PFOX Blows It Again
You might have heard about PFOX putting up the billboard in Richmond telling gay people they can stop being gay. Their billboard shows two faces that look the same and says "Identical twins: One gay. One not. We believe twins research studies show nobody is born gay."
We trashed their logic about the twin studies here years ago. It is not worth the trouble to go through it again. But you kind of wonder, who are those twins in the picture? (And actually, I wonder, which one is gay? Is the guy in the suit and tie supposed to look gay? Or is it the guy in the t-shirt?)
Turns out, they're not twins at all. These are two pictures of the same guy -- a gay man from South Africa.
Speaking via Skype, Kyle Roux said he was shocked his image was used. Especially since he calls himself an "out and proud" gay man.Here in Montgomery County we know PFOX as a sad bunch of buffoons led by a woman who cannot accept that her son is actually gay. They have sued our school district and agitated around town -- we have had their billboards, too -- and their approach is uneducated, hateful, and very, very ineffective.
"I was obviously quite shocked, so that why I decided to send you guys an email saying hey, I'm that guy in that billboard," Roux said.
Roux hasn't thought about that photo shoot in nearly a decade. He says the pictures used on the billboard were part of a stock photo shoot he did. Roux signed away the rights and was told the pictures would be used in commercial and corporate ads and brochures.
Thursday morning, friends, family and even Roux's trainer asked if he was featured in the ad, which claimed to show identical twins and the statement, "Nobody is born gay."
It's ironic, says Roux, given that he's not a twin and openly gay.
"It just seems like there no place in today's world for an organization that is promoting this as being some kind of deviant or distasteful lifestyle, because I've lived my life openly gay and happy for my entire life," he said. Openly-gay model in 'Nobody is born gay' billboard reacts
How hard would it be to find a picture of two twins where one is gay and one is straight? Doesn't PFOX know that people are going to ask, who are those guys on your billboard?
So it's not a pair of twins. Strike one. It is a happy gay man, shown twice. You're out.
"The issue isn't the photo on a the billboard, but the actual science," said Chris Doyle, a licensed clinical professional counselor and former board member of PFOX.You know what, I support those rights, too. If you're gay and you want to be straight then as far as I'm concerned you can go ahead and try. Do what you can. Maybe you will succeed where so many have failed. And to be fair, if you're straight and you want to be gay, I support your rights as well. And if you're short and you want to be tall, I support you in your efforts to try. Left-handed? I believe you have the right to try to change.
The group says being gay isn't a genetic predisposition, but instead a choice, and anyone can choose change their lives:
"PFOX supports the rights of everyone who wants to pursue that for themselves," Doyle said.
I even support the rights of PFOX to believe what they believe, in the privacy of their own homes, but eewww, why do they have to shove it down our throats all the time?
posted by JimK at 8:31 PM
26 Comments:
485NC church members indicted for kidnapping, beating gay man to cure ‘homosexual demons’
Five members of a controversial North Carolina church were indicted this week on charges that they kidnapped and assaulted a fellow member because he had been possessed by “homosexual demons.”
On Monday, a Rutherford County grand jury indicted Sarah Covington Anderson, Adam Christopher Bartley, Brooke McFadden Covington, Justin Brock Covington and Robert Louis Walker Jr. on charges of second degree kidnapping and simple assault. Anderson was also charged with assault by strangulation.
Matthew Fenner told WSPA that he was a member of The Word of Faith Fellowship church in 2013 when the others physically attacked him for being gay on Jan. 29, 2013.
“I honestly thought I was going to die,” Fenner recalled. “My head was like being flung back, my vision was going brown and black… I couldn’t breathe and I’m sitting here thinking if I don’t get out of this, I’m probably going to die.”
According to QNotes, the suspects slapped and strangled Fenner, and they threatened to imprison him for two days to fight his “homosexual demons.”
Although the church has been accused of abusing LGBT people in the past, Fenner said that local officials refused to take him seriously or even let him file a complaint at first.
QNotes described the Spindale church as “cult-like” for a technique of “deliverance” in which members are encircled, and subjected to “high-pitched shrilling sounds, screams and prayers.”
