Archive for March, 2012

Narth. No, its not what Pinky of Pinky and the Brain used to say. NARTH stands for The National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, and it has now hit a new milestone. It is, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, now the main source of anti-gay junk science. As SPLC points out in their report, anti-gay groups decided that they could no longer rely on mainstream science with its pro-reality agenda. As notorious homophobe and pseudo-scientific crank Paul Cameron of the anti-gay organization the Family Research Institute said, “We can no longer rely on – almost all pro-family organizations do today – on gleaning scientific ‘bits’ from those in liberal academia. We must subvert the academy by doing original, honest research ourselves.” Honest research means reporting anything, regardless of the facts, that puts homosexuality in a negative light. NARTH promotes the idea that homosexuality can be cured, an idea opposed by every legitimate medical and psychiatric organization. Their founders see homosexuality as a mental illness. As reported in the SPLC Intelligence Report: “In 1995, for example, NARTH featured Scott Lively, co-author of The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, at its annual conference. Lively’s book argues that the Nazi Party recruited gay men because of their inherent savagery and that gay men largely orchestrated the Holocaust — a claim roundly rejected by all reputable historians. NARTH has also promoted the work of Paul Cameron, who remains director of the Family Research Institute despite being ejected from the American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association (ASA). The ASA declared, “Dr. Cameron has consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented sociological research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism.” An excellent example is the NARTH claim that the work of Seton Hall professor Theodora Sirota showed that children raised by gay parents had worse outcomes than those raised by heterosexual parents. The problem with this claim is that the research did not look at children raised by gay parents- it looked at outcomes in families where there was a gay husband married to a heterosexual wife. As Dr. Sirota wrote: “[N]o conclusions about gay or lesbian fitness to adopt children or quality of active gay parenting can be drawn from the findings of my research. No conclusions about the well-being of children who are or were actively raised by gay or lesbian parents can be drawn from the findings of my research.”

Many pseudo-scientific organizations or organizations with a purely religious agenda give themselves names to make them sound mainstream and legitimate. One of those is the American College of Pediatricians. It sounds like a purely medical based organization,  but in fact, it is a socially conservative and religiously driven group. Like NARTH, they are also in the business of creating fake research and statistics to demonize gays. ACP head Dr. Joseph Zanga, described his group this way: “essentially a Judeo-Christian, traditional-values organization … open to membership for pediatric medical professionals of all religions who hold our core beliefs … that life begins at conception and that the traditional family unit, headed by an opposite-sex couple, poses far fewer risk factors.” You’d never get their agenda from the name of the organization, though, so when they put out statistics or research, they seem to have a lot of credibility when in fact they do not. They distort the findings of other researchers, according to the very researchers whose research they cite. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, stated: “It is disturbing to me to see special interest groups distort my scientific observations to make a point against homosexuality. The information they present is misleading and incorrect.”

AIDS Healthcare Foundation. The name sound legitimate. At one time, it probably was. But now, they have been taken over by leadership with a bizarre agenda- enforcing the use of condoms in the adult industry at any cost. They made alliances with anti-porn advocates. They successfully got a mandatory requirement into city law that all non-studio porn shoots in Los Angeles use condoms even for oral sex. This requirement has done little more than force non-studio shoots to move outside of the city of Los Angeles, because there is no market for that type of porn anywhere in the world. No one wants to see oral sex scenes with all the sex organs covered up. They belittle the use of testing that has been so successful that not a single incidence of AIDS has occurred since 2004, and even before that it was rare.  AHF put the main testing facility used by the adult industry out of business. They lie about statistics, they distort the facts, and they have long since ceased being a reliable source of information. Their agenda borders on the fanatical. They believe in condoms and abstinence only. They even oppose a drug Truvada that may help in preventing transmission of the AIDS virus.  In a press release, AHF stated: “AHF has long been critical that PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) will not work on a large-scale basis because, consistent with poor medication adherence rates for most diseases, people will not be able to take Truvada as directed. Because of this, there will be little or no preventative effect, and drug resistance and drug resistant strains of HIV will develop. In addition, people who falsely believe they are fully protected against HIV very likely may engage in riskier behavior, thereby increasing their risk of HIV infection.” Finding a way that people can prevent transmission has been a huge goal of AIDS researchers, but AHF seems to believe they should not even try. Condoms are good enough. Forget testing. Forget research. We are going to put condoms on everyone whether they like it or not. The next thing I suspect they’ll try to enact is a law that forces married people to wear condoms, insisting on safe impregnation through artificial means. Gay fanatics trying to dictate to straight people what they should do does not seem to be any better than celibate religious fanatics trying to dictate the sexual practices of heterosexuals.

There have been many studies that show no link between abortion and mental illness, despite the repeated claims from anti-choice advocates. We looked at the issue at the end of last year back on the December 30th Sex and Science segment, where we talk about meta analyses. In that segment, we show the difference between good research and bad research. One of few studies to show an abortion mental illness link published in a major journal was in 2009.  It was roundly criticized when it came out. A new report in the February 2012 Journal of Psychiatric Research offers even more proof that the study does not stand up to scientific scrutiny.  The original study was done by Priscilla Coleman of Bowling Green State University in Ohio. It was not well received when it came out, and we reported on it negatively at the time. This latest analyses shows that Coleman and her colleagues  included mental health ailments not only after abortion, but all across the life span, making it impossible to know whether the psychological problems came before or after the procedure. In other words, a woman could have a mental breakdown at age 20 and an abortion at age 30, and it would be included as evidence for a link between abortion and mental illness. According to researcher Julia Steinberg, an assistant professor in the University of California, San Francisco’s department of psychiatry, “This is not a scholarly difference of opinion; their facts were flatly wrong. This was an abuse of the scientific process to reach conclusions that are not supported by the data. The shifting explanations and misleading statements that they offered over the past two years served to mask their serious methodological errors.” Coleman has admitted that she looked at lifetime mental illness rather than at mental illness that could conceivably be linked to abortion, and now claims that the study which has been so widely used by anti-choice forces never asserted that there was an abortion mental health link, ignoring the fact that the language of her study repeatedly claims such a link. The Journal that originally published Coleman’s paper comes down on the issue this way: “Based on our joint review and discussion of the debate, we conclude that the Steinberg-Finer critique has considerable merit and that the Coleman et al. (2009) analysis does not support their assertions that abortions led to psychopathology in the NCS data”. Case closed.