fisking the anti-gay fundies
The Watcher at Fundie Watch does a spectacularly hilarious job of fisking Matt Barber's "Unmasking the 'Gay' Agenda" screed (available at Concerned Women for America, ClownHall, Renew America, and Catholic Online...choose your poison).
The Watcher does such splendid work that I have little to add, except these two points:
The first involves Clinton Fein, who Barber claimed "addressed the 'gay' agenda in a 2005 article candidly titled, 'The Gay Agenda.' When I tracked down Fein's original article, I found an explicit caveat:
"Despite the tongue-in-cheek nature of this piece, it can, and likely will, be taken out of context, and used destructively by bigots and homophobes with ill intentions."
Bigoted homophobe Matt Barber managed to pull five quotes from Fein's piece, thus showing that his hatred is matched only by his dishonesty. Perhaps that's why Barber doesn't link to any of his sources: He knows that he'll be caught misrepresenting them, and relies on his audience's lazy complicity in his deceptions.
The second point is Barber's reference to the "1972 Gay Rights Platform," which I found mentioned all over the wingnut portion of the blogosphere. Given their problems with factual accuracy, I decided to look for it from a more reliable source. Barber was bothered by the demand for the "Repeal of all laws governing the age of sexual consent," which is represented here in its original context:
6. Repeal of all state laws prohibiting transvestism and cross-dressing.7. Repeal of all laws governing the age of sexual consent.
8. Repeal of all legislative provisions that restrict the sex or number of persons entering into a marriage unit; and the extension of legal benefits to all persons who cohabit regardless of sex or numbers.
One should remember that "age of consent" laws, along with anti-sodomy statutes, were widely used (especially in that era) to selectively criminalize same-sex acts; in the absence of evidence to the contrary, this demand should be read in that light. NAMBLA, to the extent that it even exists, is as much a pariah among the LGBT community as among straights.