In an affidavit, Fenner recalled how Sarah Covington Anderson had told him he was “disgusting” because of his sexual orientation before the physical abuse began on one of three instances that he described.
“Deliverance soon ensued (which meant extremely rough pushing, loud screaming, and other violent measures intended to ‘break me free of the homosexual ‘demons” they so viciously despite), and I was at one point grabbed by my throat by Sarah and shaken, punched, and beaten,” the affidavit said. “I received many bruises on my collarbones, neck, chest, and shoulders.”
“I had at least 15-20 college age men around me, screaming, shaking me, punching me, hitting my chest, grabbing my head, telling me to repeat different phrases, all of which caused (and have resulted in much) mental distress to high levels,” he added.
An attorney for the church insisted that all of the charges were false.
“They are innocent of the charges leveled against them and we look forward to proving their innocence and to their complete vindication before a trial court,” a statement from the attorney said. “We are adamant that no one ever physically harmed Mr. Fenner… The church does NOT target members who are gay.”
The U.S. Department of Justice dropped a hate crimes investigation against the church in 2012 after Michael Lowry recanted allegations that that church members held him against his will for months because he was gay. But he now says that he was coerced into changing his story.
Part 1
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JimK: "and their approach is uneducated, hateful, and very, very ineffective."
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Billboard: "We Believe Twins Research Studies Show"..."Nobody Is Born Gay"
Then they use this research?:
Raw Story: "A 2003 study by the World Policy Institute titled “Sexual Orientation and Human Rights in the Americas” noted that 52 percent of identical twins of homosexual men and 48 percent of identical twins of lesbians were found to also be homosexual. The statistics came from an exhaustive 1993 study published in the Journal of American Psychiatry." [emphasis in original]
"Scientists say that this much higher incidence of shared orientations among twins in fact argues strongly for an inherited or genetic factor in making up a person’s orientation."
To confuse the issue further: Identical genes do not necessarily behave identically.
And further: NYT: [A]ccording to new research, though identical twins share very similar genes, identical they are not. … It has long been known that identical twins develop differences that result from environment. … “But what we found are changes on the genetic level, the DNA sequence itself.” said Jan Dumanski, a professor of genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and an author of the study.
And now for the exciting conclusion!
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And further still: The Guardian Revisits Hair Whorls, courtesy Box Turtle Bulletin.
For those of you who don’t know, hair whorls are the hairs that swirl around that tiny bald spot on the back of your head.
BTB: Dr. Klar is a geneticist working at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland. … He reports that "altogether in a combined sample of 272 mostly gay men observed, 29.8% exhibited counterclockwise hair-whorl orientation". This, he says, is "vastly different from the value of 8.4% counterclockwise rotation found in the public at large, which included both males and females".
Older Brothers, Left-Handedness, and Gay Men:
BTB: For several decades researchers have noticed that gay men are less likely to be among the firstborn [and] are more likely to have more older brothers than sisters. … but doesn’t hold true for lesbians … Researchers have also noticed that gay men and women are more likely to be left-handed than everyone else.
Now get this, they’re related:
"Drs. Blanchard and Lippa noticed there were two completely independent trends among gay men:
1) Right-handed gay men were much more likely to have more older brothers and fewer older sisters than the general population.
2) Left-handed gay men were the opposite. They were much more likely to have fewer older brothers and more older sisters than the general population. Gay lefties were also more likely to have older siblings regardless of gender than anyone else, included gay men who are right handed.
One more:
"There was another trend that Drs. Blanchard and Lippa noticed but couldn’t explain. While right-handed lesbians didn’t stand out much from the general population, left-handed lesbians were much more likely to have more older brothers and fewer older sisters."
Now, what have we learned from all this?
“The issue isn’t the photo on the billboard, but the actual science,” said Chris Doyle, a counselor and PFOX board member. People choose to be gay, said Doyle, and his organization is there to help them undo that mistake and encourage them to pursue a more godly lifestyle.
So, people choose to be attracted to what revolts them the most. Hair swirling is a lifestyle choice. Gay men and left handed lesbians choose how many older brothers and sisters they want before deciding to be born. And, if you’re gay, anything less than ambidexterity is an abomination to God. And science, like math, is a dangerous cult, and all scientists are mad.
