Via friend and fellow Truth Wins Out Blogger Michael Airhart I get this link to John Aravosis going on a righteous tear as to why the Family Research Council isn’t merely a pious group of conservative christians who just happen to disagree with same-sex marriage but is, in fact, an organization of calculating hate mongers who will shrink from no lie they think they can get away with. And thanks to useful tools like The Washington Post and Dana Milbank they can get away with a lot of them.

Why the Family Research Council is a hate group

At one point, I had the Congressional Research Service send me a copy of every single document the Family Research Council had written about gays, and then I had CRS get me every single document listed in the FRC doc’s footnotes. I.e., all the “original sources” for the Family Research Council’s anti-gay claims.

And there were a lot of them.  At the time, FRC’s list of footnotes could be nearly as long as the written part of the document itself.

What did I find when I went through the original sources cited in the footnotes?  I found that nearly every single footnote was a lie.  Not a lie in the conventional sense – meaning, they didn’t make up a source that didn’t exist.  Rather, they did things like quoting a damning opinion from a judge in a court case without mention that the judge was in the minority, that the gays had actually won the case they were citing.

Or they’d quote a study with a hideous conclusion about gays and lesbians, only for you to realize later that the actual quote in the study was rather benign – instead, FRC “forgot” to put and end-quotation mark on the quote, added an ellipse, and then put their own damning conclusion.  Let me give you a made-up example of a quote about gays to who you how the family research council did this.

“This study looked at 45 gay men, and 35 lesbians.  It was clear from the subjects that gay men and lesbians face greater societal pressures in their day to day lives… which makes gays and lesbians much more likely to rip the heads off small bunnies.

Wow, rip the heads off small bunnies – that’s pretty bad.  But hey, it’s a real study in a real journal, so it has to be true.  Except of course that the real quote from the actual study ends at the ellipse, while the FRC added its own opinion after the ellipse, while “forgetting” to put the end quote, so it looks like the FRC’s opinion is part of the official quote from the reputable study.

Gosh, I wonder how that happened?

It went on and on like this, through hundreds of footnotes.  I went through the original research of the various studies they cited and found that the study reached no such conclusion like the FRC claimed it did.  And on and on and on.

These are not honest people simply expressing a contrarian view of politics, like Democrats and Republicans do every day in Washington.

Tony Perkins, FRC’s head, got on TV a few months ago to debate whether gay parents were as good as straight parents.  Perkins said “no,” and he had the study to prove it.  Perkins explained how studies have proven that kids need a mom and a dad.  What Perkins didn’t bother telling you was that those studies compared kids with a mom and a dad to kids with a single parent.  The studies never looked at the relative merits of gay parents.  Gay parents might have been just as good, or heck, even better than straight parents.  The study didn’t even look at it.  But Perkins cited the study as proof that straight parents were better than gay parents, when the study had nothing to do with it.

And again, Dana, if you actually go through the FRC’s “research,” you will find this kind of “mistake” happening again and again.  It happens so often, it’s happened for twenty years now that I’ve been tracking them, that you come to realize that lying for the Family Research Council isn’t a flaw, it’s a feature.

There’s more…you should read it.   That the beltway media has a habit of looking the other way at conservative hate groups so long as their talking heads dress nicely and refrain from wearing hoods, never gets any less repulsive no matter how often you see it.   But it stopped long ago being just a problem for the gay community.   This endemic disdain for what used to be journalism’s basic function, to get the facts, get them right and get them out to the public, is a big reason why one of our two major parties has walked off the crazy cliff, and now threatens to take the United States of America with it.

As your gay neighbors have watched the fanatics in the course of waging their scorched earth culture war shove any pretense of honor, reason and morality from their way, so we have watched one news organization after another, one journalist after another, tuck their tails between their legs and run, run away from democracy’s front lines.   Speaking truth to fanaticism, let alone to power, will never get you the big bucks.   When calling a fact a fact and a lie a lie means raising the ire of the rich and powerful, or perhaps one or more of their batshit crazy friends, it’s safer on the paycheck to just stick to stenography.   There are two sides to every story, but never a factual side to any story.   Print the controversy, pass along the press releases and hit the bar at days end.   It’s only a job.   Remember how, in the aftermath of the Proposition 8 trial, so many mainstream journalmalists were shocked, shocked, to discover there was so little substance to the opposition to same-sex marriage? What did we know…it’s not like our job is digging up and reporting the facts or anything…