Justin's Political Corner
Among the ten arguments are offensive lies and stereotypes about gay people, as well as arguments that aren’t even substantively relevant:
1. Allowing Gay Scouts But Not Leaders Is Inconsistent
This argument is actually valid, making it one of the weakest presented in the letter, because it supports an inclusive policy for all Scouts and leaders, not a continuation of the ban. The only inconsistency in the membership policy is that it excludes people who are gay (and atheist). On My Honor may even be correct that the inconsistency “will surely draw an equal protection lawsuit,” but that is the fault of the Boy Scouts of America for trying to cling to some form of discrimination.
2. Boy-On-Boy Sexual Contact Will Increase
This argument conflates sexual orientation with sexual behavior, while promulgating the myth that people who are gay are predatory. The implication is that gay teenagers should never even be allowed to go camping because they’re a threat to their straight friends. Such fear-mongering serves only to further demonize the gay community.
3. All Troops Will Have to ‘Facilitate Open Homosexuality’
This isn’t a new argument; it’s merely a complaint derived from a desire to discriminate.
4. So Many Will Leave In Protest That The Scouts Will Collapse
If “tens- and possibly hundreds of thousands of parents and Scouts” leave the BSA, as On My Honor suggests they will, it’s an insult to the very integrity of the program to begin with. Rather than supporting the many values and lessons the Scouts stand for, these individuals will prove their only reason for participation in the Scouts was because the organization is anti-gay.
5. Parents Will Lose Their Right To Shield Their Kids From Learning About Gay People
Like argument #2, this claim relies on the false assumption that being gay automatically makes an individual somehow more “sexual.” Having gay Scouts will not increase the level of discussion about sex anymore than having straight Scouts does. Even a “17-year-old gay activist openly flaunting his sexuality and promoting a leftist political agenda” would honor the Scouts’ commitment to improving society by being helpful, friendly, courteous — and particularly brave.
6. The Scouts Are Caving To Pressure From Society
On My Honor is disappointed that it was just last year that the Scouts decided that banning gay Scouts was “the absolute best policy,” but now “BSA’s top leadership is more concerned about what is popular in the polls taken outside the Scouting family.” When that decision was made, the Scouts refused to explain it, likely because there is no sensible justification for it. Since then, the organization has lost the corporate sponsorship of Intel, UPS, and Merck, so it’s not surprising its leaders became less attached to a policy they couldn’t even defend.
7. Units Who Don’t Comply Will Be Legally Vulnerable
Like argument #1, this concern simply reveals the inconsistency of allowing gay Scouts but not leaders. When the Supreme Court ruled in favor of BSA’s policy in 2000, Chief Justice William Rehnquist argued that the BSA engages in “expressive association.” If that expression is applied inconsistently, it would no longer define — or protect — the organization. This argument is simply a redundant concern that units will no longer be able to get away with discrimination.
8. The Policy Will Allow ‘Transgendered Girls’ In the BSA
First of all, transgender girls would probably be more interested in the Girl Scouts, which they’re actually welcome to join. Contrary to On My Honor’s fears, gender identity has nothing to do with sexuality whatsoever. Transgender boys should be allowed to join the Boy Scouts, but that form of inclusion is not addressed by this policy. The language “sexual preference” in the proposed change is disappointing, but only because it’s inaccurate nomenclature for sexual orientation.
9. Language In The Resolution Is Merely Symbolic
On My Honor seems to think it’s consequential that the “whereas” statements that justify the resolution will not be part of the policy once it’s approved. It apparently has no qualms about putting forth its own symbolic arguments.
10. Many In the Scouting Family Support Discrimination
On My Honor conveniently ignores the most recent survey that specifically addressed the policy on gay Scouts to cite an older survey with less supportive results. Still, trying to argue a “moral” point from a claim of popularity compromises what moral integrity the position even has.
It’s unclear if On My Honor represents anybody other than its founder, John Stemberger. Nevertheless, other anti-gay organizations like the Family Research Council are supporting his efforts. Through this open letter, he has shown not only a lack of understanding but a significant antipathy for the gay community.
h/t: Think Progress LGBT
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones went on a rambling, transphobic rant during his radio show, warning that protecting the rights of transgender people will cause them to start “vomiting and crapping all over the place.”
During the April 30 edition of his radio show, Jones launched a screed against the “globalist mafia,” which he blamed for efforts to reduce discrimination against transgender people. After claiming that he isn’t bothered by transgender people - but that their “fake rights” don’t exist - Jones warned that “transvestites” would “throw up all over the walls” in public bathrooms. He continued by peddling a number of outrageous, damaging stereotypes about transgender people.
