The Power of Popular Culture Chapter 13 Homosexuality in American Culture
Part 5 The irresponsibility of the Supreme Court We have on the bench, in almost every state, and in the Supreme Court, an irresponsible judiciary that has no moral right to the positions they now hold. There is such a thing as "independent judicial research," after all. That is, there is an implicit -possibly explicit- mandate for judges and Justices to do any research necessary prior to rendering decisions that deal with complex issues. This applies especially to scientific or technological matters like patent protection for sophisticated computer programs, and medicines of many descriptions, and the like, but it also applies -or should apply- to a complex psychological and sociological issue like homosexuality. . The principle applies to questions such as whether or not homosexuality is a mental illness -as generations of psychology professionals have said it is, starting with Sigmund Freud in his never retracted Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, but including Irving Bieber, Sandor Rado, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney (hor-nye), and still others. The DSM, the "bible" of the American Psychiatric Association, classified homosexuality as a mental illness until the early 1970s and still characterized it as a pathology (not necessarily an illness per se) into the 1980s, and as an illness in all cases when homosexuals sought to cease being homosexual and disdained their same-sex interests, into the 1990s. There was even one type of homosexuality that was regarded as pathological into the early 2000s. . Not only this, but a good number of psychologists and psychiatrists have written about the way that the APA leadership in 1972-73 subverted the organization, shutting out critics of homosexuality from committee deliberations, from membership in relevant committees, and otherwise turned the APA into a sounding board for homosexual grievances. That is, especially after a mass exodus from the APA in the years after 1973 which cost the group at least one-third of its membership, the organization had lost all credibility as an honest source of information about homosexuality, it had become an advocacy cabal for homosexual interests, with people like the late Dr. John Money acting as shills for the same-sex crowd. . This being the case it is legitimate to ask whether the courts, any of them, ever questioned the competence of the APA to reclassify homosexuality as not being a mental illness, indeed, to progressively "normalize" it as time went on. To the best of my knowledge this never happened. The bench, every relevant bench, ignored the many serious questions about the legitimacy of the APA and acted on the assumption -which was what it was, an assumption- that the organization was authoritative on such matters. Nor did the Republicans in government -at different times, in the House, the Senate, or the White House- ever raise the issue. . How could they? The only argument they knew how to make was Biblical, and even then their knowledge of the Bible on this question was abysmal, for example often saying that only 4 or 5 verses discussed the matter while research tells us that there are 15 verses in each testament, some extended, a minimum of 30 passages altogether, and hence one of the major themes in the holy book. Which is good to know if you are trying to make a case to fellow believers, to get them on board with the issue. Which, though, carries almost no weight in a pluralist democracy. . The point is that numerous cases at law involving homosexuality have been decided on false premises, as if the last word on the subject was provided by the APA, and as if "since" homosexuals supposedly are "normal," such cases should be determined strictly on legal grounds. . This is unconscionable. This is to speak of judges and justices who are ignorant of the infiltration of the American Psychiatric Association by homosexual and pro-homosexual Left-wing psychiatrists in the 1960s, ignorant of virtually all the research literature written by the founders of psychology over many years, ignorant of more recent work by organizations like NARTH, in few words, ignorant of everything that matters: All the while making binding law for everyone else and in the process destroying religious freedom for the sake of promoting a grievous and harmful sexual psychopathology. In all the time since this morbid development began, in the 1950s, there has not been even one (1) congressional hearing on either the legitimacy of the American Psychiatric Association to render valid findings about homosexuality, on whether homosexuality is a psychopathology as generations of psychoanalysts and other psychology professionals have said, or on the sources of information used by the APA in reaching its conclusions despite considerable opposition to those conclusions from within the organization itself at various times. . We need to recognize the fact that it all began with Kinsey, a point raised repeatedly by Dr. Judith Reisman for the past three decades. . Why is this important? Suppose we were discussing any one of several major cases of a book or research study about which the author and his (or her) results were subsequently discredited. The fact remains that the false research nonetheless had real world consequences. Take the case of Clifford Irving's