The National Council on Family Relations is frankly a little suprised that people are so upset with them. You remember NCFR -- the group that's putting together the White House's next version of the online debacle 4parents.gov -- but this time on straight-only marriage. That's right, research on gay marriage is verboten on the federally-funded marriage research clearinghouse NCFR is putting together.
And they're breaking their own rules about discrimination and banning their own research on gay marriage to do it. I guess if you index for inflation, thirty pieces of silver is worth about $5 million today -- the value of the contract the Bush White House is giving NCFR.
Apparently a lot of NCFR members are pissed too, so NCFR Board members sent a letter out with some startling and curious admissions:
From last April (2004), when Michael Benjamin, the Executive Director of NCFR, told the Board he was considering seeking a grant for a Healthy Marriage Clearinghouse... We anticipated controversy surrounding this project, but we regret to admit that we did not anticipate the intensity of the reactions.Well, duh. They only rejected their own stated values to score a government contract. Why should anyone be pissed about that? Then they quote a letter they sent to HHS regarding 4parents.gov -- they didn't sign on to the letter every sane organization in the world signed, but apparently sent their own:
We believe that government sponsored websites should contain information that reflects the state of the science -- and when there is not consensus among scientists, then the diversity of findings should be represented on the site. The website should reflect what is known, what is unknown, and what is disputed.Unless it's information about gay marriage. On a marriage clearinghouse website. Scheduled to go live in June. That they're developing.
Michael Benjamin (email mbenjamin@ncfr.org , phone (202) 659-1190 ) is NCFR's executive director and the primary investigator on the project. He's the guy responsible for breaking NCFR's own rules and banning his group's own research from the clearinghouse. Maybe he needs another reminder of the rules:
NCFR's Executive Director shall not allow practices, activities, decisions, or organizational circumstances which violate the Board's value that NCFR provide a context supportive of diversity by race, ethnicity, culture, age, gender, religion, physical ability, country of origin, and sexual orientation.Maybe he just forgot the last three words.
Their own rules. Their own research. Their own letters.
Their own stubborn, arrogant, bigoted hypocrisy.
