aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, December 07, 2006

CWA, Mary Cheney, Barbie & the transgender menace

Both Amanda and Pam at Pandagon had terrific commentary on Concerned Women for America’s reaction to Mary Cheney’s pregnancy.

Pam’s post links to a Town Hall piece from CWA’s Janice Shaw Crouse and concludes with a note from Mara at the National Center for Transgender Equality:

I saw your diary yesterday about conservative reaction to Mary Cheney’s pregnancy and I think you overlooked a really interesting milestone.

Now that the Concerned Women for America apparently has a woman spokeperson, the whole of the transgender part of the LGBT movement is going to need to recalibrate.  I felt so much joy being accused of “gender confusion” by the men at Concerned Women for America, which was done several time with no apparent irony.

This is really a great advance.  Maybe I won’t be so gender confused now that women speaking for CWA are actually women.

Mara

For a delicious sampling of what Mara’s referring to, let’s remember Barbie the transgender menace. Last January Bob Knight, Director of CWA’s Culture and Family Institute, was shocked to find an “I don’t know” answer option to an “are you a boy or a girl” question on the Barbie doll website.

With “policy analyst” Martha Kleder he parses the acronym LGBT ("and some of them add Q [for questioning]") to explain the “homo-sexual activist agenda” to his listeners. “This transgender movement is very dangerous,” he warns:

MARTHA: Well Bob obviously things could get a lot worse but we wanted to alert our listeners to the fact that the Barbie.com website might not be safe for surfing for young girls…

BOB: ...It’s really steering girls away from the idea of womanhood as predominantly, in terms of Christians, serving the lord, getting married, having kids, you know, building a home. You don’t see any of that with Barbie… Barbie’s suspect to begin with but once they start throwing this transgender question at little girls they’ve really crossed the line.”

More of the gay-friendly Romney

Bay Windows excerpts its Aug. 25, 1994 interview with Mitt Romney:

“I feel that as a society and for me as an individual, it’s incumbent on all of us to respect one another, regardless of our differences and beliefs, our differences in sexual orientation, in race and that America has always been a place, and should be a place, to welcome and tolerate people’s differences.

“I personally feel and one of my core beliefs is that we should accept people of all backgrounds and recognize everyone as a brother and a sister because we are all part of the family of man.” [...]

“I think the gay community needs more support from the Republican Party and I would be a voice in the Republican Party to foster anti-discrimination efforts.”

The bias is sales

The NYTimes looks at research by two University of Chicago economists, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro:

[T]hey showed that the main driver of any slant was the newspaper’s audience, not bias by the newspaper’s owner.

A comparison of circulation data (per capita) to the ratio of Republican to Democratic campaign contributions by ZIP code showed that circulation was strongly related to whether the newspaper matched the readers’ own ideology.

Their measure indicates that The Los Angeles Times, for example, is a liberal paper. Its circulation suffers in Southern California ZIP codes where donations to Republicans are especially high.

The authors calculated the ideal partisan slant for each paper, if all it cared about was getting readers, and they found that it looked almost precisely like the one for the actual newspaper. As Dr. Shapiro put it in an interview, “The data suggest that newspapers are targeting their political slant to their customers’ demand and choosing the amount of slant that will maximize their sales.”

On one hand that sounds a little mercenary. On the other hand, there is certainly good news in the finding. If slant comes from customers, then the views of the owners and the reporters do not matter. We do not need to fear that some partisan billionaire will buy up newspapers and use them for propaganda.

Uh, or that leftist reporters will brainwash our convservative populace. The full paper is available, for five bucks, here.