#2262: Sharon Slater

Family Watch International (FWI) is a hate organization that lobbies the United Nations for pro-life and anti-gay causes, including the imprisonment of gay people around the world. Sharon Slater, its president, is apparently opposed to the death penalty for gay people, but she is fine with imprisonment. The FWI for instance arranges an annual, invitation-only global policy forum for UN delegates to promote their policy objectives, where Slater has particularly emphasized ex-gay messages, including “the personal testimony of a patient who is successfully reorienting from homosexuality to heterosexuality” and a speech from an alleged expert Slater conspicuously refused to name. According to FWI literature, “so-called ‘homosexual rights’ are driving much of the current worldwide assault on marriage, the family and family related issues.” There is a good, if old, portrait of Slater, the FWI, and their efforts here.

Like many anti-gay groups, Slater and the FWI focus much of their attention on Africa. After all, their ideas for how to treat gay people probably won’t fly in the US anymore (not that they’ve entirely stopped trying), but fanatic bigots still have some clout in certain African nations that makes it possible to turn their bigotry into policy; by claiming that the West is imposing its corrupt, “anti-family” values on the rest of the world, and that the “developing world” is the last holdout against the “homosexual agenda” (Slater is no stranger to lying, of course), these groups often do find favor with people who otherwise find themselves struggling under the weight of a global economy designed to exploit and indebt. 

And as long as gay people get to suffer, these organizations – FWI included – are not above creating alliances e.g. with Islamist extremists, for instance in developing a UN “Declaration on the Rights of Children and Their Families”, which is basically an anti-marriage-equality statement: It calls upon the UN to recognize a “family with a married mother and father” as the preferred family organization, and “call upon States Parties and the United Nations system to discourage sexual relations and childbearing outside of the marital bond”. The effort was at least in part set in motion by Slater’s and the FWI’s “Protect the Family” petition, which is not really about protecting families but attacking families organized in ways different from the one Slater fancies (i.e. those led by grandparents, single parents, same-sex parents, and countless other configurations of people caring for people – Slater is, in fact, explicit about this goal – family values™ are not about family values). Slater is also a frequent participant and keynote speaker at the World Congress of Families, which is not about families either.

FWI has been deeply involved in promoting abstinence-and fidelity-only initiatives in Uganda, and has praised Nigeria – where same-sex couples can face up to 14 years in prison or stoning at the hands of Sharia courts – as “a strong role model” for other regional governments “on how to hold on to their family values despite intense international pressure.”

As mentioned, Slater and the FWI are also opposed to sex education: “It’s destructive. It’s pornographic. It’s designed to change all the sexual and gender norms of society by sexualizing children everywhere. It’s probably one of the most insidious attacks on the health and innocence of children ever imagined,” says Slater. In a radio interview, she also said that sex education is a plot by Planned Parenthood to turn your kids into sexual deviants so they can make more money on condoms, STD tests and abortions. There is, Slater asserted, “an intentional, targeted effort to get to your children and change the way they think about sexuality, to encourage them to engage in sexual activity, whether it be heterosexual or homosexual or self-stimulation, because if they can recruit children into this worldview and this sexual ideology, then they’ll have the future, if they can train up the next generation in all these radical ideas. And that’s what they’re after. In fact, even Hitler said, ‘He who owns the minds of the children owns the future.’” Because whenever organizations or people disagree with you, it is always because they are in a greed-motivated nefarious conspiracy against you, the US and Jesus.

Diagnosis: Deranged bigot. But Slater and her organization are not mere fringe lunatics with Internet access – their power and influence is frighteningly real, if mostly realized abroad: Slater is genuinely knowledgeable of the workings of the UN, and possesses enough political skills to exploit that knowledge; few loons covered in our Encyclopedia rival Slater and her organization for harm and suffering caused.