supposedly authorized 1971 biography of Howard Hughes. Irving received a six figure advance and the book seemed headed for best seller status. Hughes, however, until then unwilling to talk with anyone about anything, finally broke his silence to denounce the book as a fraud. Irving served a year and a half in prison only to come out of the episode wealthy and famous. Following his release from prison, he continued his writing career, penning his own account of the Hughes debacle, “The Hoax,” which was made into a 2006 film starring Richard Gere. Another Irving, David in this case, also became a celebrated expert on all things Third Reich as the effect of his 1983 unmasking the so-called Hitler Diaries. The significance of this is that many people regard David Irving as a neo-Nazi and resent the fame he cashed in on at the time. Of course, Irving's exposure of the fraud is all he talks about on the subject. It is his claim to fame. After the German newspaper Stern published the fake diaries at a $4 million pricetag, Irving reversed himself and said they were genuine. Meanwhile, noted historian _Hugh Trevor-Roper_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Trevor-Roper) originally pronounced the diaries genuine only to decide, on reflection, that they weren't. Trevor-Roper's first position was also what stuck, tarnishing his reputation badly. Also blemished in the process was Rupert Murdoch, publisher of the Sunday Times, the paper that ran the story in England, telling its readers that the diaries were authentic even after Trevor-Roper had warned him.. Finally, although this is just a sketch of the story, two senior editors of Stern lost their jobs in the process. Fakes can make a great difference. The saga of several noted (notorious) fakes is told by _Barbara Maranzani_ (http://www.history.com/news/author/barbaramaranzani) at her site, since 2013, History’s Most Famous Literary Hoaxes. And there is more... . How about “The Education of Little Tree,” published in 1976 and then made into a movie which had a wide TV audience? The book itself was featured in Oprah's book club. In one form or another the text sold 9 million copies and was featured in many school curriculums. Trouble was, this supposed coming-of-age story among Cherokee Indians was a hoax perpetrated by a former Klansman, Asa Carter (aka Forrest Carter), speech writer for George Wallace, who is credited with creating the slogan “Segregation today, Segregation tomorrow, Segregation forever.” So much for a book and the movie based on it that has been praised by Leftists as a prime example of the oppression of Native Americans. The whole thing was fiction, and bad fiction at that, misrepresenting Cherokee customs and values. . Perhaps the worst example of a literary fraud (unless the "Donation of Constantine" takes the dubious prize) was the creation of a text that did much to inspire the Holocaust, resulting in millions of deaths of Jews during WWII, and inspiring attacks against Jews in the contemporary Mid East inasmuch as it remains a best seller in Arab countries, especially Egypt, where a TV "documentary" series set all kinds of viewership records. This, of course, refers to the , Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a ham-handed forgery produced by Czarist secret police in about 1900, supposedly describing the efforts of a cabal or wicked Jews in Europe to take over the world through financial manipulation, unethical business dealings, and crimes of every description. And if someone wants to believe such utter nonsense, here is a book for just such people. It promotes just about every negative stereotype of Jews that exist. However, the whole production is a pastiche of miscellaneous literature from various sources, edited to suit anti-Semitic purposes. In it you will find snippets of writings of Theodore Herzl (distorted in meaning), passages from an obscure anti-Jewish 19th century German novel, and a French satire that criticized Louis Napoleon III, among other things. The nature of this hoax has been known since no later than the post WWII era, but that has not prevented the book from continuing to influence people who hate Jews. . This game is still played today, of which there are many examples. . There are several online sources for the story of Andrew Wakefield and his fraudulent 1998 "findings" that autism and several other afflictions were tied to vaccinations, but two worthwhile examples are the information found at the website Vocative, in a January 4, 2016 article by Joshua Krisch and in the Wikipedia entry for Andrew Jeremy Wakefield. . According to Wakefield, vaccines for the measles, mumps and rubella were causally linked to autism -and sometimes to bowl disease. This bogus claim first came under investigation in 2004 in a report by _Brian Deer_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Deer) of the Sunday Times and by 2010 everything had fallen apart. Hence, after a tribunal of the _General Medical Council_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Medical_Council) of Britain, Wakefield was found guilty of "four counts of dishonesty and 12 counts involving the abuse of developmentally challenged children." Wakefield was also convicted of failing in his duties as a medical professional, of acting "against the interests of his patients" and of publishing research that was dishonest and irresponsible. There