Did I miss anything?
So funny.
“The issue isn’t the photo on the billboard, but the actual science,” said Chris Doyle, a counselor and PFOX board member.
---
"Drs. Blanchard and Lippa noticed there were two completely independent trends among gay men: [Actually three…]
1) gays are left handed
2) gays are left whorled
3) gays have older siblings (and yes, that counts on it’s own)
4) right handed gay, more older brothers
5) left handed gay, more older sisters
6) left handed lesbian, more older brothers
And…*drum roll*
7) right handed lesbians do not stand out from the general population.
Take that twist, PFOX!
"Did I miss anything?"
yes
you slept in when they were handing out brains
What is going on? How do we explain this recent wave of secularization that is washing over so much of America
The answer to these questions is actually much less theological or philosophical than one might think. As we have seen, a steady, incremental uptick of philosophical atheism and agnosticism is discernible in America in recent years. But the larger reality is that for the many millions of Americans who have joined the ranks of the nonreligious, the causes are most likely to be political and sociological in nature.
For starters, we can begin with the presence of the religious right, and the backlash it has engendered. Beginning in the 1980s, with the rise of such groups as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, the closeness of conservative Republicanism with evangelical Christianity has been increasingly tight and publicly overt. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, more and more politicians on the right embraced the conservative Christian agenda, and more and more outspoken conservative Christians allied themselves with the Republican Party. Examples abound, from Michele Bachmann to Ann Coulter, from Mike Huckabee to Pat Robertson, and from Rick Santorum to James Dobson. With an emphasis on seeking to make abortion illegal, fighting against gay rights (particularly gay marriage), supporting prayer in schools, advocating “abstinence only” sex education, opposing stem cell research, curtailing welfare spending, supporting Israel, opposing gun control, and celebrating the war on terrorism, conservative Christians have found a warm welcome within the Republican Party, which has been clear about its openness to the conservative Christian agenda. This was most pronounced during the eight years that George W. Bush was in the White House.
What all of this this has done is alienate a lot of left-leaning or politically moderate Americans from Christianity. Sociologists Michael Hout and Claude Fischer have published compelling research indicating that much of the growth of “nones” in America is largely attributable to a reaction against this increased, overt mixing of Christianity and conservative politics. The rise of irreligion has been partially related to the fact that lots of people who had weak or limited attachments to religion and were either moderate or liberal politically found themselves at odds with the conservative political agenda of the Christian right and thus reacted by severing their already somewhat weak attachment to religion. Or as sociologist Mark Chaves puts it, “After 1990 more people thought that saying you were religious was tantamount to saying you were a conservative Republican. So people who are not Republicans now are more likely to say that they have no religion.
A second factor that helps account for the recent rise of secularity in America is the devastation of, and reaction against, the Catholic Church’s pedophile priest scandal. For decades the higher-ups in the Catholic Church were reassigning known sexual predators to remote parishes rather than having them arrested and prosecuted. Those men in authority thus engaged in willful cover-ups, brash lawbreaking, and the aggressive slandering of accusers—and all with utter impunity. The extent of this criminality is hard to exaggerate: over six thousand priests have now been credibly implicated in some form of sex abuse, five hundred have been jailed, and more victims have been made known than one can imagine. After the extent of the crimes—the rapes and molestations as well as the cover-ups—became widely publicized, many Americans, and many Catholics specifically, were disgusted. Not only were the actual sexual crimes themselves morally abhorrent, but the degree to which those in positions of power sought to cover up these crimes and allow them to continue was truly shocking. The result has been clear: a lot of Catholics have become ex-Catholics. For example, consider the situation in New England. Between 2000 and 2010, the Catholic Church lost 28 percent of its members in New Hampshire and 33 percent of its members in Maine, and closed nearly seventy parishes—a quarter of the total number—throughout the Boston area. In 1990, 54 percent of Massachusetts residents identified as Catholic, but it was down to 39 percent in 2008. And according to an “American Values” survey from 2012, although nearly one-third of Americans report being raised Catholic, only 22 percent currently identify as such—a precipitous nationwide decline indeed.