#2261: Jane Skrovota

Jane Skrovota is hardly a big name in bigotry; indeed, she is just a Lincoln, Nebraska local lady whose only claim to notability is a graphic diatribe she delivered during a public hearing before the Lincoln city council in 2012 on a proposed ordinance to ban discrimination against gays and transgender citizens in employment, housing and public accommodations. That rant is, however, deliriously insane. You can hear it in full here. Some choice quotes:

“Winter Wipe Out TV Show have broken bones and man slaughter every minute. Winter wipeout show is produced in Holland by gay bi’s and orgiers. Why do gays like to see people perishing?”

“P.E.N.I.S. goes into the anus to rupture intestines, the more a man does this more likely he will be a fatality or a homicider. Getting pleasure while the other man passes away reverberates another homicide later.” 

“UNESCO United Nations has gender and bioethics conferences combined. Only gays go to gender studies. Gays are the bio ethic genociders in hospitals Ah, children can be eliminated the FEDS stated in this December 11th article ah the Lincoln General Star page six. Gays should not be employed in hospitals or any health occupation.” 

“Lesbians and Gays rarely live past 40 years old because it is common for the partner to do away with them or they self inflict.”

“Have No Gays in Education. A high percentage of gay men in school grounds molest boys partly because they do not have AIDs yet! Be on the side of the innocent boy who gets Fs and Ds a year after being molested.”

“To avoid going gay like Hillary Clinton did, college students need single rooms and single-gendered dorms. Going lesbian is not normal. A college woman is seduced with illegal Rohypnol to go gay, otherwise they think it’s abhorrent.”

“AIDS is a Candida fungus disease. Roman senators went to Roman baths to be promiscuous gays, bis, and orgiers, and then went to The Colosseum to watch Christians get mauled and perish. Do gays become sadistic? Yes. They cuss after coupling, don’t like the land they lay on, and 80% of those that did treason by the year 2000 were gays. Don’t employ gays in military, education, health, or psychology. They are the genociders, molesters, treasoners, deranged.” 

“Jesus was kissed by Judas, a homo, who tried to sabotage Jesus’ kind ideas. Do you choose Jesus, a celibate, or Judas, a homo? You have to choose.”

Don’t worry, there is plenty more where those quotes came from.

Diagnosis: So no, not an influential public figure by any stretch of the imagination, but we just had to include her all the same.

#2260: Mark Sircus

Marc Sircus is a near-legendary crank and promoter of cancer woo, perhaps most familiar for his Transdermal Magnesium Therapy, which is not something you should get involved with under any circumstances. Sircus, like many quacks, are fond of adding meaningless alphabet soups to his name, and usually titles himself with “O.M.D” (“oriental medicine doctor”, which does emphatically not have anything to do with doctor or medicine, but does convey a hint of racism), as well as “Ac.” (probably “acupuncturist”) and “DM (P)”, which is new to us but may have something to do with pastoral medicine. None of the “credentials” are worth the price of the paper on which they are printed, if they are printed anywhere at all, but they are apparently good for marketing purposes. We encourage people to ponder why Sircus feels the need to add meaningless letters to his name in his promotion materials given that readers are unlikely to have the faintest clue what they are supposed to be short for, and Sircus presumably knows that they don’t. 

