There is literally no anti-science conspiracy theory far-fetched enough for a dim bulb like Bryan Fischer to latch onto. So we are not surprised that the most hateful spokesperson for one of the country’s most ridiculous hate groups, the American Family Association, is now an AIDS denialist:
I recently came across several articles commemorating the 20th anniversary of Magic Johnson’s HIV diagnosis. I still remember the screaming headlines in 1991, the abrupt termination of his NBA career at the height of his powers, and his subsequent and short-lived come back.
One would have expected pictures of Magic, taken 20 years after this life-sentence diagnosis, to be a withered, shriveled version of his former self, his life force eaten away by this killer virus.
“One would have expected,” said the renowned scientist and medical researcher Bryan Fischer.
So why is Magic the picture of health 20 years after this supposedly terminal diagnosis? Easy: the HIV virus does NOT cause AIDS. Since, as one of the world’s leading virologists, Peter Duesberg of U.C. Berkeley, says, HIV is a “harmless passenger virus,” Magic is likely to carry HIV with him to the end of a long and healthy life.
Duesberg wrote a bombshell book in 1996, Inventing the AIDS Virus, which exposes the myth of the so-called AIDS virus.
Peter Duesberg’s theories have been widely disproven, and hundreds of thousands of people have died in Africa, in part because certain leaders over there took him seriously for a while. He’s a quack, pure and simple. Right up Bryan Fischer’s alley…
In fact, in this respect, the bogus HIV/AIDS link is just like the hysterical anthropogenic global warming scam.
And only true idiots or those who stand to profit from huge corporations for propagating the idea that anthropogenic global warming is a myth would lend credence to that statement. As I highly doubt that Bryan Fischer is making that much money from the AFA, I’m going to continue believing he’s simply hysterical, incredibly easily led and simply not that smart.
Anyway, there’s no reason to go through Bryan’s piece line by line — that would be giving him more attention than he’s worth — but he sums up by blaming the entire AIDS crisis on gay men and poppers. This, of course, discounts the lives of the untold numbers of AIDS victims around the globe who are heterosexual, women and children. But wingnuts are pretty casual about discounting other people’s lives when it comes to pushing their propaganda, I’ve found.
If Linda Harvey had her way, I surmise, gay people really wouldn’t be allowed to do much of anything. Unfortunately for her, lots of the best doctors in the country are gay — indeed, I would venture a guess that a gay doctor has cared for Linda at some time or another, which means, according to her logic here, that she has been influenced by the Cootie of Gay. Here is Linda Harvey of the surely-about-to-be-named-a-hate-group Mission America, commenting on how the sexuality of physicians is more important than the health of children:
How do you feel about open homosexuals tending to your child in a health care setting? Do you think these folks provide good role modeling at a time when your child is very vulnerable? I was thinking about this recently when I heard that Children’s Hospital in Columbus has a homosexual employees group called NCHARGE, which stands for Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s Advocates Representing Gay Employees. The meeting minutes of this groups reveal that they participated in last June’s gay pride parade, that they participated in a health expo on adolescent health this summer and that they’re concerned about same-sex partner benefits. They’re also planning to be identified with rainbow lapel pins.
But let’s say your eleven year-old has broken her leg rather badly and needs to be in the hospital a few days, which would you prefer: a nurse who’s proud of her lesbianism, who has rainbow identifiers on her work clothing, or a nurse who does not?
I would like to suggest that parents think long and hard about this. If you want your children to admire people who proclaim a homosexual lifestyle, they’re involvement with your child during a hospital stay is sure to be an influence. And let me be clear that folks involved in these behaviors can be certainly competent workers but they are tacking on to their workplace identity one that is highly offensive to many people and can be erroneously influential to children who won’t, or shouldn’t, see the whole picture of how this behavior really manifests itself.
Here’s what parents can do: select your pediatrician very carefully, first of all. There are a few homosexual doctors treating kids, there are far more nurses, LPNs, technicians and other health care workers in these lifestyles so you may want to consider writing a letter that you file with your pediatrician that should your child ever be hospitalized, you do not want your child to be treated or cared for by one of these members of the Children’s Hospital gay employees group except in the case of an emergency situation. But for routine in-hospital care where contact with your child would be required, your values should be respected.