Of course, the negative reaction against the religious right and the Catholic pedophile scandal both have to do explicitly with religion. But a very important third possible factor that may also account for the recent rise of secularity has nothing to do with religion. It is something utterly sociological: the dramatic increase of women in the paid labor force. British historian Callum Brown was the first to recognize this interesting correlation: when more and more women work outside the home, their religious involvement—as well as that of their families— tends to diminish. Brown rightly argues that it has been women who have historically kept their children and husbands interested and involved in religion. Then, starting in the 1960s, when more and more British women starting earning an income through work outside the home, their interest in—or time and energy for—religious involvement waned. And as women grew less religious, their husbands and children followed suit. We’ve seen a similar pattern in many other European nations, especially in Scandinavia: Denmark and Sweden have the lowest levels of church attendance in the world, and simultaneously, Danish and Swedish women have among the highest rates of outside-the-home employment of any women in the world. And the data shows a similar trajectory here in America. Back in the 1960s, only 11 percent of American households relied on a mother as their biggest or sole source of income. Today, more than 40 percent of American families are in such a situation. Thus it may very well be that as a significantly higher percentage of American moms earn a living in the paid labor force, their enthusiasm for and engagement with religion is being sapped, and that’s playing a role in the broader secularization of our country.
In addition to the above factors—the reaction against the overt mingling of religion and conservative/right-wing politics, the reaction against the Catholic priest pedophile scandal, and the increase of women in the paid labor force—I would add two more possibilities concerning what might also be at least partial contributors to the recent rise of irreligion in America: the greater acceptance of homosexuality in American culture and the ubiquity of the Internet.
Since the days of Stonewall and Harvey Milk, more and more Americans have come to accept homosexuality as a normal, legitimate form of love and pairing. For many, acceptance of homosexuals simply boils down to a matter of fairness, civil rights, and equality before the law. The overall stigmatization of homosexuality has weakened significantly in recent decades. We see that those Americans who continue to malign homosexuality as sinful or immoral, and who continue to fight against gay rights, do so exclusively from a religious vantage point. And it is turning some people off religion. In my previous book, Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion, which was based on in-depth interviews with Americans who were once religious but are no longer, I found that many of those who have walked away from their religion in recent years have done so as a direct consequence of and reaction against their respective religious tradition’s continued condemnation and stigmatization of gays and lesbians. The fact that Americans today between the ages of eighteen and thirty are the generation most accepting of homosexuality in the nation’s history, and are simultaneously those least interested in being religious—and the fact that the states that have legalized gay marriage tend to be among the most secular—might be coincidental, but I highly doubt it.
Next, the Internet has had a secularizing effect on society in recent decades. This happens on various levels. First, religious people can look up their own religion on the Web and suddenly, even unwittingly, be exposed to an array of critiques or blatant attacks on their tradition that they otherwise would never have come across. Debunking on the Internet abounds, and whether one is a Mormon, a Scientologist, a Catholic, a Jehovah’s Witness—whatever—the Web exposes the adherents of every and any religious tradition to skeptical views that can potentially undermine personal certainty, rattling an otherwise insulated, confident conviction in one’s religion.
We see direct evidence of this happening more and more. For example, in her ongoing research on nonbelieving clergy, Linda LaScola has found that many pastors and ministers who have lost their faith in God cite their time spent on the Internet as a factor in their emergent atheism. In another study of an extremely segregated, close-knit, almost secretive Satmar Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York, sociologist Hella Winston also found evidence of the Web’s secularizing potential. Many of her informants went online, often secretively, and what they found there helped to erode their religious provincialism, sometimes directly prodding their emergent questioning and even abetting their eventual rejection of their religion.
Second, the Internet allows people who may be privately harboring doubts about their religion to immediately connect with others who also share such doubts. In other words, the Internet fosters and spurs secular community. Nascent atheists, skeptics, humanists, agnostics—even those in the most remote or fundamentalist of communities—can reach out to others online, instantly finding comfort and information, which encourages or strengthens their secularity.
