Anti-Gay Myths Derailed by Economist's Data Research

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Homophobia - especially state sponsored homophobia such as exits here in Virginia thanks to the efforts of Christofascists at The Family Foundation and their trained monkeys in the Virginia GOP - is bad for business and bad for Virginia's economy.  That finding has been underscored by an economist at the University of Massachusetts who has studied the economic cost of homophobia from Virginia to as far away as India.  Business Week looks at the findings that confirm that religious based bigotry needs to be eliminated from the public square and the marketplace.  Here are some highlights:

Economist Lee Badgett says equal treatment for gays and lesbians can benefit economies from Virginia to India. For the past two decades, she’s mined data in her quest to prove it. 

“My long-run goal has always been the same: It’s using research to help create a more just world,” said Badgett, 54, director of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Center for Public Policy and Administration. “When policy makers can pick out their favorite myth about gay people to hang their policy on, it’s pretty hard to argue against.” 

The World Bank is collaborating with Badgett to analyze homophobia as a hurdle to development in emerging markets. She’s been called as an expert witness before Congressional subcommittees and in a court case that found California’s same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional. Colleagues credit her with publishing the first research tackling gay and lesbian issues as economic rather than sociological. 

This week, Badgett’s work for the institute was widely cited by national and international news outlets after the White House said President Barack Obama plans to issue an executive order that would bar federal contractors from discriminating against gay and transgendered employees. The change would cover 14 million more workers than state laws do, she found. 

Preliminary findings showed that discrimination related to homophobia leads to less education, lower earnings, poorer health and shorter lives. The lost workplace productivity and health problems connected with homophobia cost the country between $2 billion and $31 billion in 2012. The range is wide because data on sexual minorities is scarce, she said. 

Her work there has shown that gay couples without the option to marry miss out on tax and insurance benefits, and states that don’t allow same-sex marriages lose incremental revenue. Virginia could realize as much as $60 million in the first three years from spending on weddings and tourism, April research showed. While the impact is relatively small -- Virginia’s gross domestic product totaled $426 billion in 2013 - - it does contribute to the economy. 

The only thing that in the last analysis that supports anti-gay discrimination is religion - something that has across the centuries brought more wars, death, and destruction than almost anything else.  One need only look at the sectarian strife in Iraq or the terror attacks of religious extremists to see that the evils of religion go on unabated even today.   The civil laws need to cease empowering religious based hate and bigotry.

Until laws on Gays Change, Virginia Will Lose Good People

I do not make any effort to hide the fact that but for the boyfriend's (soon to be husband's) successful salon, I'd be pushing to leave Virginia in a heartbeat - and I'd shake the dust off of my feet as I left.  In point of fact, we know a number of people who have left the state and moved to more gay friendly states taking their talents and assets with them.  Even within Virginia, gays routinely leave backward rural areas for more tolerant regions and cities.  The net impact is a lose for Virginia and, for the rural areas, they sink further into a "Deliverance" mindset which guarantees that much desired new businesses and corporations will avoid the areas.  And rightly so.  An op-ed in the Virginian Pilot bemoans the fact that because of the Christofascist/Virginia GOP maintained homophobia in this state, good and talented people continue to leave.  Here are excerpts:

The state's hostility toward gays and lesbians - both implicit and explicit - forced Laura Laing and her partner to leave Virginia nearly a decade ago.  It was the Commonwealth's loss.

Laing and Gina Foringer lived in Norfolk, and they had a daughter. Laing was the biological parent, but Foringer's rights were limited here - partly because of a 2004 state law that "put into question contracts that (same-sex) couples had together," Laing told me Wednesday.  The Affirmation of Marriage Act also prohibited same-sex unions. 

"We felt Virginia wasn't going to protect our family," said Laing, who formerly worked for Inside Business and PilotOnline.com.  In 2005, the couple and their 5-year-old daughter moved to Baltimore. The change has been dramatic.

They visited schools where same-sex parents weren't a big deal.  Then last year, Laing and Foringer got married. Maryland is one of several states that allow civil unions or gay marriages.

Their daughter is now 13 and in the eighth grade. And Foringer recently started an environmental contracting firm.   Virginia missed out on that, too," said Laing, who remains a writer.

Her views are worth noting, following a March poll on attitudes toward gays and lesbians in the commonwealth. Virginians might be more hospitable today, but we've lost folks who got tired of fighting for equality and simple common decency.