Um, yeah. Along the same lines, I would also suggest that Fundamentalists stay true to their beliefs and only see doctors who believe in Creationism. I mean, it’s not like evolution is the freaking foundation of biology or medical science or anything. Here’s the video if you’re bored to death or something:
Dan Savage points out that Linda does make an exception to this rule, which truly makes me question her commitment to Sparkle Motion*:
Harvey notes that straight parents should clearly communicate that it’s okay for gay and lesbian doctors and nurses to treat their children in “emergency situations,” which can be seen as either tremendously gracious on Harvey’s part—”Well, okay, that lesbian nurse can save my daughter’s life”—or as the kind of wishy-washy moral relativism that is destroying the moral fabric of this great nation.
ANYWAY, so now you know. Fundamentalists really need to be more concerned with who their doctors and nurses sleep with at night, rather than whether they have the expertise required to care for their sick or injured children. Priorities!
*Oh, my god. I had never thought of that before. THAT is who Linda Harvey reminds me of! If you haven’t seen Donnie Darko, watch this clip, then Netflix the movie.
Health care providers are much more savvy these days about picking up on abuse in patients than they used to be. Physicians, particularly those practicing primary care, are trained to screen patients for physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. When it comes to child abuse, along with other professionals in positions of public trust like teachers and social workers, they are mandated in every state to notify the authorities if we even suspect it. Many states have similar laws covering the reporting of elder abuse and domestic violence.
What’s not showing up on their radar is spiritual abuse.
What is it? For a vivid description, read the memoir Ex-Gay No Way, in which Jallen Rix EdD writes with great insight about the religious abuse [his term] that he endured for years as a gay man born into a conservative Protestant family. “Spiritual abuse” comes up in religiouscontexts. The term seems to have made an early appearance in the medical literature in 1998:
Spiritual abuse is the act of making people believe–whether by stating or merely implying–that they are going to be punished in this life and/or tormented in hell-fire forever for failure to live life good enough to please God and thus earn admission to heaven. Spiritual terrorism is the most extreme form of spiritual abuse and may cause serious mental health problems. Those people who have not been spiritually terrorized have not necessarily been spared from spiritual abuse and therefore may still be in need of competent, spiritual counseling. Spiritual abuse, which may be active or passive, can best be conceptualized on a continuum from terroristic to zero abuse. Severity is determined by intensity, age of onset, duration, and individual reaction. The underlying issue in all forms of abuse is control.
Such abuse is a daily fact of life for many LGBTQ people. This study interviewed a group of them living in the Bible Belt:
In the Bible Belt, Christianity is not confined to Sunday worship. Christian crosses, messages, paraphernalia, music, news, and attitudes permeate everyday settings. Consequently, Christian fundamentalist dogma about homosexuality-that homosexuals are bad, diseased, perverse, sinful, other, and inferior-is cumulatively bolstered within a variety of other social institutions and environments in the Bible Belt. Of the 46 lesbians and gay men interviewed for this study (age 18-74 years), most describe living through spirit-crushing experiences of isolation, abuse, and self-loathing. This article argues that the geographic region of the Bible Belt intersects with religious-based homophobia. Informants explained that negative social attitudes about homosexuality caused a range of harmful consequences in their lives including the fear of going to hell, depression, low self-esteem, and feelings of worthlessness.
There are very, very few articles on spiritual abuse in the medical literature–the 1998 articles on the topic by a West Virginia hospice worker did not provoke a flurry of follow-up research. There is a small body of work in the psychology literature, mostly in studies of people involved in cults. But I daresay there’s hardly a primary-care doctor in the land who thinks about this problem or looks for it in her patients. This is a grave oversight. The medical profession should study the health effects of this distinct type of emotional abuse [it may well also be a distinct type of domestic violence]. I suspect research will quickly demonstrate what we already intuitively grasp–that it is not only a risk factor for disease, but also a potentially lethal public health issue. Like secondhand smoke, it harms at least two parties at once. Like malaria, it’s more common and more dangerous in certain regions. Like obesity, there may well be a lower prevalence among people with more education. In short, if spiritual abuse affects health, as seems likely, then we can and should study it.
Doctors are trained to warn parents about guns in the home, no matter what their private convictions about gun ownership may be. They routinely look for signs of physical and emotional abuse in their patients and refer them to sources of help. Courts have allowed physicians to give blood transfusions to the children of transfusion-averse Jehovah’s Witnesses over the parents’ strenous objections, based on the argument that to do otherwise would allow parental religious belief to kill a child. So why not teach providers to screen for spiritual abuse?