Third, and perhaps most subtle, the Web may be partly responsible for the rise of irreligion simply by what it is, what it can do, what it can provide, how it functions, and how it interfaces with us and our minds and our desires and our lives. The Internet may be supplying something psychological, or feeding something neurological, or establishing something cultural via its individual-computer-screen nexus, something dynamic that is edging out religion, replacing religion, or weakening religion. The entertainment available on the Internet, the barrage of imagery, the simultaneity, the mental stimulation, the looking and clicking, the hunting and finding, the time-wasting, the consumerism, the constant social networking, the virtual communication—all of it may be undermining religion’s ability to hold our interest, draw our attention, tap our soul.
Glaciers are melting much faster than previously thought in Antarctica, contributing to rising sea levels that could swamp island nations and flood coastal communities. And it may be unstoppable
The scientists at the University of California, Irvine, and NASA found melt rates of glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica have tripled during the last decade. They also found these glaciers were "hemorrhaging ice faster than any other part of Antarctica and are the most significant Antarctic contributors to sea level rise."
"The mass loss of these glaciers is increasing at an amazing rate," said Isabella Velicogna, jointly of UCI and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. She co-authored a study on the results which will be published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
The findings come as world leaders are meeting in Peru over the next two weeks to begin negotiating a new agreement combating global warming. Greenhouse gas emissions have increased 45 percent since 1990, helping make 2014 to date the hottest year on record and contributing to everything from droughts to warming oceans.
Using four different measurement techniques, the researchers in Antarctica looked at the total amount of loss and the rate of loss.
Over the past 21 years, researchers found glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment lost an average of 83 gigatons per year (91.5 billion U.S. tons). By comparison, Mt. Everest weighs about 161 gigatons, meaning the Antarctic glaciers lost an amount of water weight equivalent to Mt. Everest every two years over the last 21 years.
What's more, the losses are happening faster and faster.
Over the past decade, the rate of melting has increased by 16.3 gigatons per year -- almost three times the rate of increase for the full 21-year period.
All this melting combined contributed to about a 4.5 millimeters increase in sea level rise.
The picture across Antarctica, which is the size of North America, is not completely dire. NASA reported in September that sea ice across Antarctica is at an all-time high. Ice formation in the continent's southern oceans peaked this year, breaking ice satellite records dating back to the late 1970s.
And last week, research gathered by an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) found that sea ice was thicker than previously believed.
"The fact that in the past year there has been an increase of sea ice cover doesn't mean the glacier isn't melting into the ocean," Velicogna said. "They are different processes. They have a different evolution."
While global warming deniers like to claim the growth of Antarctic sea ice is the whole story and it proves the planet is cooling the fact that sea levels continue to rise proves more ice is melting than growing - the Arctic is losing ice at 3 times the rate Antarctic ice is growing.
It’s one of the most oft-used arguments put forth by climate deniers: that there has been “no global warming” for the last 17 years, as evidenced by a supposed lack of increase in global average surface temperature.
It’s also one of the most oft-debunked, as overwhelming evidence has shown that most of the heat generated from increased carbon emissions gets absorbed into the ocean, not into the atmosphere. What’s more, scientists believe global temperatures are set to rise rapidly in the face of our increasingly warm and acidic oceans.
Until this year the ten warmest years in the 132-year record have all occurred since 1998, and the last year that was cooler than average was 1976. The previously hottest years on record were 2010 and 2005 and now 2014 will be globally the hottest year on record. We are in a period of solar minimum heat output and based on that we should be experiencing cooler than average temperatures. We aren't because greenhouse gases are causing warming that's overriding the natural cycle which would normally have us in a cooler period. Further, in previous years of record heat the record was helped along by an El Nino event which naturally raises temperatures. In 2014 there has been no El Nino event and yet globally what should have been a cooler than average year given natural cycles is the hottest year ever.
