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Gay Drug Use Study: Lesbian And Gay Foundation Responds To Our Criticism

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Yesterday, The New Civil Rights Movement published our report and initial analysis of a UK study on rates of drug abuse among the UK LGBT population. The study, “Part of the Picture: Lesbian, gay and bisexual people’s alcohol and drug use in England (2009-2011),” was actually funded by an LGBT charity, The Lesbian & Gay Foundation, and was presented in the British and U.S. media as finding that gay people are seven times more likely to use illegal drugs.

The New Civil Rights Movement continues to strongly oppose the media’s characterization of the study, and continues to characterize the study’s methodology as flawed, as we reported yesterday:

One of several problems with the study seems obvious: those who took the survey were attendees at gay pride parades — hardly a representative sample of LGBT people. Other issues include age samples, the group the study used as a base, and that the study is one that uses self-reporting for its results. is the study flawed? Most likely yes, but there may still be important takeaways. Can we call it good science? Sociologists will need to weigh in, but given the easily-spotted flaws, it seems doubtful.

We concluded:

There is little question that LGBT people are subject to more harassment and hate than any other segment of the population, and it’s not surprising to learn that members of socially and politically oppressed populations would look for relief, possibly in illegal substances, especially when LGBT social life historically revolved around bars, although that has changed for many as advances in equality make their way into cultures.

Time will tell how vlid this particular study is. Studies like these, if they are valid, are important because they expose the hidden needs of minority populations, but it is irresponsible for studies like these to be released without context and explanation, allowing those on the Right to use them as “evidence” of poor moral character, especially when those on the Right created the very scenarios that strongly contribute to this behavior.

In researching the study for yesterday’s article, we contacted the Lesbian & Gay Foundation, and received the following response, from both the Lesbian & Gay Foundation and the University of Central Lancashire, who jointly conducted the study. We offered to publish their response, which you can read, in full and unedited, below, followed by our comments:

 

Thank you for taking the time to read and report on our study in to drug and alcohol use amongst lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people in England. The report is certainly generating a good deal debate about these issues, something we feel is long overdue and we have now had the opportunity to read a range of responses to the report. We welcome your contribution to the debate but would like to take the opportunity to point out a number of inaccuracies in your article

You criticise the findings on the basis that ‘those who took the survey were attendees at gay pride events’. This is a partial presentation of the facts based on a misreading of the report.  While most (81%) of the respondents were surveyed in this way, the remainder responded to the survey either by post or on-line questionnaire.  This is important, because your article misses the steps we have taken to test the effect that this may have had on the results. In 2012 we conducted a separate analysis of the POTP data on drug use by recruitment method (Pride events, postal questionnaire and online questionnaire). This analysis suggests that the high rate of reported last month drug taking amongst the sample as a whole cannot be explained simply by the large number of respondents recruited via Pride events. Despite demographic differences between the sample sub-sets (e.g. that postal respondent were older), respondents recruited at Pride events were no more likely to have taken any drug in the last month than any other group of respondents and for some substances they were the least likely. These data are reported on page 19 of the main report. From this we conclude that the high rate of reported last month drug taking amongst the sample as a whole could not be explained by the large numbers of people who were surveyed at Pride events.

You also criticise the study on basis of the age profile of the respondents, who you rightly point out are younger in our sample than in the population as a whole.  You use one of our tables to support your point about this. In the  report we emphasise clearly that  caution should be taken in relation to the comparisons between our findings on last month drug use and the figures reported for the general population by other studies, most notably the British Crime Survey.  We state very clearly that ‘making comparisons between the drug use reported by the POTP respondents and that reported by the general population is not straightforward because the POTP sample is younger by comparison’.  For this reason we also compare drug use by younger LGB people aged 16-24 for that reported by the British Crime Survey for the same age group, and conclude that within this age group last month drug taking by LGB people is just over two and half times more prevalent.