After all, if a religious, closeted gay patient is convinced he’s worthless and headed for hell because of his sexuality, that belief is overwhelmingly likely to harm that patient’s mental health, and could quite possibly end his life. That this is a common plight among children makes the problem even more urgent. These points ought to be all the justification physicians need to study spiritual abuse, look for it, and think about ethical ways to intervene.
Alvin McEwen has a pretty epic smackdown over at AlterNet right now, over the Religious Right’s use of Paul Cameron’s “research” in order to vilify gay people. Paul Cameron, as anyone who pays attention knows, is probably the least credible “researcher” in the entire field of human sexuality. But that doesn’t matter to fundamentalist Christian wingnuts, because they one thing that group has in common is that they’re willing to lie to preserve their worldview. Here’s what Peter said to Concerned Women for America’s Martha Kleder on the subject:
Kleder: One of the things I’ve also noticed is that the SPLC seems to be riled by the fact . . . uh . . . if they don’t particularly like your source that you document then you must be a hate group.
LaBarbera: Paul Cameron.
Kleder: Yeah.
LaBarbera: They say if you cite Paul Cameron, then you are a hater. I mean that’s ridiculous. You know there is a researcher who just came out and found that Paul Cameron’s work on the greater likelihood of homosexual adoptive parents to have . . . for the child to emerge as a homosexual. He confirmed Cameron’s thesis. You don’t have to agree with everything Paul Cameron ever did but how proposterous to say that citing a researcher . . Paul Cameron’s work has been published in peer-reviewed journals. What they’ve done, Martha is set up these criteria and then you violate them, they call you a hate group, and then they have their little echo chamber on the left which reports their charge. And of course the media, which really doesn’t like us anyway. The media is very pro-gay, they cite us and so it begins to take a life of its own.
Of course, Alvin does point out that Peter is one of the only members of the Religious Right who doesn’t get embarrassed when he’s called on his use of Cameron’s “data.” The rest of them apparently have a slight bit of shame and integrity left, but Peter threw that aside when he started trolling leathersex conventions.
For anyone who is new, here’s a quick intro to Paul Cameron’s career, again, courtesy of Alvin:
Cameron is a researcher who has made a name for himself by creating studies designed to demonize the lgbt community. These studies for the most part have been published in “vanity” or “pay-for-publish” journals and they are not “peer-reviewed” in the normal sense. No “peer” who objects to Cameron’s work has the right to remove it from the journal.
He has also been discredited and censured by many group and individuals on the left, the right, and in the middle due to his bad research techniques. Several of his studies have been criticized for such errors as having small sample sizes, showing an anti-gay bias in interviews, and not having enough responses to establish a suitable analysis.
And, of course, Alvin provides a few key quotes from [actual, grown-up, non-religious] medical/mental health organizations about Paul Cameron:
“(Cameron) misrepresents my findings and distorts them to advance his homophobic views. I make a very clear distinction in my writing between pedophilia and homosexuality, noting that adult males who sexually victimize young boys are either pedophilic or heterosexual, and that in my research I have not found homosexual men turning away from adult partners to children . . . I consider this totally unprofessional behavior on the part of Dr. Cameron and I want to bring this to your attention. He disgraces his profession.” – Dr. A. Nicholas Groth in letter written to the Nebraska Board of Examiners of Psychologists on August 21, 1984
“Paul Cameron (Nebraska) was dropped from membership for a violation of the Preamble to the Ethical Principles of Psychologists – American Psychological Association, 1983
The science and profession of psychology in Nebraska as represented by the Nebraska Psychological Association, formally dissociates itself from the representations and interpretations of scientific literature offered by Dr. Paul Cameron in his writings and public statements on sexuality. Further, the Nebraska Psychological Association would like it known that Dr. Cameron is not a member of the Association. Dr. Cameron was recently dropped from membership in the American Psychological Association for a violation of the Preamble to the Ethical Principles of Psychologists – Nebraska Psychological Association, 1984
Dr. Paul Cameron has consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented sociological research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism” – American Sociological Association, 1985
The Canadian Psychological Association takes the position that Dr. Paul Cameron has consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism and thus, it formally disassociates itself from the representation and interpretations of scientific literature in his writings and public statements on sexuality. – Canadian Psychological Association, 1996
There is oh, so much more where that came from, including refutations of the lies contained in Peter’s quote above, so please, read Alvin’s entire piece.
