Focus on the Family and Alan Keyes’ Renew America have joined ex-gay activist Linda Jernigan and Peter LaBarbera in spreading an already-disproven false report that lesbian gangs are running amok in America’s cities. All four sources neglect to tell their readers that Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation didn’t want the story to run in local media because the story was, in fact, false — disproven by the Southern Poverty Law Center and reported as such by the New York Times. Instead, Jernigan says, “They [GLAAD] don’t want this type of information to get out,” she told Family News in Focus, “because then they know people’s eyes will be opened, they’ll begin to see this whole situation for what it really is.”
Addendum: Antigay activist Robert Knight has joined in fueling the scare via a July 18 article in Human Events. As with the other antigay activists, Knight declined to tell his readers that the “Fox News Channel investigation” was already withdrawn and, according to the SPLC, “based almost entirely on the lurid musings of a single Shelby County (Tenn.) gang officer.”
Focus on Family, Renew America, Jernigan, and LaBarbera, seem to have serious issues with truth.
Yet they cry foul when the truth is laid out in front of them.
Says a lot more about them than about GLAAD et. al.
Why are they so afraid of the truth? I wonder.
Anyone want to take bets on how long it will take before this hits World Net Daily?
It already did.
WND also failed to tell its readers that its main source, Bill O’Reilly, apologized for distorting what GLAAD and the SPLC found to be widely scattered and unsubstantiated local media reports of overwhelmingly non-lesbian gang activity.
Did anyone read that horrible letter about Holsinger on the Americans for Truth site? LaBarbara misused the death of a youg man for political reasons. Horrible.
Aaron, XGW didn’t cover the Russell Groff story because it’s not ex-gay-related, but Box Turtle Bulletin and Good As You wrote about it.
I encourage XGW readers to consider a donation to:
Kevin Olive Defense Fund
c/o Homewood Friends Meeting
3107 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21218
We now return to the “lesbian gangs” hoax….
I’m still waiting to be issued my pink pistol.
I wonder if this particular urban legend involves lesbian gang members, rather than gay men, because right wing homophobes would find lesbian gang members more believable.
My pistol is still steel blue.
What kind of good Christian is Erik Rush whose “logo” for himself concerns “full-contact commentary” and a martial arts guy in white kicking the head off of a guy in red [see: https://www.erikrush.com/ ]. Jeesh….
But gee… on a good note, as this is supposely kid on kid doings, we don’t have to worry over the pedophile claims anymore….. we can just blame it on the younguns. /sarcasm
It was a sweeps-week segment that was so thinly sourced and grotesquely sensationalized that it’s difficult to believe that any professional journalist found it to be credible [goodbye Bill O’Reilly!]. And it wasn’t. Under intense pressure from local gay and lesbian activists, the affiliate’s station manager finally admitted that WPTY-TV’s reporters had neither independently verified the gang officer’s overheated claims nor obtained any documentary evidence such as arrest records or written police reports to substantiate their tale. As the station grudgingly conceded, “Our investigation did not turn up widespread violence in schools due to this.”
I did a quick look at rapes (last 30 days) via the Memphis Crime Mapper [https://crimemapper.memphispolice.org/crimemapper/index.cfm?action=search] for a one mile circle around the Shelby County, TN High Schools [https://www.scsk12.org/SCS/schools/schools.html] and found…. 0 rapes around these schools.
So I went to the Memphis City High (and a few Charter Schools [at https://www.memphis-schools.k12.tn.us/admin/communications/directoryofschools.html – nearly all 21, some street addresses were not found by the Memphis PD site] and searching this time for rapes within a half-mile of each school over the last 30 days, I found…… 4 not in the immediate vicinity of the school but within a half a mile. Aggravated assaults were more common, often two or three within a half mile of schools, and 4 in the immediate vicinity of the schools (within a 4-5 blocks but not directly correlable with the school).
GTO must be taking a break in Memphis.
