This past Wednesday, Congress held an unprecedented hearing about the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Blogs and news serviced covered this quite well, and there are many points that hopefully continue the conversation in more mainstream coverage. My (and probably many others’) favorite part was Sen. Al Franken (D-WI) calling out the distortion of a federal Health and Human Services study. The witness, CitizenLink’s (a Focus on the Family affiliate) Tom Minnery, tried to claim that a nuclear family was only a married man and woman. Watch Sen. Franken call into question not just this claim, but the entire testimony over these lies.

(Video courtesy Think Progress)

Family Research Council (FRC) even supported Minnery by claiming that DOMA, the law on trial, prevented the HHS study from even recognizing married same-sex couples, let alone as a nuclear family. This is all part of the same rhetoric game they play, and outright lies are why they are considered a SPLC-certified anti-gay hate group.

To add insult to injury, the lead author of said study, Debra L. Blackwell, Ph.D., publicly supported Sen. Franken by stating that the study did not exclude gay, married couples from the definition of a nuclear family. The study simply showed that children generally fare better when their biological or adoptive parents are married, not their “mother and father.” Word choice was intentional in this study.

Many news services followed up on many aspects of the hearing, but I didn’t read much after the hearing outside of a live blog on the Prop 8 Trial Tracker site by the Courage Campaign. It wasn’t until I received the daily email from the “news” service of the American Family Association, One News Now. (scare quotes to be explained) They had a link to an article on their page that claimed to be a reposted article from the Associated Press. No author was listed, but this is usual for most AP articles, even on reputable news wires. Still, the first sentence had a glaring edit that couldn’t have come from the AP: the word marriage was in scare quotes.

I decided to look up the same article on another source and compare the two word for word to see what other edits I could find. It turns out, AFA added an entire section that was not included on any other AP article online. I immediately summed up my findings and sent them off to Jeremy Hooper at the blog Good As You. He has done some fantastic research into many of these groups and individuals. If you really want to know more about how their messages of “love” are filled with lies, I recommend following his blog and looking back through his past posts. Jeremy did some additional work and took some screenshots for his post on this matter. Check out the massive addition to the original article that credits no other author except the AP:

h/t Good As You

Jeremy continued with a little more follow-up:

You won’t find the Austin Nimocks section in anyone else’s report. If you search Google News, you will find this AP story in literally hundreds of media outlets. But if you insert the word “Nimocks” into the search, exactly one result comes up:

201107220826
[Google News]

But it’s the “liberal” media that’s biased? Mmm hmmm, right, AFA.

It’s lies like these that misinform Americans and the world (see Uganda and Ghana for example) about gay people, and it affects me directly. They are trying to convince others that my family is not a real family, and can be brushed off easily with a pair of quotes. The above article was seen by their readers, and many of them probably wouldn’t even bother to see if the article was misleading in any way. I try to not let it affect me, but I remind myself that I need to be ready to keep my cool for the day when someone dares to call into question my family or parenting to my face.

Until then, I am grateful for people like Sen. Franken who bring attention to the lies and misdirections that these hate groups bring with a facade of love. Plus, he has never shied away from calling out liars (and naming them as such), like his 2003 book, Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them).

Many thanks to Jeremy Hooper for originally posting this story and for all his hard work to reveal and expose the truth. Kind of like a gay Fox Mulder.