Fox News contributor and self-identified “comedian” Steven Crowder published a transphobic FoxNews.com column smearing a transgender Mixed Martial Arts fighter by repeatedly referring to her as a male and incorrectly accusing her of having an unfair advantage over her opponents as a result of “being a man.”
In a March 20 FoxNews.com column, Crowder railed against transgender MMA fighter Fallon Fox, repeatedly depicting her as a male who’s interested in “beating up women”:
Let me paint you a picture: your daughter is playing a contact sport. Say, football or hockey. She’s gone from being your little girl to becoming a beautiful young woman. Opposite her on the field (or ice), is somebody who once was a man, until he decided that he didn’t feel like being one anymore.
[…]
Enter Fallon Fox, a male-to-female transgendered person, who has now decided to make a living by beating up women.
[…]
Unless you were born and raised a woman, you don’t go around hitting chicks.
Crowder’s insistence on referring to Fox as a male is clearly meant to be derogatory. Mentally, physically, and legally, Fox is considered a woman. Given she also self-identifies as a woman, Crowder is violating basic journalistic standards by failing to identify a transgender person by his or her stated gender.
Crowder is unqualified to be making statements about the physical characteristics of a transgender woman.
According to experts who have looked at Fox’s case, Fox is unlikely to experience any significant physical damage over her female opponents.
And James McDonald at Bleacher Report recently noted that much of the criticism about Fox’s alleged physical advantage has been based on bias and ignorance, not real medical expertise.
This clearly seems to be the case with Crowder, who has no basis in his column for blindly insisting “she’s a man!” Like his fellow Fox News contributor Dr. Keith Ablow who regularly misinforms about LGBT issues, Crowder is more interested in mocking and stigmatizing transgender people than doing actual research about the subject he’s commenting on.
h/t: MMFA
Last month, the City Council of Phoenix, Arizona passed sweeping nondiscrimination protections, ensuring that people have equal access to employment, housing, and public accommodations regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. One state lawmaker, Rep. John Kavanagh (R) is not pleased that transgender people will be protected when using the correct bathroom, and so he has introduced a new bill to ban them from doing just that.
Kavanagh gutted a Senate Bill about a Massage Therapy Board to use as a shell for his new amendment, which prohibits a person from entering a “public restroom, bathroom, shower, bath, dressing room, or locker room” if the sex designation of that facility does not match the individual’s birth certificate. He defended his “show your papers to pee” bill in an interview with 12 News Phoenix:
KAVANAGH: The city of Phoenix has crafted a bill that allows people to define their sex by what they think in their head. If you’re a male, you don’t go into a female shower or locker room, or vice versa. It also raises the specter of people who want to go into those opposite sex facilities not because they’re transgender, but because they’re weird.
Violating this law would constitute “disorderly conduct” and could be prosecuted as a class 1 misdemeanor. The bill describes itself as “an emergency measure that is necessary to preserve the public peace, health or safety and is operative immediately as provided by law.”
The Massachusetts Department of Education recently issued a comprehensive set of guidelines for respecting transgender youth in schools, including using the names and pronouns they’ve chosen for themselves and allowing them to use the appropriate restrooms. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly is not happy about it, and in an epic rant captured by Equality Matters, complained to Monica Crowley and Alan Colmes that the policy violates parents’ rights. His bloviating was rife with ignorant stereotypes about what it even means to be trans — including jokes about name changes — and he offered no compassion whatsoever for the actual experience of trans youth:
From the 02.26.2013 edition of FNC’s The O’Reilly Factor:COLMES: There has to be some confidentiality. Some students don’t feel comfortable talking to their parents about issues like this. This isn’t as if you wake up some day and Jane says, “Call me John,” or vice versa. […]
O’REILLY: The parents should be shut out of this whole process? They shouldn’t know anything that’s going on?… Here’s how insane you are and this whole thing is, and this is truly madness, ladies and gentlemen.You’re telling me that a kid can go to a public school in Massachusetts, immediately upon entering the school take off the kid’s shirt and put on a dress, alright, go to the girls’ room when he’s a boy, and then change his name from John to Tiffany, and then after school, put the shirt back on, go home, and he’s still John. […]
COLMES: Sometimes a child needs the ability to have a confidential conversation with someone not in the family.
O’REILLY: There’s a difference between a conversation and a lifestyle. That’s such a violation of parental rights by the state of Massachusetts. It’s off the chart violation.