was even more, as the charges piled up, but to give you an idea. In so many words, as Brian Deer put it in another of his articles, Wakefield's supposed research was an "elaborate fraud." Everything had been a scheme to profit from new medical tests of his devising, and from collaboration with lawyers seeking damages from presumed cases of disease due to vaccines. . The damages done were significant and some are still with us as many parents, unaware of the story, refuse to vaccinate their children, thus exposing them to entirely preventable illness. More generally, Wakefield's dishonest claims led to a decline in vaccination rates in the United States, United Kingdom and Ireland and a corresponding rise in _measles_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles) and _mumps_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumps) , resulting in serious illness and deaths, and his continued warnings against the vaccine have contributed to a climate of distrust of all vaccines and the reemergence of other previously controlled diseases." . As well, despite the well publicized findings of medical fraud, Wakefield's paper, which was cited 675 times in reputable publications before the scandal erupted, was still being cited years later. Altogether there were 675 known examples of citations before retraction in 2010, but an incredible 308 times after. The damage continues. . But nothing compares with the continuing influence of the Kinsey Reports of 1948 and 1953, two sometimes wildly inaccurate studies that succeeded in damaging American culture -including law, governmental policy, religion, entertainment, education, sexual values, and public opinion- beyond anything even Alfred Kinsey himself could have imagined at the time. In so many words the Kinsey studies were frauds that were received by the news media of his era uncritically, as truthful, and from there his books began to shape opinion across most sectors of society. While there were some criticisms by actual experts in those years, the press treated the studies as unarguable despite many severe limitations and law violations that are inadvertently admitted in the pages of the two volumes, especially the first book. It wasn't until 1990 with the publication of Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, co-authored by Judith Reisman, Edward W. Eichel, John H. Court, and J. Gordon Muir, that a full fledged critique became available. . At that point, Patrick Buchanan reviewed the volume and predicted that it would reset the debate about homosexuality in America. It did no such thing, not because the book wasn't well researched but because the news media did not choose to take it seriously; by then most of the press and broadcast television had bought into some version of the myth that homosexuality was a worthy civil rights cause and anything that called that narrative into question was unwelcome. So, Reisman labored alone after that, with limited success, but she has persisted to today and her research is invaluable to anyone who is interested in learning the sordid truth. . The story she tells is perhaps best related in her 2010 book, Sexual Sabotage, and it is sobering. Year after year homosexuals and their allies in the media and show business have made more and more gains, all the while as the Right essentially abandoned the field except for brief resurgences of activism tailored for specific elections, like 2004, pretty much the "last hurrah" of any kind of serious opposition. . Independent Judicial Research and the Issue of Homosexuality . Another huge problem has been self-serving legal precedent. You would suppose that in all cases where depth knowledge of an issue was important -without it how could a judge decide on the merits of a case?- judges would be required to do some research to 'get up to speed,' so to speak. However, you would be wrong to make that supposition. Au contraire, the Law has actively discouraged any such thing, and until recently, roughly the 1990s, judges were admonished not to carry out research. . The one notable exception stemmed from the Frye decision of 1923 although it primarily only applied to such things as drug patents and medical technology. And all that Frye really did was allow expert testimony and a minimum of judicial research, just enough for a member of the bench to understand some basics. . The limitations of this became obvious by the time the Daubert case was adjudicated in 1993. At that time the Supreme Court ruled that a better standard than Frye was needed, one that adequately defined the role of judges as "gatekeepers" who should ensure that expert testimony really did rest on a foundation of proven science so that "dueling" experts could not skew or falsify the data they were working with. . Yet the Daubert decision did not require any court to follow its lead, compliance would be voluntary. Hence the anomaly that half the states are still reliant on Frye, including populous giants like California, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. With the additional anomaly that the Supreme Court itself may choose to ignore Daubert which, according to critics of the high court, is commonplace among the most senior of the Justices who may decide major cases involving computers, for example, despite the fact that they are basically clueless about how to use a computer, how computers