And what's behind Virginia's continued anti-gay legal climate?  The desire of folks like Victoria Cobb at The Family Foundation who seek to impose their beliefs on all and make a living peddling hatred.  People who have a sick need to feel superior to others whom they want to look down upon as "sinners" and who they want to keep inferior under the civil laws.  It is time that this end once and for all.

The South's Longer Wait for Equality

At time I get annoyed with LGBT bloggers in liberal states who seem incapable of understanding what it is like for gays who live in reactionary states such as Virginia where the Republican Party of Virginia has just nominated the most insane and extreme slate of statewide candidates in state history.  These bloggers living securing in liberal states forget that in 29 states LGBT individuals can be fired at will and have ZERO legal protections.  Yes, in theory we gays in these backward states are free to pick up and move.  But in reality it is not so easy given family commitments and other considerations.  And overall, nowhere is the anti-gay mindset stronger in America than in the South where homophobia seems to have replaced racism as the last socially acceptable prejudice (although scratch the back of most homophobes and one will find a racists as well or a minority member being duped by black pastors into carrying water for former white supremacists).   A piece in The Advocate looks at this sad state of affairs.  Here are excerpts:

As much of the country breathlessly followed the coverage of the Supreme Court’s two marriage equality cases in March, Will Batts was busy fighting battles on numerous fronts. The executive director of Tennessee’s Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center operates in a setting only 900 miles (but still a world away) from Washington, D.C., in a state with a Republican-controlled legislature and GOP governor, and where several anti-LGBT bills have been proposed.

“Legislators seem bent on making us invisible in every way possible and preventing any state-level recognition of our relationships,” Batts says. “Life is not easy for LGBT people in the South, especially our youth and transgender brothers and sisters. The needs are great and the resources very limited.”

[M]arriage equality doesn’t necessarily feel inevitable in the South, and the ability to wed the person you love is just one of many rights LGBT folks in the South are denied. Save for Kentucky, which only protects gay and transgender people who are employed by the state, D.C., and Maryland, workers can be fired for being LGBT in every state south of the Mason-Dixon line. Even though the 2010 Census found that same-sex couples in Southern states are more likely to be raising children than their northeastern and West Coast counterparts, they have almost zero defenses against housing discrimination unless they live in big cities like Atlanta or New Orleans.

The battles against LGBT people continue to be waged quietly in the South. Alabama’s current school curriculum requires teachers to instruct students that homosexuality is an “unacceptable, criminal lifestyle,” . . . .

The bottom line is that it is hard at times living in the South and the bigotry one faces from judges, the state itself, and the "godly folk," is a slow corrosive poison.  At times one wants to simply slip into despair.   Believe me, if I could I would leave Virginia in a heartbeat.

Brutal Murder in Russia Highlights State Sponsored Homophobia

This blog previously reported a brutal anti-gay murder in Russia (a photo of the victim is set out above).  As more information comes out it becomes evident that such murders are almost encouraged by the government of Vladimir Putin - himself a former KGB officer - and the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church who Putin is courting to shore up public displeasure with Putin's regime.  It should be noted that the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church (like the Roman Catholic Church) have for centuries supported foul regimes in exchange for power and privileges - this seemingly has not changed.   Queerty has more details.  Here are excerpts:

The 23-year-old man brutally tortured and killed in the Russian town of Volgograd over the weekend has been identified as Vladislav Tornovoi. His murder has enraged gay activists who continue to struggle against their country’s blatant dismissal of their rights.

The Moscow-based Investigative Committee initially reported that Tornovoi was killed after he came out to two men he was drinking with during Victory Day celebrations.

The assailants, 22 and 27, “hit him…and then they brutally beat him, set fire to the clothes he was wearing, slashed his anal area and then stuck three bottles in there, again beat him and then threw a 20-kg stone onto his head,” said Andrei Gapchenko, a senior investigator in Volgograd. They face up to 15 years in jail on murder charges.

Just last month, President Vladimir Putin blamed Russia’s declining population on homosexuals, while a national ban on “gay propaganda” looms in the near future.

The social climate is as unfriendly as the political, according to a survey by independent pollster Levada: 50 percent of Russians believe homosexuals should be given medical or psychological treatment, while 5 percent said they should simply be ‘‘destroyed.’’

Gay rights activist Nikolai Alexeyev argued that investigators noted Tornovoi’s homosexuality “to portray him as someone abnormal…expendable” and downplay the gruesome nature of his murder.

It is beyond to see such hate and bigotry fanned by the Russian government.  I will not be visiting Russia any time soon.