Sircus is so into cancer woo that he is even associated with the delusional rantings of Tullio Simoncini (both are apparently sources trusted by people like Joe Mercola). According to Sircus, “[c]ancer is, fundamentally, a relatively simple oxygen deficiency disease and the use of bicarbonate increases oxygen carrying and reaching capacity.” Or in other words: “I don’t have the faintest clue about physiology, but I am merrily making up nonsense” (explanation here if you need it). The idea that sodium bicarbonate is an efficacious treatment for cancer must count as one of the most idiotic (and vile) disciplines of cancer woo out there – though the competition is fierce – relying as it does on blatantly false, conspiracy-theory driven delusions about what cancer actually is. According to Sircus, however, and his book Winning the War on Cancer, “[s]odium bicarbonate happens to be one of our most useful medicines because bicarbonate physiology is fundamental to life and health.” This is not how “because” works (and that is not the only problem with the claim). Sircus has observed, though, that many chemotherapy treatments include sodium bicarbonate, and asks whether it could be that the results one sees when using chemo and sodium bicarbonate is the result of the latter rather than the former, and promptly concludes that it is. “There are no studies separating the effects of bicarbonate from the toxic chemotherapy agents, nor will there ever be,” claims Sircus, suggesting a conspiracy. In reality, of course –Sircus isn’t even close to reality – sodium bicarbonate has been provided as part of a chemotherapy regimens not to treat the tumor but to protect the kidneys, given that certain chemotherapy regimens cause massive tumor cell lysis, though it is less commonly added these days since questions have been raised over whether it is actually beneficial. (Moreover, a controlled trial where one group of cancer patients only gets sodium bicarbonate without chemo is not very likely to pass ethical review boards, for obvious reasons.) Bah, details: Sircus has a panacea and a conspiracy theory to underpin the claims on its behalf; details are irrelevant. Instead, Sircus goes on to claim that baking soda can cure H1N1, too.

Sircus is the leader of something called the International Medical Veritas Association (remember Badger’s Law!), which is apparently different from the infamous HIV/AIDS-denialist, antivaccine Medical Veritas International organization (Badger’s Law predicts such confusing similarities among these kinds of organizations), and also writes the IMVA blog. A telling entry on the blog is his “Cancer Still a Mystery to Medical Science”, discussed here. You can already guess the gambit he tries to use, can’t you? Yes, there is still a lot of stuff scientists don’t know about cancer – that’s why they do research – and no, that doesn’t mean that you get to fill the gaps with whatever unsupported bullshit you fancy. In fact, Sircus goes one step further: he is claiming that physicians are deliberately making money by “complicating” the subject of cancer. To Sircus and the quacks, cancer isn’t “complicated;” the complexity of cancer is just part of a conspiracy, and/or the myopia of scientists blinded by the “reigning paradigm” that cancer has something to do with cells or DNA (the “cherished chosen belief system” of scientists and physicians who defend it with “fanatical fervor”); according to Sircus, that is “just […] a theory”. The rest of the post is a long list of familiar cancer quackery, including vitamin C quackery, where Sircus cites a recent study published in Cancer Research to support his case – or rather, he doesn’t cite the study, but a news story about the study that completely misrepresents its findings, and then ignorantly proclaims that “[o]ncologists never made it to first grade as far as knowledge of nutrition and its role in health and disease.” It’s hard to decide whether to laugh or to cry. 

So, what’s really the cause of cancer? Well, I think it’s worth quoting him at some length: “The germ theory of cancer is quite legitimate though medical authorities continue to crucify Dr. Tullio Simoncini for his focus on fungus and yeast as a central part of the cancer paradigm. Long before Simoncini walked the earth we have had research connecting fungus to cancer. Fungus is a microbe, and many scientists believe viruses, fungi and bacteria are all different stages of the microbe life cycle. Neither Dr. Dannenberg nor Dr. Simoncini is a medical heretic but many subjects in our contemporary civilization are just too taboo.” One would have liked to know a bit more about the “many” scientists who don’t know the difference between fungi, viruses and bacteria (some suggestions as to where Sircus picked up the idea here), though even that claim isn’t nearly as ridiculous as the idea that Simoncini is anything resembling a legitimate scientist, however. 

Sircus is, of course, also an anti-vaccine activist, advocating (in his post “String the Bastards Up”) killing scientists at the CDC for crimes existing only in his feverish imagination: “I think these people should be lined up against a wall. Actually there is no punishment that could possibly compensate for the suffering of autism and the tragedy of vaccine deaths” and “I am calling for the conviction and the worst possible punishment under the law for certain people in government who are in the medical field.” It’s unlikely that explaining to him that vaccines demonstrably do not cause autism would help much. This is what might happen if you are unable to distinguish reasonings from violent, paranoid fever dreams. And instead of executing them, “we are letting doctors in white coats inject poisonous heavy metals into babies and paying them well for it,” laments Sircus. As telling as his baseless, conspiracy-driven hatemongering against those who are actually helping people, is the fact that no vitriol is directed against his fellow bicarbonate sodium-quacks, who are demonstrably killing people, and being paid for it, by injecting people in desperate situations with what is, in effect, poison.