Cameron is a liar, a poor researcher, and a hatemongering bigot of the first degree. Perhaps one day an ACTUAL mental health professional will examine Cameron’s tiny life and figure out where it all went so terribly wrong.
But this, dears, is one of the many reasons these groups, including Peter’s, are on the hate groups list. They ALL know Paul Cameron is a fraud.
But they hate/fear/are threatened by gay people too much to let little things like facts get in the way.
Doctors who carried out a stem cell transplant on an HIV-infected man with leukaemia in 2007 say they now believe the man to have been cured of HIV infection as a result of the treatment, which introduced stem cells which happened to be resistant to HIV infection.
The man received bone marrow from a donor who had natural resistance to HIV infection; this was due to a genetic profile which led to the CCR5 co-receptor being absent from his cells. The most common variety of HIV uses CCR5 as its ‘docking station’, attaching to it in order to enter and infect CD4 cells, and people with this mutation are almost completely protected against infection.
[...]
The ‘Berlin patient’ is an HIV-positive man who developed acute myeloid leukaemia, received successful treatment and subsequently experienced a relapse in 2007 that required a transplant of stem cells.
Doctors chose stem cells from an individual who had an unusual genetic profile: a mutation inherited from both parents that resulted in CD4 cells that lacked the CCR5 receptor. This mutation, called CCR5 delta 32 homozygosity, is present in less than 1% of Caucasians in northern and western Europe, and is associated with a reduced risk of becoming infected with HIV.
This is because all new infecting viruses need to use the CCR5 receptor on CD4 cells when infecting an immune system cell of the CD4 type.
It’s not a magic bullet, it seems, and if you read the entire piece, you’ll see that it was a grueling treatment created for a specific set of circumstances, but it could point scientists in the right direction in curing the damn disease once and for all.
Following in the footsteps of a doctor who sexually mutilated girls and then tested their sexual response to sex toys, pediatric endocrinologist Maria New and her collaborator Heino F. L. Meyer-Bahlburg, of Columbia University, have gained notoriety this week for allegedly contemplating drug-based tampering with unborn girls — possibly without the informed consent of the parents.
Outrage over New’s conduct is focused upon her alleged off-label misuse of the steroid dexamethasone. New’s off-label use of the drug to treat congenital adrenal hyperplasia was already controversial: The drug is thought to cause negative side effects in mothers, and it may cause birth defects as well as prevent them. But New and Meyer-Bahlburg, their critics say, do not fully disclose risks to experimentees patients or perform followup.
The notoriety grew considerably with exposure of Meyer-Bahlburg’s comments seemingly promoting the drug as a potential means to inhibit personality traits in girls that are deemed by social conservatives to be reserved for men or lesbians.
The claims were announced in several venues:
an article in Time magazine which noted the permanent damage that dexamethasone has done to unborn lab animals. as well as potential misuse of the drug to bypass parental and social phobia toward gender-variant children rather than to treat any genuine disorder in the children
a related article published by Alice Dreger, Ellen K. Feder, and Anne Tamar-Mattis at the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum, criticizing what they say is New’s unauthorized and unsupervised experimentation upon girls, and calling for federal government investigation.
Dreger and her concerned colleagues warned that proponents of off-label use of dexamethasone have failed to perform rigorous follow-up studies for aftereffects of the drug. They further cite Meyer-Bahlburg’s comments about the drug’s potential to alter girls’ personality as lacking in ethical responsibility.
If the accusations are accurate, then the contemplated misuse of the drug to treat personality would represent a bold extension of the mental-health abuses already committed by antigay and conservative Christian activists against orientation- and gender-variant persons.
Off-label uses of drugs can be life-saving. But like ex-gay ideologists, some doctors and their pharmaceutical sponsors stand to profit from (mis)use of a treatment, particularly when no effort is made to monitor aftereffects and provide followup care that is free of bias.
Like the ideologues of NARTH, New allegedly promotes risky treatment as if it is safe and effective. NARTH counts upon a timid medical establishment to refrain from standing up and condemning its malpractice; are New or Meyer-Bahlburg possibly doing the same?
