I’ll let you in on a little secret.

There are times when I get extremely frustrated with some who fight for lgbtq equality.

The other day, I was reading an excellent piece on Equality Matters (a really good site), which detailed the fact that Fox News was relying on the supposed expertise of religious right “experts” to comment on a situation involving a seven-year-old transgender girl who was allowed in the Girl Scouts.

The piece pinpointed two of the phony experts – Judith Reisman:

Reisman is actually a long-time peddler of anti-LGBT propaganda. She is a full-throated proponent of the claim that gay people are more likely to engage in pedophilia, as well as the myth that the Nazi party was run by gay men. She has railed against the media for failing to acknowledge “that homosexuality is correlated with disorder.” She’s also accused those who support transgender youth of “chemically violating and numbing the nation’s cruelly and unnaturally traumatized youth.”

And the Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg:

FRC has been labeled as an anti-gay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Sprigg is a good example of the reasons why. Sprigg is the author of some of FRC’s vilest anti-LGBT propaganda, including a pamphlet that links homosexuality to pedophilia, mental illness, disease, and violence while promoting “ex-gay” therapy. He’s stated that he would prefer to “export” gays and lesbians from the U.S. and condemned anti-bullying initiatives for trying to “indoctrinat[e]” children.

Here is the thing, though.

The piece failed to mention that Reisman is a failed researcher who was given a federal grant of more than $784,000 to study 30 years worth of Playboy magazines. These findings were dismissed as “paranoid pseudoscientific hyperbole.” Or that she wrote a book accusing sex researcher Alfred Kinsey of child abuse. When the Kinsey Institute easily batted down her charges, she sued it for defamation and emotional distress, claiming that it tried to censor her book. Not only was the case dismissed, but it was dismissed with prejudice, which means Reisman could not re-file it.

The piece also failed to mention that Sprigg’s pamphlet in question – The Top Ten Myths About Homosexuality – is filled with distortions, cherry-picked work, and quotes taken out of context created to justify homophobia.

This is not a slam on Equality Matters, but rather just an outcry of frustration on the entire lgbtq movement in general. I think that the reason why it has been so difficult for us to expose the right is because we are not thorough enough.

In dealing with religious right groups, the gay community has shown an appalling degree of laziness in demonstrating why these groups and their phony analysts have no credibility.

It is simply not enough to call them hatemongerers. It is simply not enough to say that they are hate groups.

We have yet  to make any consistent effort in educating the public how they rely on lies, junk science, and distortions to make their case. Simply spotlighting their words with no explanation as to the inaccuracy of their statements is totally unacceptable.

How many of us know anything about the 11 researchers who have gone on record over the years complaining about how religious right groups take their work out of context?

How many of us know anything about Paul Cameron and the religious right’s reliance on his discredited research and methods?

There is a serious disconnect here and it’s something which constantly bothers me. The lgbtq community has so much power than we did before. We’ve got magazines. we have webpages. Hell, we even have a television channel.

Would it kill those in charge of gay media to focus at least one iota of attention on what goes into a Family Research Council anti-gay pamphlet or what criteria do these groups use to anoint someone as a “policy expert?”

Instead, we seem to outfox ourselves by assuming that it won’t matter if we put the information out there.

“Oh it won’t do any good,” we tell ourselves. “It won’t change many minds.”

But we don’t know what is going to happen unless we make the effort from the start.

If I said it once, I’ve said it a million times – if the lgbtq community is going to get any headway with combating religious right groups, the labeling of these groups as bigots without any discussion or knowledge of their techniques of deception  must stop. The lgbt community must roll up its collective sleeves and do the hard work not just to educate those in the mainstream, but also itself.

But I can’t help but wondering are we ever going to at least make an effort?

Related posts:

How religious right groups distort good science in the name of God

It’s not enough to call them bigots