You might remember Lisa Diamond from a number of places — maybe your Mom bought you Sexual Fluidity in an attempt to express passive acceptance of your lifestyle with a nod to the possibility that you might flow back on over to hetero-ville (this actually happened to somebody I know, could be an isolated incident) or maybe you remember seeing her in The Real L Word, in which she met with Nikki Weiss and Jill Goldstein about the TV series the now-married couple optioned from Diamond’s book.
Or maybe — and this is the most likely position of all — you have no fucking idea who she is. Well, neither does The Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the United States Representatives, apparently, but that didn’t stop them from extracting quotes from her work to support their unsupportable thesis!
As you may recall, Paul Clement, Legal Eagle of the Universe, left his law firm in order to defend DOMA, as requested by John Boehner, who is an idiot. Their whipsmart crack-team of legal experts are presently hard at work ensuring 81-year-old widow Edie Windsor’s relationship with her deceased partner is not recognized by the federal government. As Rachel covered for you when their spectacular document was revealed, it truly is an anti-gay masterpiece.
Misrepresenting research — whether that means presenting faulty/biased research as fact  or presenting actual research with inaccurate context — is essentially all the anti-gays can do in these cases because, as aforementioned, their case is fundamentally wrong. DOMA is based on discrimination against gay people, plain and simple. Discrimination is a difficult thing to defend in court, so instead they make shit up, mostly about babies, indoctrinating children and being born gay.
Yesterday, Lisa Diamond filed an affadavit to complain that her work was being distorted. Diamond, an associate professor of developmental psychology at the University of Utah, says her areas of specialty “include the nature and development of affectional bonds and the nature and development of same-sex sexuality.” She also wrote Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men For Women. This is what Diamond lays out in her affidavit:
BLAG misconstrues and distorts my research findings, which do not support the propositions for which BLAG cites them. Specifically…BLAG quotes the following statement from one of my papers: “…there is currently no scientific or popular consensus on the exact constellation of experiences that definitively ‘qualify’ an individual as lesbian, gay or bisexual” – as support for their claim that sexual orientation is not immutable. This is incorrect. My quoted statement concerns the scientific and popular debates over the defining characteristics of LGBT individuals and it says nothing whatsoever about the immutability of sexual orientation itself. Hence, BLAG has incorrectly characterized my research.
BLAG goes on to state on page 11 that “according to multiple sources, a high number of persons who experience sexual attraction to members of the same sex early in their adult lives later cease to experience such attraction” and in support of this claim they provide the following quote from one of my articles: “50% [of respondents] had changed their identity label more than once since first relinquishing their heterosexual identity.” The quotes statement refers to sexual identity labels (i.e., how individuals describe and interpret their sexuality), and not to sexual orientation. Neither this article nor any of my other published work supports BLAG’s claim that “a high number of persons who experience sexual attracton to members of the same sex early in their adult lives later cease to experience such attraction.” Hence they have completely misinterpreted my research.
Alvin McEwan at Pam’s House Blend points out that this is far from the only problem in the BLAG’s documents — just like the bogus science from the the Prop 8 case.
McEwan focuses on the “Plantiff Mistates the Science on Same-Sex Parenting” section,which he categorizes as “a huge mess.” The work of George W. Dent is used to make the case that same-sex parenting is inferior to heterosexual parenting, but Dent backs up his thesis with completely fabricated statements as well as citations of discredited researcch and researchers. This includes the work of George Rekers, the ex-gay movement icon recently caught taking a European trip with a rentboy. Rekers has also been in the news lately for his role in the eventual suicide of one of his patients, who entered treatment for homosexuality at the age of four, and who at no point experienced successful conversion to a straight man.
Some of Geroge W. Dent’s crazy shit includes:
Every child with homosexual guardians has lost at least one biological parent. Loss of a parent is universally regarded as a great misfortune. If the child has one biological parent, the other adult is a step-parent. In fables step-parents are typically hostile to their step-children.
 At this point I want to laugh at the ridiculousness of it but it’s just not funny anymore! It’s exhausting. I know I’ve only been alive for 29 years but i wish people could just stop making shit up. The bad research and inept researchers brought to testify in the Prop 8 trial were one thing; anyone who has ever served on a jury can agree that not everyone speaking before the judge is going to be a blue-ribbon witness. This, however, is a case being brought by the actual government of our actual country, and which John Boehner wants the Justice department to pay for. In short, this isn’t just embarrassingly bad research being presented with the brazen hope that no one will actually look at it; this is your federal tax dollars at work! And also Lisa Diamond’s — that lady is well within her rights to complain.