The basic goal of these guidelines is to protect trans students, but O’Reilly makes it clear he doesn’t know the first thing about them.
h/t: MMFA
Following outreach from GLAAD, ESPN980 in Washington D.C. announced today that it has suspended Steve Czaban and Andy Pollin, hosts of the “Sports Reporters” show, over a segment they ran last week in which the pair made fun of transgender college basketball player Gabrielle Ludwig.
We have been working with Gabby and Mission College, and she is nothing short of extraordinary, certainly undeserving of the ridicule she received last week. We are very hopeful that Czaban and Pollin will return to the air with a greater understanding of the impact that their words can have, the power their platform provides, and the breadth of their listenership - which they now know includes many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and allies.
From the 12.06.2012 edition of WTEM’s The Sports Reporters:
h/t: GLAAD
The Illinois Family Institute (IFI), a designated anti-LGBT “hate group,” thought it was successful when it opposed East Aurora School District’s transgender-inclusive policy and the district then rescinded the measure. But now that the district has formed a new committee to readdress what would be best for trans students, IFI’s Laurie Higgins is livid. Higgins has posted an epic screed against the effort, blatantly attacking trans members of the committee as “two adult cross-dressing males who wish they were women” and encouraging bullying of transgender — what IFI calls “gender-confused” — students.
Before delving into IFI’s epic tirade of bigotry, let it be noted here that mental health professionals agree that the best therapy for young people questioning their gender identity is to affirm them, including with social recognition (pronouns, name choice, etc.) and a non-discrimination environment. Gender identity is a separate experience from biological sex, and like sexual orientation, it is not chosen, however biologically invisible it may (yet) be. To not respect an individual’s identity is to reject it, and to encourage such rejection is to promote bullying and discrimination. That is exactly IFI’s intention.
Here, Higgins is directly encouraging bullying. There is no “kind, compassionate and inclusive” way of telling a person that their identity exists outside of “morality, objective reality, and public order.” Such messages promote quite the opposite sentiment.
The Aurora community should demand that only Aurora community members may serve on the committee, and at the next election, they should get rid of any school board member who supports any “transgender” policy.
It is unclear if Higgins is even concerned if IFI is advocating on behalf of anybody. Her claims that cisgender (non-trans) students might get uncomfortable in the bathroom around a trans student — a consequence of being similarly misinformed about trans identities — are weak. They are no more substantive than arguments that white customers might feel uncomfortable with black customers at a lunch counter. IFI has a vendetta that is both political and personal, and such perspectives have no role to play when the goal is a safe school with an efficient learning environment.
Fox News’ Dr. Keith Ablow is a strong advocate for plastic surgery as a means to improve a person’s self-esteem and self-image, so long as that person isn’t transgender.
During the October 3 edition of Fox & Friends First, co-host Ainsley Earhardt asked Ablow for his thoughts on a viewer who was considering getting plastering surgery for her nose. Ablow, a psychiatristwho is a member of Fox’s “Medical A-Team,” called the woman “nuts” for hesitating to undergo the procedure, adding:
From the 10.03.2012 edition of FNC’s Fox and Friends First:
ABLOW: You know why she’s crazy? Because she hasn’t done it. Look, she’s looking in the mirror for thirty minutes, “I don’t think I like this, that.” Go! Get a plastic surgeon. Take the leap because I wonder what else in this woman’s life she hasn’t been willing to do even though she knows she wants to.
EARHARDT: In your experience, people who get the plastic surgery, are they usually happy with it?
ABLOW: Usually. I mean, I think plastic surgery gets a bad rap because the bottom line is it helps a lot of people feel better about themselves. What’s so terrible? It’s not a terrible thing. Go, get the nose job.
Ablow’s ardent support for cosmetic plastic surgery is in stark contrast to his stance on transgender people pursuing gender reassignment surgery in order to feel comfortable with their bodies. Last year, he criticized transgender people who “grotesquely amputate” their body parts, writing:
[E]ncouraging the choosing of gender identity, rather than suggesting our children become comfortable with the ones that they got at birth, can throw our species into real psychological turmoil—not to mention crowding operating rooms with procedures to grotesquely amputate body parts[.] Why not make race the next frontier? What would be so wrong with people deciding to tattoo themselves dark brown and claim African-American heritage? Why not bleach the skin of others so they can playact as Caucasians?
