An undercover gay blogger stealthily attended the National Organization for Marriage's annual conference for young people and uncovered the right wing's view on parenting by same-sex couples, gay news websites, and rationalizing the connection between gay people and pedophilia.
Blogger Carlos Maza applied to the It Takes A Family to Raise a Village conference for college-age and post-college young adults, organized by NOM's Ruth Institute. He wrote a full report at Equality Matters, chronicling the convention.
Here are five things that Maza "learned" during his trip to the four-day convention:
1. NOM cultural director Thomas Peters, who touted his work to support Chick-fil-A, gave a lecture on messaging and gay media.
"When you're on a gay website ... you see much more of the worldview that's surrounding their advocacy of this issue," he said. "When you see, for instance, an article about how awful, how horrible Professor Regnerus is with his exploitation and stereotyping of gay people, and then on the side is ad after sponsored ad for gay hookup sites, for pet grooming, and for, I mean, literally -- this is sort of like the worldview of the people who are fighting us very seriously."
2. Robert Gagnon, associate professor of the New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, spoke for an hour on homosexuality being more offensive to God than polygamy. "Since the foundation, obviously, is more important than the superstructure built on it, the conclusion from that is that a homosexual relationship is worse than a polygamist one."
3. One of Gagnon's books claims that accepting homosexuality and gay people into mainstream society gives license to accept pedophiles into society as well.
4. Economist Doug Allen gave several reasons as to why lesbian-headed households are supposedly not stable. "The lesbian households, they tend to be much more likely to marry in the rates, not just in numbers, in numbers and rates, but they're much less stable than the gay households," he said. "And lots of theories about why that is. You know, getting on the same menstrual cycle, getting really attached to your own biological child and not being willing to share the biological child with your female spouse."
5. At the end of the conference, a student from Brigham Young University asked Maza for his thoughts on the lectures. Maza said he felt that many of the arguments were unfair and vitriolic. Maza said that instead of debating him, the female student listened intently, and they ended up engaging in a conversation around marriage and gay rights. "In the empty lobby of a small hotel in San Diego, a conservative Mormon from Utah and a progressive gay activist from D.C. saw eye-to-eye on the overwhelming majority of "pro-family" and "pro-marriage" issues," he wrote. "It was the kind of unholy alliance I never expected to form at an anti-gay conference."
Read the full report at Equality Matters.