Part of it all is, of course, motivated by Sircus’s hatred for real medical doctors, in particular oncologists: “Oncologists certainly don’t cure cancer since it’s illegal to even speak about curing cancer and since most of their patients die no matter what the doctors say or do.” None of those claims are remotely true of course. It is, however, true that real doctors tend to reject most of the nonsense Sircus promotes, which makes it hard for people like Sircus not to ascribe them malicious intentions. As for his own views, we are still waiting for his magnum opus, the (ostensibly) 3000-page Conquering cancer, which supposedly sums up Sircus’s various views on the topic (one recent(?) addition being electrochemical cancer quackery, discussed here), as well as his fundamental misunderstandings and lack of understanding of basic biology, physiology or medicine. 

Another one of his inventions is “natural allopathic medicine”, which according to him and his e-book is a “new therapeutic principle that revolutionizes both allopathic and naturopathic medicine offering a radical shift in medical thought and practice” that focuses on “pH management, cell voltage, magnesium and iodine medicine, cannabinoid medicine, carbon dioxide medicine, re-mineralization of the body, increasing oxygen transport and oxygenation of the tissues, opening up of blood vessels, saturation and healing of cells with concentrated nutrition via superfoods, breathing retraining, emotional transformation processing, detoxification and removal of heavy metals and radioactive particles.” Apparently you can use it to treat Ebola: “Instead of using toxic pharmaceuticals that diminish the immune system by further driving down nutritional status we use we treat and cure through the fulfillment of nutritional law.” It’s hard not to suspect that his success criterion is “no one complained”. Evidence? “Just ask an emergency-room or intensive-care-ward doctor right after he has injected magnesium chloride or sodium bicarbonate to save someone’s life.” I think we can safely say that emergency room doctors are not using magnesium chloride or sodium bicarbonate in emergency situations for their nutritional value. He doesn’t offer any other evidence for any of his claims, apart from some cherry picking and misrepresentations of some papers thrown together in a speculative jumble.

Diagnosis: When you, regarding a topic you know nothing about, disagree with everyone who knows anything about it, you should at least stop to consider the possibility that you are wrong before you conclude that everyone else is in a nefarious conspiracy against you. But that’s what people like Sircus, who have staked their careers on the second of those options, need you not to do. It does seem, however, that Sircus is a true believer rather than an outright fraud, though it’s an interesting question whether there really is a legitimate distinction to draw when you encounter characters like Mark Sircus.

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence

#2259: Matt Singleton et al.

Matt Singleton is a Baptist minister in Louisville who also runs an Internet talk-radio program. A staunch supporter of the nearby Ark Park, Singleton is a fierce critic of evolution, calling teachings on evolution a lie that have led to drug abuse, suicide and other social afflictions. His criticisms have, not the least, been directed at Kentucky’s academic standards for public schools, which, as they should, include evolution: “Outsiders are telling public school families that we must follow the rich man’s elitist religion [no less!] of evolution, that we no longer have what the Kentucky constitution says is the right to worship almighty God,” Singleton said. “Instead, this fascist method teaches that our children are the property of the state” – relatively silly though possibly effective rhetorical gambit showing that someone is completely out of touch with anything resembling reality, of course.

Singleton made the comments when the Kentucky science standards were up for review in 2013. He was not the only one. Parent Valerie O’Rear, for instance, said the standards promoted an “atheistic world view” and a political agenda that pushes government control. Dena Stewart-Gore, meanwhile, suggested that the standards would marginalize students with religious beliefs, leading to ridicule and physiological harm in the classroom, and create difficulties for students with learning disabilities: “The way socialism works is it takes anybody that doesn’t fit the mold and discards them,” she said, adding that “we are even talking genocide and murder here, folks.” This would be an unusual definition of “socialism” outside of America.

