Again, thank you for publishing this, and thank you for your tireless efforts to promote justice, freedom, and equality.

Oh, and Lee; Israel is far more progressive on gay issues than the United States. Gays in Israel will probably enjoy marriage equality before gays in the US.

Ultimately, George is no different from Fischer. Yet he enjoys the credibility of his association with Princeton University. Endowed chair or not, I wonder what the University’s reaction would be if George was spewing this kind of hatred about Jews or blacks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N.....ed_States)

Of course, Fischer’s claim that repealing DADT would lead to gay Nazis is ridiculous. The group I just mentioned (led by Russell Veh) was active in a time when the military was even more restrictive than in the DADT era. Even closeted gays risked being “outed” and kicked out of the military back then. That didn’t stop Veh’s group from operating (and, eventually, dying out).

http://wakingupnow.com/blog/protect-children-2

I think you’re attempting to show that (Jewish) Israel is more homophobic than (Christian) America, but that’s going to be a pretty hard sell. Though Israel’s actions against Palestine have been a nightmare of human rights abuses, that doesn’t translate to homophobic hate.

It’s no more illegal for a same sex couple to marry in Israel than it is for an atheist couple to marry, since Israel has no civil marriage for gays or for straights. This is inexcusable discrimination, but on the other hand, the gay partners of Israelis can get residency permits, something the partners of gay Americans cannot, and will not so long as Republicans have their way.

Gay Israelis married outside the country, like straight Israelis who had a secular wedding elsewhere, are also recognized as married by the state, something that American same sex couples married within America are prevented from achieving under DOMA. Israel further allows openly LGBT troops in all branches of its army, and has since 1993, something prohibitted for American gays and lesbians under DADT and illegal for American transgender people even if DADT gets repealled.

Finally, until you manage to pass ENDA, Israel’s probably ahead of most of America in employment equality as well. At least in comparison to Israel, America’s prejudice is definitely real.

Regardless of the inadequacy of your example, a simple look at the SPLC’s stated purpose would show you that the organization “monitors hate groups and extremists throughout the United States and exposes their activities to law enforcement agencies, the media and the public.”

Israel is not the United States no matter how closely allied, Fischer on the other hand is a true American bigot of the exact kind the SPLC has worked to combat.

Thank you for the additional detail regarding Spitzer’s work. Spitzer acknowledged many of the methodological difficulties of his own study. My impression has been that since Spitzer could not produce reliable data conclusively proving that reparative therapy never works (and since proving a negative is a virtual scientific impossibility anyway), he simply covered himself by saying that reversing sexual orientation MIGHT be possible — but in any case, would be extremely rare. Anti-gay groups have seized upon that slender reed of “might” to deceptively assert that Spitzer completely reversed his earlier beliefs.

Robert Steinback, deputy editor, Intelligence Report/Hatewatch

For those who might be interested in Spitzer’s study, it is important to note that, while it seemed to show that some people could change their sexual orientation, it was filled with methodological flaws that render his findings essentially impossible to draw real conclusions from. This is important, since anti-gay groups are likely to continue to cite his findings despite his objections to the mischaracterization of his findings, in which change in sexual orientation was potentially possible for a small percentage of gays and lesbians.

Spitzer made use of an extremely unrepresentative sample for his work, in which 97% were Christian, 95% white, and for 93% religion played a major role in their lives and values. Research was conducted by phone interview without participants given a consent letter ensuring anonymity or the protection of their identities. With 76% of the men in the sample married (to women) and most active in conservative religious communities. Some of his sample were actively involved in ex-gay ministries, where the pressure to at least claim a change to heterosexuality is extremely strong.

More importantly though, Spitzer measured the change from homosexual orientation to heterosexual orientation based on a 100 point scale, with 0 being only heterosexual desires and 100 being only homosexual desires. Any participant with a score above 20 was deemed homosexual, with those who scored 21 seemingly considered every bit as gay as those who scored 90.

Generally speaking, most non-homophobes would consider someone who’s about twice as attracted to women as he is to men to be, at most, bisexual, and certainly wouldn’t agree that such a person restricting their sexual behaviour and (reported) desires to women demonstrated that homosexual individuals could change their sexuality. Spitzer, however, made no acknowledgement that more fluid sexualities or sexual identities exist, nor did he bother to further examine and qualify claims such as heightened feelings of masculinity in men or exactly which markers of sexual desire changed during therapy and which were static.

The result is a study which, while latched onto by the ex-gay movement, offers far more questions than answers and is too methodologically disorganized and faulty to answer any of them, much like the rest of the research that Fischer relies upon above.