operate, etc., not to mention such factors as computer networks or differences between Apple and Microsoft products. . Also relevant is a Rhode Island state court decision of 1959, the Etoile case, which stipulates that in all instances where hard evidence is crucial to a verdict or ruling, the opposition, not just the party advocating a view, is entitled to hear (or read) the evidence. But in possibly ALL cases concerning homosexuality Etoile has been a dead letter; there has been no meaningful discussion of expert testimony that casts substantive doubt on the credibility of the APA to render objective pronouncements about homosexuality. . Of course, it would help if conservatives knew what they were talking about. Few have any empirical knowledge of the issue and most habitually frame their arguments in terms of traditional (Biblical) morality, or, perchance, on freedom-of-religion grounds -which, even if successful, which is hit-and-miss, still leave homosexual gains unchanged. . Indeed, conservative defenders of Christian-derived morality and of Christian opposition to homosexuality, sometimes are ridiculously out of their league. A case in point was the trial concerning the constitutionality of California's Proposition 8 of 2010 which was passed by the voters of the state by a clear majority. But the lawyer defending the Christian position, that marriage is between a man and a woman not something else, not incidentally still Barack Obama's position at the time, was -there is no kind way to say it- an idiot. . This begs the question about the presumed necessity for the judge, Vaughan Walker, to recuse himself. After all, Walker is a homosexual. You would hardly expect him to reach some other decision than one in favor of homosexual interests. Regardless, there was no challenge to the propriety of his presiding and the trial went ahead. . The Christian attorney then presented exactly one witness, who, it seems, was witless. Even Walker was astounded and asked if there might be additional testimony on behalf of the Christian view. There was not, apparently because the lawyer was of the opinion that his case was so 'obviously' right that no-one could refute it in open court. Which, if so, and no other explanation is available, would have been preposterous. After all, the homosexuals had just called a parade of so-called experts on their behalf during a period of two weeks. . The Christian rebuttal was pathetic. Not only was their witness dubious inasmuch as he was not an expert as required by Frye, his argument was ludicrous, namely, that the only justification for marriage is procreation. It simply did not occur to Charles Cooper that the strongest possible argument is that homosexuality is a demonstrable mental illness, that the Law is not intended to grant rights to the mentally impaired, nor is the Law meant to validate a lifestyle that furthers the spread of a mental illness throughout society and in the process undermining a plethora of social institutions while destroying all relevant case law since the founding of the nation, to a time when Thomas Jefferson, as governor of Virginia, wrote a statute that made sodomy a felony crime deserving death. . No, it all boiled down to procreation. Never mind that some couples cannot have children, that other couples who cannot do so nonetheless adopt children, that some marriages are between older men and women who are past child bearing age, and so forth. All that Cooper could think of, as you might expect of a certified imbecile, was an argument from procreation. . Still more amazed, Walker then asked: "What testimony in this case supports the position?" . Cooper's reply was: "You don't have to have evidence of this." . Guess not. And you don't have to win your case, either. After all, how does that vintage song of the late 1940s go? "Its great to be an idiot, its great to be an idiot, just like me." These may not be the exact words but if you're curious, just ask Cooper, I'm sure he has the lyrics memorized by heart. . My experience in seeking to provide research help to Christians in other cases concerning homosexuality have led me to believe that Cooper is not an exception, he is the rule. Essentially most Christians don't know what in hell they are doing when it comes to the law, most are unwilling to do any meaningful research into the issue of homosexual psychopathology, and most are unable to frame a logical argument on social issues of almost any kind except in terms of the Bible, a book they don't really know all that well anyhow. . This is unfair to some Christians, there is no doubt about it, but as a generalization it holds up remarkably well. . In short, here is a case-in-point of my favorite axiom, "we have two parties in America, the Evil Party and the Stupid Party." To put it in alternative idiom: "Left-wingers have no conscience, Right-wingers have no brains." This is exactly what it amounts to. . However, the record of judges and Justices in deciding cases involving homosexual issues is even worse. There is no excuse for the kind of judicial irresponsibility we have seen in the years since 1973, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. Basically, on this issue, members of the bench have swallowed whole whatever line of special pleading that homosexuals have wanted them to ingest. As far as I know, there has not been any independent judicial research