Diagnosis: No, there is probably nothing you can do. It’s hopeless. 

#2258: Stephen Sinatra

Though he is, indeed, a cardiologist, Stephen T. Sinatra is better known as one of the most prominent and comprehensively lunatic woo-meisters, or “integrative medicine” practitioners, working in the US at present. In addition to being a cardiologist, Sinatra is a “certified bioenergetic psychotherapist”; we can probably safely assume that the certification is worth about as much as the bioenergetic psychotherapy it certifies. He also the proud owner of certifications from the Massachusetts Society for Bioenergetic Analysis, the Certification Board for Nutrition Specialists and the American Board of Anti-Aging Medicine, a discipline that is emphatically not recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties or the American Medical Association. All the certifications mentioned are of the kind that conveys less credibility on any practitioner bothering to obtain them. Sinatra is furthermore the author of the monthly newsletter Heart, Health & Nutrition and founder of Heart MD Institute, and proprietor of the “Healing the Heart” workshop, the psychospiritual component of a “healing” program where patients would, among other things, request guidance from “spiritual powers”. Sinatra is frequently featured on questionable talkshows, broadcasts and media outlets, including the Dr. Oz show and Suzanne Somers’s dangerously crazy book of cancer woo.

Bioenergetic psychotherapy is crackpottery based on the lunatic ravings of Wilhelm Reich, and has nothing to do with bioenergy as it is understood in real sciences – even practitioners occasionally admit that it is not science but instead “informed by science.” (It is not informed by science in any legitimate sense of the word “informed”.) Bioenergetic psychotherapy is, however, a classic tooth-fairy science underpinned by “worthless studies designed to generate false positives – the kind of in-house studies that companies sometimes use so that they can claim their products are clinically proven.”

In his books and newsletter, Sinatra otherwise promote a broad palette of quackery, from nutritional supplements to detoxification. In particular, according to Sinatra, to maintain good health you need to resolve your “emotional blockages” as well as physical ones: “whenever you confront a person with an illness, you have to involve everything, including the spiritual.… Every illness has a psychological and a physical component.” (Or put more succinctly: if you’re sick, or the advice you take from him doesn’t work, it’s your own fault.) His “metabolic cardiology” seems to be a kind of energy medicine – Sinatra is a disciple of James Oschman – focusing on the use of electroceuticals such as grounding or “earthing”, ostensibly to improve the body’s capacity to heal at the cellular level (Sinatra is one of the most prominent promoters of the quackery of earthing in the US). This is not how anything works, of course. 

And by the way, apparently the current epidemic of type 2 diabetes is also directly caused by rubber-soled shoes, which insulate us from Mother Earth’s vital 3.83 Hz vibrations, a frequency that “thins our blood so it’s like red wine, not ketchup.” You don’t want your blood to be like ketchup.

So what is the rationale for earthing? As Sinatra explains it, the Earth is a reservoir of free electrons, and without a connection to this reservoir, our cells are unable to balance harmful positive charges; he also includes pictures from live cell microscopy to illustrate how positive charge makes blood cells clump. Of course, our cells don’t need an infusion of electrons and live cell microscopy is a bogus test – Sinatra’s pictures are also unable to show a positive charge, and the blood cell clumping is an artifact that anyways would be irrelevant to the alleged health effects. 

Sinatra also claims that we are bombarded by electromagnetic radiation from modern technology, which may disrupt subtle electrical communications in our body; grounding reduces these induced voltages. In reality, of course, there is  no evidence that EMF disrupts communication in our body or that grounding would offer any help whatsoever if it did (“subtle” is probably a key term here). Ultimately, however, it’s all about the New Age: earthing is important since our connection with the earth carries information that helps align us with the greater network of intelligence of our planet. Try finding scientific evidence to contradict that, ye philistines. And the point about aligning with an intelligence network is wild imagination not supported by anything in science or reality.

