Day: November 12, 2008

Maybe the DNC; check out this email from Obama’s uber-campaign manager David Plouffe.

Friend —
Our friends at the Democratic National Committee laid it all on the line to bring change this year.
We’ve been reviewing the books, and the DNC went into considerable debt to secure victory for Barack and Joe. It took unprecedented resources to staff up all 50 states, train field organizers, and build the technology to reach as many swing voters as possible.
It worked.
But it also left the DNC in debt. So before we do anything else, we need to help pay for this winning strategy.
Make a donation of $30 or more now and you’ll get a limited edition 2008 Victory T-shirt.
The DNC’s 50-state field strategy was crucial to our campaign’s success, as well as victories for Democrats up and down the ballot. Their organizing infrastructure allowed us to compete — and win — in states that seemed insurmountable just four years ago.
They took out substantial loans to make it happen. The DNC didn’t hold back, and now, neither can we.
You were there for this campaign when we needed to reach out to more voters and compete in more states. Now we’re relying on grassroots supporters like you to come through for this movement once again.
We’ll get to work transforming this country. But first, we need to take care of the DNC.
Please make a donation of $30 or more today and receive your Obama Victory T-shirt:
Thank you for everything,
David
David Plouffe
Campaign Manager
Obama for America

Can we take care of the DNC first? Yes We Can!
How about we fix the liquidity problems by selling off Obama brand name products?
Union guys who helped elect Obama can surely afford a few more t-shirts. Check out how the UAW fixes up the members.
Charles Martin points us to a brief but fine analysis by Larry Kudlow at National Review of the bailout biz. Kudlow point out how much the Big (shrinking) Three pay their employees versus the competition.

Total compensation per hour for the big-three carmakers is $73.20. That’s a 52 percent differential from Toyota’s (Detroit South) $48 compensation (wages + health and retirement benefits). In fact, the oversized UAW-driven pay package for Detroit is 132 percent higher than that of the entire manufacturing sector of the U.S., which comes in at $31.59.
I don’t care how much money Congress throws at GM. With that kind of oversized comp-package they are not gonna be competitive. It’s throwin’ bad money after a bad cause. What a way to start the new Obama era.

Billion t-shirts should cover it.

This morning, ABC News is reporting that Ted Haggard preached a very personal sermon this past weekend about his fall from and back into grace.
Haggard spoke in the morning and evening at Open Bible Fellowship, an independent, charismatic church in Morrison, IL. I have yet to listen to the sermons but the ABC News account implies he attributes his homosexual inclinations to sexual molestation at age 7.

Haggard told the congregation that a sexual incident with a man when he was 7 years old may be related to the scandal involving a male prostitute and crystal meth use that cost him his job two years ago.
“My dad was pretty successful,” Haggard said. “He had a lot of workers. One of those workers had a sexual experience with me. I was 7 years old.”
Haggard said that incident stayed with him throughout his life.
There I was, 50 years old, a conservative Republican, loving the word of God, an evangelical, born-again, spirit-filled, charismatic, all those things,” he said. “But some of the things that were buried in the depths of the sea from when I was in the second grade started to rage in my heart and mind.”
“I’m very, very sorry that I sinned,” he said. “My wife — all my sin and shame fell on her. People treated her as if she had fallen. And my children — they all went through carrying my shame.”

Today’s Salt Lake City Tribune published an article which brings the private feud between University of Utah professor Lisa Diamond and the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) into public view. Diamond went on camera for Wayne Besen in October to complain about NARTH’s use of her research but this article brings the dispute out of the advocacy realm and into the Salt Lake City community. An added significance of the SLC Tribune raising this issue is the presence of NARTH’s Dean Byrd and Dave Pruden in Salt Lake City.
The article begins:

A national group that advocates “treatment” of homosexuality is being criticized for allegedly distorting a Utah researcher’s work to advance the theory that people choose their sexual orientation – a controversial notion rejected by mainstream psychology.

To be sure, at least one NARTH document I have reviewed does use Diamond’s research to mislead readers, but I do not think NARTH as an organization promotes the idea that sexual orientation is a conscious choice. Rather, the reparative notion is that same-sex attraction derives from faulty parenting and not conscious choice.
I suspect the position paper on female homosexuality I critiqued is at issue when reporter Brian Maffly writes:

Lisa Diamond, a University of Utah psychologist whose sexual identity studies suggest a degree of “fluidity” in the sexual preferences of women, said in an interview Tuesday that the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, or NARTH, misrepresents her findings. Position papers, some penned by NARTH president A. Dean Byrd, an adjunct professor in the U.’s Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, point to Diamond’s research as evidence that gays’ sexual orientation can be straightened out through treatment – much to Diamond’s dismay.

The NARTH position paper on female homosexuality says this about Diamond’s work in a section on the “Fluidity of Homosexuality Attraction.”

These findings support the research of Dr. Lisa Diamond who concluded, “Sexual identity was far from fixed in women who aren’t exclusively heterosexual.” After following 80 non-heterosexual young women (lesbian, bisexual and unlabeled) over a two-year period, Dr. Diamond found that half of the women “reported multiple changes in sexual identity, and nearly one fourth of lesbians pursued sexual contact with men.”

The NARTH author confuses matters by first saying,

As mentioned, many researchers attest to the reality of female sexual fluidity. This does not directly translate into proof that any woman can easily change or alter her same sex attraction.

However, following the Diamond reference is a statement that twists the concept of spontaneous sexual fluidity for some women in a way that has Diamond upset.

The degree to which a woman can or will experience change will be uniquely determined based on her history and motivation to do so.

This is a non-sequitur. While fluidity has been described over time by research participants, the cause for the fluidity is an open question. The research identified by the NARTH “fact sheet” does not allow this conclusion. We have no idea for any given woman why change occurs. Diamond correctly criticizes NARTH for misusing her work in this way. Maffly continues,

Diamond, who has never met [NARTH president Dean] Byrd, said in an interview that NARTH “cherry picks” findings or references from her work that appear to support their position.

NARTH’s responds as has become typical. They claim they are just interpreting the data differently.

[NARTH founder and past-president, Joe] Nicolosi did not respond to an interview request and Byrd claimed he did not know why Diamond, a fellow U. faculty member, took umbrage with NARTH’s citation of her work.
“NARTH’s view is that people can adapt any way they want and there is freedom of choice,” Byrd says. “If it says ‘fluidity’ it says ‘fluidity.’ How you interpret it is something else.”

The reporter Maffly can be forgiven for his opening lines about NARTH promoting choice given Byrd’s way of discussing the matter. I suspect Byrd means choice of behaviors. Whatever he means by freedom to choose, he is wrong to say there is no guidance from Diamond’s research about how to interpret ‘fluidity.’ A review of her most recent book, Sexual Fluidity, makes clear that some of the women retained their same-sex attraction while discovering opposite-sex attraction. Some women actively fought the change of attraction but resigned themselves to heterosexuality. Her work does not support the statement about change being associated with history or motivation.
UPDATE – 8/31/09: The Salt Lake City Tribune article has been archived and is not available at that link now. Here is a newswire article on the same topic. A UPI story is for some reason archived on this Moldova gateway.
Also, here is an example where NARTH members misused Michael Bailey’s research.