"you slept in when they were handing out brains"
Better that than to have a brain that responds to facts and reason with ad-hominems.
so glad the President realizes that the economy is such a mess that we need middle class tax cuts
the new Republican controlled Congress will pass them, paid not by taxing the wealthy, who already pay too much, but by cutting government spending
Obama won't veto
he wants to be bipartisan
global warming alarmists must be so disappointed that 2014 isn't significantly warmer than any year in the 21st century
basically, the temperature hasn't risen beyond a statistical rounding since 1998
they try to put on a brave face by saying it's the hottest year on record
but they realize that, sooner or later, someone will point out that saying the hottest years are all in the 21st century is simply reiterating that temperatures rose significantly in the 80s and 90s
since then, not much
here's a rebuke of those who try to calculate the "chance" of global warming (just think of the morons that fell for that!):
http://www.wsj.com/articles/holman-jenkins-climate-reportings-hot-mess-1421802468
you know, when Obama starts up with the lying, he really does it up right
“middle class economics is the idea that this country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”
nice idea
it’s not economics and no economist has formulated or argued for such an idea on the basis of economics
Obama claims credit for a boom in oil and gas
he did everything he could to prevent it
“the fastest economic growth in over a decade.”
technically true but misleading since it's only based on one quarter not the other 23 of his presidency when growth was as slow as wood petrifying
The ha-ha Great Recession ended in June 2009. What took so long? Reagan’s recession was just as bad, but the economy was booming again in three years and stayed that way for a quarter century. And Reagan knew how he did it– deep cuts in marginal income tax rates. Hint: if you tax something, you get less of it.
Obama says he just wants to tax the richest of the rich
truth: He will tax parents saving for their kids’ college in 529 funds. Obama would tax the money taken from the funds to pay college costs. And he would cap how much workers could put in 401(k) funds for retirement, thus making more of their income subject to yearly taxes.
Barry also wants to raise taxes on investments and inheritances. It would reduce the amount of private capital available to invest in start-ups and new jobs. hint: if you tax something, you get less of it.
“We’re upholding the principle that bigger nations can’t bully the small – by opposing Russian aggression, supporting Ukraine’s democracy, and reassuring our NATO allies,” he declared.
If only. He let Putin annex Crimea and seize a chunk of eastern Ukraine.
Obama declared: “American leadership – including our military power – is stopping ISIL’s advance” in Iraq and Syria.
No, it’s not, especially in Syria, where ISIL continues to gain territory.
Obama said the U.S. is “assisting people everywhere who stand up to the bankrupt ideology of violent extremism.”
Extremism isn't a ideology. To be extreme, you have to first have something to extreme about. He's referring to Islamic extremism but since he went to Muslim school as a child, he can't bring himself to mention the term. The term is a lie.
The most insincere part of his speech was about keeping America as one nation, one people, and not a cluster of groups like liberals and conservatives.
Then he threatens to veto everything he disagrees with and reminds everyone he won two elections. Back to January 2009, when he started his bipartisan effort by bringing all the Republicans in and informing them that elections have "consequences".
What a liar!!
“Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company: I mean hell.”
— John Adams, second President of the United States
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-gaslight-presidency-1421802607
excerpt:
"White House aides are saying their boss’s plan for $320 billion in new taxes on savings and investment to finance more transfer payments is a bid to be remembered as a Robin Hood. This would be accurate if our hero and his merry men had shaken down Sherwood Forest for the benefit of the Sheriff of Nottingham. Mr. Obama has spent six years trying to redistribute income, but all he’s done is make the income gap between rich and poor wider."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-the-harm-incurred-by-a-mushrooming-welfare-state/2015/01/21/d8cd15ae-a0d2-11e4-903f-9f2faf7cd9fe_story.html
excerpt:
"More than twice as many households receive “anti-poverty” benefits than receive Social Security or Medicare. Between 1983 and 2012, the population increased by almost 83 million — and people accepting means-tested benefits increased by 67 million. So, for every 100-person increase in the population there was an 80-person increase in the recipients of means-tested payments. Food stamp recipients increased from 19 million to 51 million — more than the combined populations of 24 states.
What has changed? Not the portion of the estimated population below the poverty line (15.2 percent in 1983; 15 percent in 2012)."
http://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2015/01/26/american_sniper_hollywood_heresy.html
http://newsok.com/liberal-policies-not-aiding-the-middle-class/article/5388273
http://www.westernjournalism.com/democrats-just-got-big-fat-hug-head-radical-group-whose-backing-may-regret/#TKrGWgrA3fXD4aEu.97
Bruce Jenner
what a flake
http://www.aol.com/article/2015/02/01/huckabee-compares-being-gay-to-alcohol-profanity/21137676/?cps=gravity_1967_3178355223674102168
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