C-38: The Search for Marriage

Stephanie sent me an e-mail about a "documentary" about Bill C-38 that has recently been posted on YouTube. (It's 77 odd minutes long, so it's in about 25 pieces or so since YouTube doesn't like long clips)

C38: The Search for Marriage is being bandied around the right wing-o-sphere as if it is some kind of wonderful "scholarly" work about SGM.

Stephanie pointed out several sections of the movie that were particularly suspicious:

However, by part 6 or 7 I started noticing that
the pro voices were becoming more rare. The whole segment on children
in marriage didn't present a single voice supportive of same sex
parenting. They even brought in, unrefuted, the "gays are pedophiles"
BS and when one "academic" quotes a statistic about it, they flash
Narth.com on the screen as the source.

Part 10 - "Personal Stories of Gays and Lesbians" has all the
interviewees talking about how a bad or missing relationship with a
parent is what made them gay. It turns out that every single one of
them is ex-gay except one, as we find out at the end of the segment,
who is an ex-ex-gay.

I watched a random sampling of sections myself and I agree with Stephanie's assessment that this "documentary" degrades into a recycling of the usual bogus talking points about the subject of gay marriage, and by implication it tends to devolve into a lot of the standard misconceptions about human sexuality that are behind the right wingnut opposition to SGM.

A quick bit of digging about with Google was moderately fruitful in determining some of the who and what is behind this movie. According to Lifesite, it was created by brothers Eric and Jerome Spoethe. I haven't found a lot about these two other than what's on the Spoeth.com website.

However, in it's glowing praise of the documentary, we find Lifesite gushing about the following:

“Experts” Interviewed in C-38:
- Rev. Charles Bidwell, professor of marriage and sexuality
- Murray Billet, director of Gay and Lesbian Awareness (GALA)
- Bishop Thomas Collins, Edmonton
- Fr. John Gallagher, author/historian
- Bishop Fred Henry, Calgary
- Julie Lloyd, human rights lawyer
- David Kilgour, former Liberal MP
- Dr. Ted Morton, MLA, co-author of Divorcing Marriage
- Councillor Michael Phair, co-founder of the AIDS Network of Edmonton
- Dr. Janet Smith, author of Humanae Vitae - a generation later
- Dr. Margaret Somerville, ethicist

Superficially, this might even seem to be a modestly balanced list of "authorities", until you start to think about this a bit. Is there a single person on this list that is a mental health professional? No. By far the vast majority are either religious "experts" or politicians with a known agenda. The only "authority" that they talk to that is "modestly" credible in my view is Dr. Margaret Somerville, who is quoted on the Movie's blog in this posting.

Of course, she has bought into the whole, highly questionable, idea that "gay couples can't raise families" and that such arrangements are "damaging to the children" talking point that the religious right have been bandying about for years. The short answer from the mental health profession is that the assertion is nonsense.

I might be more willing to accept some of the "objections" raised in the documentary - if they could actually back them up with credible science. (and no, quoting Dr. Paul Cameron is not my idea of "credible" research!

With Stephen Harper planning to put a motion forward to "reopen" the discussion in Parliament in the next day or so, it's worth noting that the SSM opponents are still blathering on about the same old talking points, which are for the most part outright falsehoods.