We also take great care to highlight the limitations of our study. We point out that we used a range of convenience sampling methods; that our sample is younger than that of the population as a whole; that our sample is younger than of the population used in the British Crime Survey; that most respondents were recruited at Pride events; that we had a low proportion of Black and minority ethnic respondents; and that the sample cannot be said to be representative of the LGB population as a whole.  However, these sampling and methodological problems are not unique to our study.  They are common to most studies in to drug and alcohol use and other risk behaviours amongst LGB groups as well as to many studies with so called ‘hard to reach populations’.

For us, despite the acknowledged limitations of the sampling methods, the importance of the studies main findings remain intact. LGB people are more likely to report last month drug use than the general population.  Whether the figure is seven times more likely (using the whole sample comparison from our study with the whole sample British Crime Survey figures), two and a half times more likely (using the figures for young people aged 16-24 in our study and figures for the same age group in the British Crime Survey), or three times more likely (using the 2009/10 and 2010/11 extension to the British Crime Survey which compares drug use in the last year) the fact remains that these differences are stark.  It is also noteworthy that drug use within our sample did not appear to diminish significantly with age until respondents were well in to their 40’s which again is in contrast with available data for the population as a whole.

Our study is also the first to use validated measures of dependency from DSM IV and ICD 10 (something you did not address in your piece).This suggests that more than 20% of the sample reported three or more signs of dependence. This is evidence that people are engaged in patterns of drug and alcohol use which lead to problems.

The report’s main findings should be a wake-up call for people working with the LGB community and for policy makers commissioning services at a local and national level. These concerns, raised in the report, are supported and reflected in the comments of David Stuart and Katy Richardson whose views you rely upon for support in your own article. We look forward to continuing and informed debate and discussion on these issues.

* * *

One final thought: Sociologists and other social scientists often do great work and more studies need to be done to help examine the LGBT community, whose needs, due to anti-gay laws and practices, as well as homophobia, are currently different than the overall communities in which we live.

However, as the world learned with the flawed “studies” of people like Paul Cameron, a discredited social scientist whose “work,” decades later, is still the basis of anti-gay hate from organizations like the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, and now, the flawed “work” of Mark Regnerus, which as recently as today appeared in the anti-gay attack by New Jersey’s Archbishop John Myers, once a study that portrays the LGBT community in a negative or wanting light is published, despite flawed methodology or flawed conclusions, those studies will live for decades as tools of our opponents, which is why The New Civil Rights Movement was quick, and appropriately so, to criticize this study, despite the good intentions behind it.

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Election Denialism Embraced by ‘Large Proportion’ of Trump’s Followers: Report

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May 2, 2024

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Since at least 2012 Donald Trump has been engaging in election denialism. Now, a tenet of the Republican Party, the refusal to accept official election results they don’t like is ingrained in a large number of his followers.

“I think that the powers that be on the Democratic side have figured out a way to circumvent democracy,” Darlene Anastas, 69, of Middleborough, Massachusetts, told NBC News. The network “spoke to more than 50 Trump supporters, most of whom said they don’t believe Biden can win legitimately in November.”

“Poll after poll,” NBC also reported, “has found that a large proportion of the Republican electorate believes the only reasons Joe Biden is president are voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks, buying into former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.”

NBC spoke with 72-year old George Crosby, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who said, Democrats “cheat like crazy” (video below).

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“I think they cheated before, and I think they’re going to try to do it again, because they’re a bunch of communists,” Fitzwilliam added.

38-year old James Russon of Eagle Mountain, Utah told NBC, “There’s no way Biden could legally … win without unfair means.”

“He added that the only way Biden could prevail would be through ‘cheating’ or ‘a lot of deceased people voting.'”

62-year old Randall Minicola of Las Vegas said it would be “impossible” for Biden to win. “I don’t think he’s got a following. I mean, you look who’s behind him — the only thing he’s got is ghosts behind him. That’s what I believe. Where’s the supporters then? Are they in the basement with him? I don’t think so.”