But, ah, yes, the part of Sinatra’s claim you were waiting for: vibrations. Perhaps the (current) core idea in Sinatra’s otherwise somewhat amorphous medical philosophy is vibrations. According to Sinatra, “the whole essence of life is really vibration … when people are sick, their vibration goes down,” but “if we can increase the energy of our cellular framework … our lives will thrive … Vibration is the key to life.” What it means, or how Sinatra measures decreasing vibrations, is of course unclear (we have, of course, left the world of real medicine – or reality – far behind at this point). But he is pretty clear about what causes lowering of your “vibrational energy”:

-       “Toxic energy fields – WiFi, smart meters, cellular and cordless phones, etc.

-       Drugs/Alcohol/Sugar

-       Chronic illness

-       Negative emotions – hostility, fear, anger, shame, resentment, depression …

-       Over-vaccination in the newborn and infants [Sinatra is of course anti-vaccine; what did you expect?]

-       Living in the energy of entitlement

-       Living in a false self – My life is a lie

-       Any misrepresentation of … The Truth!”

That last one is rather revealing, though: This is cult-speak. Stephen Sinatra is trying to build a cult. Otherwise, you should in particular avoid consuming veal, since the angry vibrations in the flesh of animals raised inhumanely can be passed on to those who consume them. Fortunately, you can also increase your vibrations by eating “high vibrational foods,” many of which you can coincidentally and conveniently find in his online store. “[G]rounding the body, FIR sauna and the utilization of very low frequency pulsed electromagnetic waves” also help “assist the quantum energy of the body.” According to Sinatra “[t]his is the new wisdom that will assist us in the good vibe/bad vibe technological age.” “Wisdom” is certainly not an apt term for any of it.

As for EFM, “the chaotic, unseen, and unfelt environmental electrical fields we humans are increasingly exposed to from all the electronics, appliances, and telecommunications in our lives,” what is Sinatra’s evidence for harm? Well, Sinatra will baldly assert that the evidence shows that power lines cause leukemia in children, which is false, and that cell phones cause brain cancers, which is equally untrue. Primarily, however, Sinatra will point out that “[i]llnesses like multiple sclerosis, autoimmune disorders, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and autism have been proliferating in recent years. The incidence of cancer is up, particularly among young people,” so electropollution must be the cause. Correlation is causation, even when there is, in fact, no correlation.

Sinatra has promoted other kinds of pseudoscientific nonsense, too, of course. He is for instance co-author, with Jonny Bowden (proud holder of a “degree” from the diploma mill Clayton College of Natural Health), of the book The Great Cholesterol Myth: Why Lowering Your Cholesterol Won't Prevent Heart Disease-and the Statin-Free Plan That Will. Though less flagrantly nonsensical than his vibration woo, the book – which, to emphasize, hardly enjoys any better foundation in science than his claim that misrepresenting his claims may cause you ill-health by lowering your vibrations – is probably even more likely to cause actual harm to people than his vibration nonsense. (There is an overly fair review of the book here.)

Diagnosis: Egregious nonsense and lunatic New Age ravings, all of it. Of course, if you are able to distinguish evidence-based medical claims from lunatic New Age ravings, you are probably not in Sinatra’s target audience, and he does seem to have found one, for whom the fact that he is, indeed, an MD will probably give him some unwarranted credibility. And make no mistake: despite their laughable silliness, Sinatra’s advice has the potential to cause real and serious harm. Dangerous.

Hat-tip: Chad Hayes, skepdic, Harriet Hall.

#2257: James Simpson

Accuracy in Media is a wingnut “media watchdog” run by Don Irvine. It was founded with the expressed purpose of combatting “liberal media bias” but actually – and predictably – ended up combatting accuracy instead, in favor of promoting wingnut conspiracy theories. It’s a perfect fit for wild-eyed conspiracy theorists like Jim Simpson, who for instance opposed the Obama administration’s comprehensive immigration reform plan because he believed it to be part of a Marxist push to destroy America and potentially make President Obama a dictator. He also accused the “illegal immigration lobby” of using the tactics of Nazis and Communists in promoting “ideas that are self-evidently destructive,” and asserted that there would be no room for compromise because reform proponents are Marxists and Marxists will only be “emboldened” by attempts to compromise: “When dealing with Marxists, the ‘moderates’ compromise away our rights, our livelihoods and our country to people and agendas that are inherently destructive to our society,” said Simpson and warned that immigration reform would mean the end of America, for instance because immigrants want to “destroy the culture” and ultimately “create a huge pool of voters” that they can use to institute “despotic governments.” “Accuracy” is not an apt term to describe any part of Simpson’s rant.

Immigrants destroying America – as part of some liberal plot to “dilute” America with “not nice people” – is of course a recurring theme in Simpson’s, uh, thinking. For instance, Mexican immigrants are often “child rapists” who are coming to the US because they will ostensibly get off easier in the justice system. Another common topic is of course voter fraud, something that Simpson is very concerned about, based on little evidence beyond what his paranoid imagination can dream up: In a 2014 rant, for instance, Simpson argued that  voter fraud is a massive, “existential threat to our American Republic,” but the only “proof” of voter fraud happening he managed to list was college students voting in the state where they attend school, which is legal (not counting his references to Kris Kobach’s infamously dishonest and silly voter roll “crosscheck” system, which was carefully designed to yield false positives that weren’t controlled for). Of course, in Simpson’s mind, campaigns to replace the electoral college with a national popular vote and efforts to restore felons’ right to vote also count as conscious efforts to increase voter fraud. So there is that. “Democrats’ attitude toward voter fraud is the voting version of reparations for slavery,” complained Simpson.

Simpson thinks boycotts of companies by people he disagrees with are “economic terrorism”; it’s different when his side engages in boycotts, of course, since his side only engages in boycotts when they “are attacked first”.

Diagnosis: Yes, he is a fairly typical specimen, but that doesn’t make the delusional, paranoid garbage that passes for thought in Simpson’s head any less garbage. And people do listen to him, it seems.

#2256: Frank Simon

The American Family Association is a group of bigoted, unhinged fundamentalists. The national leaders are crazy enough, but the wild-eyed Talibanists you find in their various state chapters might occasionally be even crazier. Frank Simon is the director of the Kentucky chapter, and he believes that the 1962 Supreme Court decision prohibiting government-led prayer in schools led to “the AIDS epidemic and the drug culture” (as well as teen pregnancy and violent crime). Accordingly, legalizing government-led school prayer is “one of the best ways of returning God’s protection to America,” Simon thought, and promptly started a petition to change the Constitution.

No fan of gay people, Simon has a long history of anti-equality activism that borders on the, shall we say, unhinged, in particular through his group Freedom’s Heritage Forum, which in practice is just a de facto lobbying wing for his church. He has for instance promoted, in addition to pseudoresearch by Paul Cameron, Scott Lively’s The Pink Swastika, a piece of Holocaust revisionism that claims not only that gays weren’t systematically murdered by the Nazis, but were rather the architects of the Holocaust. And as Simon sees it, the evil continues: “There are hundreds of children in America who are dying of AIDS because they were sexually abused by homosexuals,” Simon said back in the early 2000s, based on data he found in the place where he usually finds data for his claims. There really are not, and it should be unnecessary to point that out. 

In his anti-gay campaigns, Simon is locally famous for using any means possible to win, and has a long history for instance of paying for anti-equality ads where he tries to link homosexuality to pedophilia. In 2004 he mailed what was more or less gay porn (graphic descriptions of sexual acts) to 65,000 households as part of his attempt to prevent renewal of the Kentucky Fairness Ordinance. The move seems to have backfired somewhat.

Diagnosis: Raging maniac. But Simon is resourceful and desperate enough to use any tricks at his disposal, and has been doing so for decades. So yes, he’s had an impact. It is less clear whether he is overall helping his cause or not.