Monday, June 11, 2007

Box Turtle Bulletin nails Holsinger paper

Just as I knew they would, Jim Burroway and Box Turtle Bulletin revealed James Holsinger's paper on homosexuality for the farce that it is.

Burroway reveals things about the paper that I didn't even notice:

The whole point of Holsinger’s paper is to draw a sharp contrast between gay relationships and heterosexual relationships.

But to do so, he he culls his evidence largely from papers which describe injuries from nonconsensual intercourse to denigrate consensual relationships, he describes odd sexual practices that are enjoyed by heterosexual couples to denigrate the minority of gay couples who indulge in those same practices, and he misleads his readers by padding his bibliography with more references to papers explicitly describing injuries experienced by heterosexual men and women to imply that they describe gay men instead.
In other words, to describe gay sexual acts, more often than not he turned to papers which describe injuries sustained through heterosexual activity.


And then he used this evidence from heterosexual activity to say that “when the complementarity of the sexes is breached, injuries and diseases may occur as noted above.” But what does this evidence suggest about “complementarity” in heterosexual relationships? Holsinger doesn’t answer.

Now some folks have continued to try and make the case one of Holsinger's religious beliefs but don't be fooled by such platitudes.

Holsinger manipulated credible scientific work to denigrate gay males. His paper appealed to bad stereotypes and urban legends about gay men and anal sex. I'm surprised he didn't try to prove the notorious "gerbil" story.

Is this the man we want as surgeon general?

And speaking of Holsinger's defenders, I noticed that One News Now hasn't said a thing about the story.

In that past when the news service was Agape Press, it freely reported Paul Cameron's studies and other notorious bits of junk science regarding the lgbt community.

For that matter, has the Family Research Council made a statement about Holsinger? I don't see why the group shouldn't. In the past, members such as Robert Knight and Timothy Dailey published a bunch of studies about the lgbt community.

Some of these studies still exist on the FRC web page.

Why so silent, boys?

No comments: