As anyone who monitors the religious right-wing knows, distortion and misrepresentation are their stock-in-trade. Nowhere is this more true than with the Dobson propaganda machine known as Focus on the Family.
From outright lying about medical research on sexual orientation to claiming anti-Christian persecution if stores dare to say `Happy Holidays' - their deceit is legion. And there has been little opportunity to fight back because Dobson is not eager to hear anything other than his own unchallenged voice. But wait.
FoTF recently created a Website devoted to spreading "The Truth". It's filled with the usual crap by right-wing fundies and anti-abortion, anti-sex and anti-gay activists, but here's where our story - and our opportunity -- lies. The site contains a forum for reader response, where people like you and me can counter their deceit with facts.
Story on the flip.
Now, about the recent incident that occurred here.
On March 2, the site posted a `Gay Gene' article by FoTF `ex-gay' activist Melissa Fryrear, in which Fryrear made patently untrue claims about the medical research on genetic/biological indicators for sexual orientation. To the great surprise and dismay of FoTF, the article was greeted with a barrage of criticism - there ARE a small handful of informed and intelligent readers among the hordes of Bible-banging know-nothings. You can read the thread
here although it has been locked from further comment (and will likely soon be removed) for reasons I'm about to explain.
Over the next 7 days, the stinging criticism of Fryrear's article continued while the FoTF staff became increasingly shrill and irrational in their defense. They posted three more articles in the thread by Fryrear - and that was their biggest mistake. After googling the text of one article, I saw that it was a virtually verbatim copy from the website of NARTH (a psuedo-science organization and co-peddler of ex-gay conversion therapies with FoTF). Fryrear, FoTF's "Gender Issues Analyst", had plagiarized her article, while pretending to be an outside observer reporting the facts. On Thursday, I wrote a post documenting the extent of the plagiarism with a side-by-side comparison of the word-for-word regurge.
You can guess what happened next.
FoTF immediately deleted my post and locked down the thread preventing any further comments. They also promptly deleted the Fryrear articles along with the original `Gay Gene' article (the cached copy is here). Then, the Moderator came on to declare that the thread had been locked because - get this - posters were "making personal attacks on Dobson". You can read all this in the thread; until it's removed, that is.
It gets weirder. In a separate thread, questions were raised about the lock-out. I questioned why -- if the rationale were true -- those posts weren't simply removed and the thread kept open, and why the Fryrear posts had suddenly disappeared. I got a post to `check my email'. I posted back asking why the removal of Fryrear's posts should be a secret. Five minutes later, these three posts on the Fryrear removal had been deleted from this thread as well.
Here you have an excellent example of the dishonesty and denials typical of the religious right-wing and FoTF. One of their `ex-gay' poster-girls writes an article lying about medical research, which actually turns out to be plagiarized evidence of her own personal dishonesty. Then the site editors attempt to hide all traces of the exposure, shutting down discussion and fabricating persecution myths as their reason for doing so.
Check it out yourself. Go to their "TrueU" Website and find the `Coffee Shop' forum; the `Gay Gene' thread is in the folder titled "Student Lounge: Culture." Better yet, sign up, comment, and show the religious right-wing that their lies and dissembling will not go unchallenged.