were.

Comparisons like Reed’s are "a complete misuse of the research," said Judith Stacey, a New York University sociologist.

We did find one study funded by conservative organizations as showing gay parents are worse than straight ones, but it’s been denounced by the American Sociological Association, the researcher’s own university and many reputable sociologists. In conducting the study, Mark Regnerus loosely defined same-sex couples and, in doing so, only spoke with two children who were actually raised by gay parents.

Our ruling
Reed said there’s "irrefutable" social science to show that children are better off being parented by a mother and father. That’s not right. What studies really show is that children are better off with two parents. Those studies do not focus on gender.

All reputable research so far indicates that children brought up by gay parents are just well off as those brought up by straight parents.  We rate Reed’s statement False.

With mouth pieces like Reed knowingly telling lies it is little wonder that the under 30 generations hold Christianity in such low regard.  In some ways, I hope Reed and his hate merchant allies continue to lie - they are killing the Christian brand and personally, I look forward to the day when self-identifying Christians are a minority in America. 

American Sociological Association Condems Renerus in 10th Circuit Brief

I have written a lot lately on the same sex marriage case pending in Michigan because it is the first time since the Proposition 8 trial at the District Court level that Christofascist witnesses have testified under oath and been subjected to cross examination.  And what we have seen is sadly the norm for the opponents of marriage equality: experts motivated by religious belief rather than the truth, "studies" structure to achieve preordained conclusions, and blatant lies by the supposed experts on the side of bigotry and discrimination.  To date, the rulings striking down same sex marriage bans have rejected the arguments put forth by these sleazy witnesses.  In my view, what really needs to happen is that is that witnesses like Mark Regnerus be hit with perjury charges and attorneys putting forth discredited evidence be hit with sanctions.  But I digress.  In a stunning filing, the  American Sociological Association submitted an amicus brief in the appeal of the Utah ruling that struck down Utah's marriage ban which more or less openly condemned Mark Regnerus and stopped just short of calling his "study" fraudulent.  The Bilerico Project has highlights:

[I]n a brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, the American Sociological Association urged the court to strike down marriage discrimination amendments in Utah and Oklahoma and rebuked the discredited research of ASA member Mark Regnerus, whose anti-LGBT New Family Structures Study falsely claimed to show that children do worse with same-sex parents than opposite-sex parents.

The ASA announced the brief in a press release:

"Our latest amicus brief is part of the ASA's ongoing effort to ensure that U.S. courts considering lawsuits to legalize gay marriage understand that social science research shows parents' sexual orientation has no bearing on their children's well-being," said ASA Executive Officer Sally T. Hillsman. "The claim that same-sex parents produce less positive child outcomes than heterosexual parents is simply unsupported."
"As the same-sex marriage debate continues in courtrooms across the country, the ASA will continue to emphasize the clear social science research consensus that children raised by same-sex parents fare just as well as children raised by heterosexual parents," Hillsman said. "In addition, we will continue to correct the record when gay marriage opponents misinterpret or misrepresent social science research to support their position."

On Regnerus:

Same-sex marriage opponents, including those defending the gay marriage bans in Utah and Oklahoma, often misinterpret or misrepresent social science research, claiming it indicates children with gay parents have worse outcomes than those with heterosexual parents. In particular, same-sex marriage opponents frequently misportray research by Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin.
"As I have stated before--and as I will continue to state--the Regnerus papers and other sources gay marriage opponents often rely on provide no basis for their arguments because this research does not directly examine the well-being of children raised by same-sex parents," Hillsman said. "Therefore, these analyses do not undermine the social science research consensus and do not establish a legitimate basis for gay marriage bans."

The ASA took pains to point out that Regnerus's conclusions -- and his subsequent anti-marriage equality advocacy -- quite simply could not be more wrong:

Rather than proving same-sex marriage is a bad thing for children, social science research actually suggests the opposite. "I want to reemphasize that the research supports the conclusion that the extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples has the potential to improve child well-being insofar as the institution of marriage may provide social and legal support to families and enhance family stability--all of which are key drivers of positive child outcomes," Hillsman said.

Read more at http://www.bilerico.com/2014/03/asa_spanks_regnerus_again.php#hYoiyH7Qq22eFxmB.99

[I]n a brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, the American Sociological Association urged the court to strike down marriage discrimination amendments in Utah and Oklahoma and rebuked the discredited research of ASA member Mark Regnerus, whose anti-LGBT New Family Structures Study falsely claimed to show that children do worse with same-sex parents than opposite-sex parents.

The ASA announced the brief in a press release:

"Our latest amicus brief is part of the ASA's ongoing effort to ensure that U.S. courts considering lawsuits to legalize gay marriage understand that social science research shows parents' sexual orientation has no bearing on their children's well-being," said ASA Executive Officer Sally T. Hillsman. "The claim that same-sex parents produce less positive child outcomes than heterosexual parents is simply unsupported."

"As the same-sex marriage debate continues in courtrooms across the country, the ASA will continue to emphasize the clear social science research consensus that children raised by same-sex parents fare just as well as children raised by heterosexual parents," Hillsman said. "In addition, we will continue to correct the record when gay marriage opponents misinterpret or misrepresent social science research to support their position."

On Regnerus:

Same-sex marriage opponents, including those defending the gay marriage bans in Utah and Oklahoma, often misinterpret or misrepresent social science research, claiming it indicates children with gay parents have worse outcomes than those with heterosexual parents. In particular, same-sex marriage opponents frequently misportray research by Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin.

"As I have stated before--and as I will continue to state--the Regnerus papers and other sources gay marriage opponents often rely on provide no basis for their arguments because this research does not directly examine the well-being of children raised by same-sex parents," Hillsman said. "Therefore, these analyses do not undermine the social science research consensus and do not establish a legitimate basis for gay marriage bans."

The ASA took pains to point out that Regnerus's conclusions -- and his subsequent anti-marriage equality advocacy -- quite simply could not be more wrong:

Rather than proving same-sex marriage is a bad thing for children, social science research actually suggests the opposite. "I want to reemphasize that the research supports the conclusion that the extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples has the potential to improve child well-being insofar as the institution of marriage may provide social and legal support to families and enhance family stability--all of which are key drivers of positive child outcomes," Hillsman said.

In short, what we see is that no one lies more or more deliberately than the "godly folk" and those out to "protect the sanctity of marriage."  If their lips are moving. it's best to assume that they are lying.

Amicus Brief Amer Sociological Assoc Utah And Oklahoma 10th Circuit