Why should we hold dear anything with which we were born? What’s the benefit of non-fiction over fiction? [emphasis added]
Got that? People who don’t like their noses should pursue plastic surgery, but people with intense gender dysphoria – a condition marked by strong desires to be of the other gender – should just learn to deal with it.
h/t: Equality Matters
Submitted by H:
Jennifer Braly, a transgender woman, has given over thirty lectures in psychology classes at University of Arkansas Fort Smith about gender identity disorders. On Wednesday, April 18, my professor announced to her classes that Jennifer would be a guest…
During the April 19 edition of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly hosted a segment attacking this week’s episode of Glee for featuring a storyline about a transgender teenager struggling with her gender identity. O’Reilly was joined by Fox & Friends’ Gretchen Carlson and Judge Jeanine Pirro.
Throughout the segment, O’Reilly and Carlson criticized Glee for encouraging “dopey kids” to experiment with homosexuality and possibly identify as transgender, comparing LGBT youth to smokers and “drug-fueled” celebrities.
O’Reilly and Carlson’s fear-mongering is reminiscent of last years Fox News meltdown over Chaz Bono’s appearance on Dancing with the Stars. Back then, medical professionals widely condemned the idea that transgender people on television could cause kids to identify as transgender.
From the 04.19.2012 edition of FNC’s The O’Reilly Factor:
h/t: MMFA
Much has unfolded in the day since the “Bathroom Harassment Act” was first introduced in the Tennessee legislature, a bill that would fine transgender people $50 for using bathrooms and dressing rooms.
First, state Sen. Bo Watson (R) has withdrawn his version of the bill. He had introduced it as a courtesy to state Rep. Richard Floyd (R), who represents the same region of Tennessee. In a statement to ThinkProgress, Watson’s communications director explained that “Sen. Watson concluded that there are far more pressing issues facing the state of Tennessee at this time.”
Floyd now stands alone as the sponsor of the bill (HB 2279), which he defended yesterday using incredibly transphobic rhetoric. In no uncertain terms, he explained that he would resort to violence if he ever encountered someone transgender in a dressing room:
FLOYD: I believe if I was standing at a dressing room and my wife or one of my daughters was in the dressing room and a man tried to go in there — I don’t care if he thinks he’s a woman and tries on clothes with them in there — I’d just try to stomp a mudhole in him and then stomp him dry.
Don’t ask me to adjust to their perverted way of thinking and put my family at risk. We cannot continue to let these people dominate how society acts and reacts. Now if somebody thinks he’s a woman and he’s a man and wants to try on women’s clothes, let him take them into the men’s bathroom or dressing room.
This bill is nothing short of an outright attack on transgender people, and Floyd’s comments make it clear he lacks any understanding or compassion for the trans community. Enforcement of this bill could lead to ID checks in public restrooms and would be devastatingly stigmatizing, especially considering Tennessee offers no option for individuals to change their birth certificate gender markers. Even individuals passing through one of Tennessee’s airports or bus stops could be targeted for these fines, just for being transgender.
Ablow has spent the last several weeks making the rounds on Fox News to defend his column. According to Ablow, allowing Bono to participate on Dancing with the Stars is akin to celebrating anorexia or heroin addiction. According to him, celebrating someone like Chaz Bono on television is “reality bending” because, as Ablow so eloquently put it, “Chaz Bono is not a man!”
Ablow’s fierce opposition to “broadcasting, applauding, and mainstreaming” transgender people on television might come as a surprise to you if you’re one of the few people on earth who watched the short-lived Dr. Keith Ablow Show. Beginning in 2006, the show ran for only one season and was cancelled due to poor ratings.
Before being yanked off the air, however, The Dr. Keith Ablow Show dedicated an entire episode to transgender people “living with a sex change operation.” The Dr. Ablow of 2007 seems to have had a very different take on the danger of ‘celebrating’ transgender people.
In one segment, Ablow noted that a guest’s “denial” of her gender identity “didn’t work” and made sure to address her with correctly gendered pronouns. Ablow even stated that it “makes sense in every way” for his guest to undergo gender reassignment surgery.
Ablow seemed genuinely interested in learning about and appreciating the experiences of his transgender guests. He wasn’t attacking them for wanting to “amputate” their body parts, nor was he accusing them of suffering from a “psychotic delusion.” As Ablow said, he was actually “learning” from them. He even let his audience clap!
So what’s changed? Does Ablow only have a problem “broadcasting, applauding and mainstreaming” transgender people when he’s not the one profiting from it? Or has he simply recognized that, at Fox News, it’s easier to demonize and mock transgender people than treat them with respect and understanding?
“Dr.” Keith Ablow is a hypocrite.
H/T: Media Matters For America