on the issue, maybe a moot point for the eighties but highly relevant for all cases since 1993. That is, cases concerning homosexual demands, or citizen rejection of homosexual demands, have all been reached on the basis of ignorance. This is completely inexcusable. . Although not directly related to the issue of homosexual psychopathology, reference should be made to an outstanding article by Edward K. Cheng published in 2007 in the Duke Law Journal, "Independent Judicial Research in the Daubert Age." There is far too much important information in this article for it all to be cited here a few highlights should make the point: . While the bar is set high for admissible scientific evidence to be considered definitive in court, and clearly lawyers on the political Right may have difficulty in achieving any such thing, the same principle applies to the political Left, in this instance, homosexuals and advocates for homosexual interests, and attorneys representing a point-of-view congruent with APA (ersatz) findings can only have a much worse time of it due to the specious nature of the organization's research, Which is to say that of all the arguments I have read over the years, made by homosexuals and their supporters, all -all- are specious and indefensible if you actually know the subject. . Current law is consistent in prohibiting judges from employing outside consultants in order to become better informed about content -the facts of a specific case- but there is no rule against doing old-fashioned library study or reading articles in scholarly journals or in peer reviewed books based on diligent research. Few judges do any such thing but the argument to make is that they should, all of them should, or else we end up with an ill-informed judiciary. . The excuse made by many jurists, that the law requires them to approach cases as if their minds were tabula rasa is no argument at all. It is an excuse to be lazy, or to be biased, or to be ignorant. After all, every judge approaches every case with a 'memory bank account' filled with information of various kinds, his or her education does that not even counting private reading interests, and there is no such thing in reality as a blank slate. Far better on an issue like homosexuality for a judge to make genuine effort to learn as much reliable information as possible so that a decision is based on the best available current knowledge. Indeed, not to do so can be construed as dereliction of duty. . How can judges assess specialized knowledge or supposedly empirical claims with little or no knowledge of the field of study involved? This principle applies to chemistry and medicine, computer programming and high tech inventions, and so forth, and it applies just as much to a psychopathology such as homosexuality. . Although it can be argued that the law is defective inasmuch as a number of ambiguities remain which are unstated here, and Cheng makes a case for the need to reform legal procedures so that judges are clearly required to conduct independent judicial research, there are sufficient provisions of existing law to assert that without waiting for anything, such that any judge -and this includes Justices of the Supreme Court- should feel an obligation to do whatever research is necessary in order to understand a case no matter how technical or complicated, so that his or her decision will be based on the best current information or, in other instances, so that a judge will not allow use of dubious findings or false results. And to do so effectively also means that hard won knowledge is necessary. . As Cheng said, it is vital that cases should be decided on their merits regardless of the adversarial model in use generally. The "pro" vs. "con" formula should never be abandoned but it needs to be augmented so that the best -most plausible, most moral, most reliable- findings are reached. And, by the way, judges are allowed to question witnesses at will, which is important in many kinds of cases where establishing facts is difficult. Yet few judges use this freedom more than perfunctorily. This should also change -for the sake of decisions that serve citizens to best effect. To ask good questions requires a judge to know what he is talking about. . . There is much more in Cheng's well crafted and detailed article but this should be enough to get the idea across. Which is: . Several decades of decisions by the nation's courts on the issue of homosexuality should be thrown out as bad law. They all should be thrown out as miscarriages of justice. Apparently no judicial research was carried out in any of these cases, whether about homosexual so-called "rights" (a right to be mentally ill makes no sense whatsoever), about so-called homosexual "marriage" or homosexual adoptions of children, or supposed homosexual rights to force religious believers to disobey their sacred scriptures, especially the Bible, the book that, more than any other, provides the foundation for our system of law. Concerning homosexuality, decisions by the courts of our country have almost all been tragic mistakes which need to be overturned. All judges and Justices who were parties to these miscarriages of justice should be removed from the bench and disbarred so that sanity on the issue of homosexuality can return to America. . This is the point. . . . -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