NBC News did not report on where these particular GOP voters got their information or how they came to believe these claims, but it did note the “possibility of another election in which large numbers of Republicans refuse to accept a Biden victory has also been stoked by influential conservatives.”

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Trump’s election denialism is so strong that in 2020 CNN published “A list of the times Trump has said he won’t accept the election results or leave office if he loses.”

Election denialism continues to be spread throughout the right.

“A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in March, NBC noted. Carlson, a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has spoken very positively about Russia and its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Numerous studies and fact checks have found mail-in voting to be safe and secure, with little opportunity for fraud, yet just last week Carlson, like Trump, was claiming massive election fraud. Undermining Americans’ faith in democracy was a main goal of Russian President Putin’s 2016 attack on the U.S. elections, according to a 2017 report issued by a group of U.S. Intelligence agencies.

But just last week Carlson claimed, “About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll.”

A portion of NBC’s report from Thursday also appears in this January 2024 NBC News video.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won

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8 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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Falsely claiming he won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump is now refusing to commit to accepting the 2024 results for the Badger State this November.

In an interview with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Trump appeared to dance around the issue, declaring he would only accept the official results “if everything’s honest.”

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the paper’s Alison Dirr and Molly Beck in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.

The Journal Sentinel reports Trump “offered similar conditions when asked the same question by news outlets in 2016 and 2020.”

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“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” he said.

In that interview Trump once again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020, a state President Joe Biden actually won by more than 20,000 votes.

“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the newspaper. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”

Trump’s “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, along with his support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been central to his 2024 campaign.

“Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the last presidential election in Wisconsin and his new comments placing conditions on when he would accept the results of the next election come as Republicans are seeking to persuade GOP voters to restore their trust in the state’s system of elections and embrace absentee voting,” the Journal Sentinel reported. “There’s no evidence to support that Wisconsin’s election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.”

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In October of 2016, weeks before Election Day, during the final presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would make the commitment “that you will absolutely accept the results of this election?”

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time.”

He then went on to sow doubt about the credibility of the election.

Trump’s refusal to accept election results stretches back more than a decade, even before he ran for president.

After he refused to accept his loss in 2020, ABC News reported “Trump has longstanding history of calling elections ‘rigged’ if he doesn’t like the results.”

“On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a ‘total sham’ and a ‘travesty,’ while also making the claim that the United States is ‘not a democracy’ after Obama secured his victory.

“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” Trump wrote on Twitter

One month later, in December of 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Ironically, four years later he became president after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but winning the Electoral College.

Watch the video above or at this link.

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‘No Place for Antisemitism’: Biden Denounces Violent Campus Protests, Hate Speech and Racism

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11 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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President Joe Biden made rare, unscheduled remarks from the White House Thursday morning, denouncing the recent violent protests on college campuses, and telling Americans there is “no place” for antisemitism anywhere across the nation. He also denounced “hate speech” and “racism,” while declaring his support for the right to peacefully protest.

“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” President Biden declared. “There is no place for hate speech, or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”

“Violent protest is not protected,” Biden said strongly. “Peaceful protest is.”

Stressing “the right to free speech,” and the people’s right “to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard,” President Biden also declared the importance of “the rule of law.”

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“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” the President also said, praising the ideal of peaceful protests, which he said are in the “best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”

“But,” he added, “neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society and order must prevail.”

America is a “big, diverse, free thinking and freedom-loving nation,” Biden said, denouncing those “who rush in to score political points.”

“This isn’t a moment for politics, it’s a moment for clarity.”

“It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest,” he warned. “Threatening people, intimidating people. instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to democracy but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish a semester and their college education.”

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“Look. It’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

“I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions in America. We respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn’t mean anything goes. It needs to be done without violence. Without destruction, without hate, and within the law. And I’ll make no mistake. As President, I will always defend free speech. And I will always be just as strong standing up for the rule of law. That’s my responsibility to you the American people. My obligation to the Constitution.”

The President also responded to reporters’ questions, including saying he saw no need to call up the National Guard.

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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