And critics are alarmed that, again like the ex-gay movement, Meyer-Bahlburg might be using medicine to promote social disorder — specifically, bigotry and discrimination against innocent gender- and orientation-variant people — by treating the innocent and natural as if they are diseased, and by treating unnatural social ignorance and prejudice as if they are innocent and beyond dispute.
In recent years, some among the ex-gay industry leadership at Exodus International have occasionally crept away from the absolutist insistence that sexual orientation is solely defined by bad parenting and abuse. To the limited extent that Exodus has done this, it has held out an unethical hope to bigoted churches that any biological origins for sexual orientation might one day be artificially manipulated by politically correct (evangelical) doctors.
In Meyer-Bahlburg and New, if their professional critics are correct, we may be witnessing a case where medical professionals are willing to dismiss important dangers, mislead parents, and possibly alter the gender and sexuality of the innocent, in pursuit of social or religious objectives that are contrary to sound health.
Apart from concerns about the alteration of politically incorrect personality traits, the controversy over treatment of CAH also touches somewhat upon the distinction between healthy and “disordered” intersex/transgender biology.
Some bloggers have compared this case to that of Nazi physician Josef Mengele. But a more apt and worrisome comparison might be made to the era yet to come: The era of Gattaca, in which — absent any ethical consideration — the unborn are medically manipulated to conform to ostensibly health-oriented social demands.
The 1997 movie Gattaca was considered by many to be the best science-fiction movie of its decade. The movie warned of what would happen to people who failed, as unborns, to be submitted to re-engineering — and who therefore would fail to conform to social expectations: These people — labeled “de-gene-erates” — were to be discriminated against and exiled from society.
That potential epoch of the master race seemed decades away, 13 years ago — but absent strong social and professional resistance and supervision, it may come sooner than anyone thought possible.
If you were Lou Engle, you would. He would call all of you Jezebel. In fact, he did last Tuesday night in St. Louis at a revival at the Gateway House of Prayer. As Wayne reported on Friday, Lou Engle and the team from TheCall are holding a series of revivals/schools every night from June 19 to July 12, open to the public. Thus, it was as a member of “the public” that I traveled to St. Louis on Tuesday to attend one of these sessions, alongside approximately two hundred of Engle’s faithful followers.
Most of the crowd was under thirty, and the striking thing was that most wouldn’t have looked out of place at Starbucks. They were suburban, to be sure, but there were also more than a few visible tattoos in the room. This is Lou Engle’s “Elijah Generation,” which represents a shift away from the overly coiffed, good-haired fundamentalist men of stereotype as well as reality. Quite frankly, I didn’t feel out of place, physically. However, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally, it was soon made very clear that, though no one in the Gateway House of Prayer made so much as a move to speak to me or welcome me*, they considered me not only to be an enemy, but moreover one of the greatest threats to their well-being. This was disconcerting to experience as an adult, fully removed from the angst-ridden, closeted paranoia of my conservative Christian adolescence, but I’ll come back to that in a moment.
The evening began with a worship team leading the crowd in singing what some might call “songs,” for almost an hour and a half. However, they really weren’t “songs,” but more repetitive kindergarten-level chants. The praise leader would seize on a line like “I love you Jesus” or “Worthy is the lamb,” or a short, equally simple verse, and then lead the group in singing it over and over again, sometimes for more than ten minutes, before going seamlessly into another simple phrase and melody. The overall effect, I noticed, was a sort of hypnosis that fell over the crowd, as the young people in that room showed how serious they were about praising God by swaying, dancing, holding their hands in the air, and the like. Those in the front were the first to stand and sway and raise their hands, and, like a slow wave, the physical expression moved backward through the rows until it reached, and passed behind, me. The congregants would call this “The Holy Spirit,” perhaps, but really, it was just good old fashioned peer pressure. More than anything, the word that kept going through my head was “occult.” They were doing nothing less than going into ceremony, as Lou Engle’s bodyguard/bouncer kept a watchful eye from the front corner of the room, perhaps peering into the crowd for evidence of uninitiated outsiders or insiders not fully toeing the line.
Behave as a member of the tribe, or be discovered. And so I did, until Lou Engle finally stopped rocking back and forth in his seat in the front row and began to speak. I have embedded, in several segments, most of Lou Engle’s talk.** For each, I will summarize, analyze and comment on what was said, and the implications therein. If you’re pressed for time, I’m putting the most significant/egregiously awful quotes in bold print. The summary starts after the jump.
The claims were announced in several venues:
