Yesterday Think Progress ran a story about CNN giving air time to David Pickup of NARTH. The ex-gay therapist went on the show to try, apparently, to attack California?s ban on children being forced into ex-gay therapy. One of the things that Pickup loves to do is claim that homosexuality is caused by sexual trauma. Here is their transcript of the exchange and the video:
PICKUP: The parent asks for, first of all, what fits for the child? The parent says that the child is distressed, usually because he?s had something happen in his life that has caused his homosexual feelings. And the child, who is the client, most importantly, confirms that, and says he needs help because he?s distressed over homosexual feelings. [...]
There many thousands of people all over the world, probably multiple of thousands, who believe for them, there is a cause-and-effect nature of homosexuality, and usually it happens because of a severe gender identity inferiority, lack of emotional unmet needs from the time one is a child ? from usually the same-sex parent, and there?s a lot of inner wounds we discover in therapy. The short version is: when those wounds get healed, the homosexual feelings ? we don?t force them away, they naturally, spontaneously dissipate.
Let us throw out all the usual run of how this kind of therapy has been proven to not only be ineffective, but damaging to those who are forced to under go it. Yes, there are a very few cases out there where a person may end up being traumatized into same-sex relationships. There are some lesbians who have been so traumatized by their experiences with men- usually through repeated sexual abuse- that they eschew all relationships with men. There are some men who, due to sexual trauma, end up preferring sex with other men. The thing is, these are a tiny, tiny fraction of the overall LGBT population. They are about as common as gay men or lesbians who undergo sex change operations in hopes of avoiding the internal stigma of being gay without, well, realizing that they could come out the other end of the process still being gay.
What is important to discuss is kind of tucked at the end of the article and should be far more elaborated. Think Progress wrote ?Baldwin and Cohen did their best to push back against his quackery, but the better choice would have been not to give him or any ex-gay therapist airtime at all. As the Washington Post?s Erik Wemple responded yesterday, ?The public has heard enough of their garbage.??
People often kvetch about the bias in the media. They scream over the Conservative bias at FOX or the Liberal bias at MSNBC. Bias in the media is nothing new. In fact, bias is woven throughout the media and cannot be avoided. In many ways, it is best to know what the bias is and adjust your reading and viewing habits accordingly.
There is a far more insidious form of media bias called Moderate Bias. In this case, CNN falls into it, but then again, so does MSNBC and FOX. In an effort to appear fair and balanced, the media often brings in people who are not reliable sources of information. For instance, while discussing Climate Change, these networks will try to provide the other point of view. They will show clips from scientists who disagree with the prevailing wisdom and offer a sometimes false sense of balance to their thinking.
This has allowed a lot of dangerous thinking to flourish. For instance, take the ?debate? over Creationism. This is a false debate perpetuated by the media. The evidence that the Christian God created the world some 10,000 years ago is, well, pretty non-existent while the evidence that the world was created millions of years ago is pretty substantial. However, charges of being anti-Christian has lead to the media offering a ?balance? to their coverage whereby they give credence to this idea that the world was created 10,000 years ago. With this tacit media approval of this idea comes power and acceptance.
Part of the problem is, of course, FOX. The network was founded and is run for the sole purpose of giving power to the Conservative mentality, and their anti-fact biases are used to push the rest of the media into accepting the anti-fact groups. Unfortunately, this anti-fact bias creates problems when it comes to everything from education to economics.
For instance, biology relies upon evolutionary theory in order to understand the creation and changes inherent to the various species over time. Can evolution be reconciled with religious beliefs? Certainly, but that discussion?s place is not in the biology classroom, but rather in a church or in a philosophy or theology class.
The point in this, since this could go on for pages, is that it is time to start pushing back against Moderate Bias and to demand less opinion and more fact in the media. It is time to isolate or eliminate those voices that are only willing to rely upon opinion or religious ?fact? and for us to rely upon actual information when it comes to our discussions.
Source: http://lezgetreal.com/2012/10/moderate-media-bias-and-the-illusion-of-debate-over-ex-gay-therapy/
spanx aurora borealis gcb mary j blige rush limbaugh rush limbaugh dionne warwick
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