“To err is human, to remain in error is stupid”
I don’t know who said it, but I think it is fitting.
Why this story wasn’t debunked before it even got to the air the first time is beyond me. One can do a quick look at the numbers and conclude that the original claim (“more than 150 lesbian gangs in the DC area”) is patently absurd.
According to Wikipedia, the population of DC is just over 581,000. (Granted, the metro area is larger, but one would assume that gangs are, for the most part, concentrated in poorer urban areas.) If we accept the religious right-wing’s repeated assertion that only 1% of the population is gay or lesbian, this leaves us with a DC gay and lesbian population of 5,810. According to FightCrime.org’s gang study, the average size of a DC gang is about 25 members (most traditional gangs number close to 180 members).
So, just using the low end of the scale, we find that 150 x 25 = 3750. In other words, DC has not only a higher percentage of lesbians than would ever be expected in the gay population as a whole, but more than 50 percent of the gay and lesbian community in DC–regardless of age–is involved in street gang activity.
Now, I don’t know anything about gangs or have ever visited DC, but I know the ridiculous when I encounter it. And I could verify that with figures from a simple Google search that took, oh, about five minutes.
People like Peter LaBarbara and Stephen Bennett and organizations like Focus on the Family should stop pleading ignorance about the false “information” they spew against the GLBT community. They know it’s false. And yet, they think God is totally cool with bearing false witness against one’s neighbor. It’s sickening.
Focus on the Family could also have monitored the mainstream media for accurate coverage, and they could have contacted police officials, such as those in D.C., for confirmation.
They were not motivated to do that, though, because then their story would have died and they would have had one less fund-raising pitch.
O’Reilly has been fueling anti-gay sentiment lately more and more (and of course these groups pick up on it and exploit it). After O’Reilly got in trouble for this segment, he immediately talked about how gay people are trying to corrupt kids by having gay night at the Padres stadium in San Diego. There was a hat promotion for kids the same night–O’Reilly said it was “social engineering.” The problem is that there was no connection between the gay group and the promotion.
He had just the other night a terrible segment about gays using the immigration service for fraud purposes (Andrew Sullivan has the clip today). Somehow O’Reilly thinks that gay immigration will bring more fraud than straight (he did not back it up). Like Falwell and antigay groups, O’reilly uses these segments to bring in more viewers, more money, etc. He exploits them. He also generally picks gay guests who are not very good at commentary or standing up to his bullying.
I showed the lesbian gang segment to my English class, and we tore the segment apart one by one based on logic. They could see that O’Reilly was misrepresenting the issue, but many anti-gay groups will run with anything (anybody remember the devil worshippers overrunning the nation scare in the 80s)?
Absolutely appalling. Liars 4 Jesus.
I hope Wayne Besen hits ’em squarely between the eyes with this!
They worship the Law, but break it so easily. What about the “bearing false witness” commandment? And they claim that they have no influence on hate crimes occurring, yet spread deadly lies like this! (And no, I think they should be permitted to show how evil and ignorant they are through speech like this)
This smacks so much of the “blood libel” used in the 30s.
The first time I heard it, I knew it just smacked of being an urban legend. Oddly, Snopes doesn’t have anything on it.
Box Turtle Bulletin itemizes the disproven instances of same-gender-loving gangs in Baltimore, Chicago, D.C., Memphis, New York, and Philadelphia.
So, this whole scare was based on some lurid musings of some Tennessee gang cop? Are you SERIOUS?? It’s probably a fantasy of the guy’s, not a fear of events or a warning of possibility…
Doesn’t LaBabs have anything better to do, like, infiltrate the gatherings of a MALE gay biker gang for “research?” I mean, I figured if anyone would know about this first, HE would. He’s obsessed with the seediest activities that gay people participate in.
You know for Bill O’ Reilly to apologize his numbers had to be way off. 150 lesbian gangs in the D.C area? There’s 150 gangs there period. Try 1 group of 4 girls.