Sample Letter Denying Claim For Damages: Fill & Download for Free

The Official Guide For Repairing Your CreditWhen Credit Repair is NeededPeople tend to forget about their FICO score until it’s too late. It’s not until they are applying for a new credit card or attempting to secure a mortgage or car loan that they realize something is amiss. Your unfortunately low score can result in one of two situations:You’ll pay absurdly high-interest rates. You’ll flat out be denied the loan or line of credit. Let’s use simple numbers here for the sake of the example. Receiving a 9% interest rate instead of a 6% rate over the 30-year lifetime of a fixed mortgage can cost you as much as $800 extra per month depending on the size of the loan. Multiply that out and you’d have paid $288,000 more in interest than you would have otherwise.This is why you need to repair your credit now, especially if you anticipate any larger purchases in the near future.1: Receive All Three Free Credit ReportsAs mentioned above, you are within your rights as established by the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) to receive your credit report free of charge once per year from each of the three main credit bureaus. Use the resources below to obtain copies of each.Request your reports onlinePrint and mail the request formPhone: 1-877-322-8228 – Request your report by phoneView your reports via Credit Karma or Budget Tracker & Planner2: Review All Details and ItemsNow that you have all three reports, plan out a solid portion of your day to cross-reference and audit each of them. You have two main goals during this step.First, make sure all of your information is correct with the reporting agency and the company providing the information.Second, meticulously go through every item to find any mistakes, miscalculations, or absence of information. Remember, each report will list out potential problems apart from other items. You will want to resolve these but don’t assume that these are the only issues.Finally, double-check everything to find what the bureaus did not.You will find information regarding your identity, including your:Past addressesEmployment historyNames and aliasesSocial Security numberAll types of accounts you have with various companies (including any bank accounts or loans)Any account ever sent to a collection agencyThe number of times you’ve requested a new line of credit or loanEvery time you or a company or another organization requested to see your reportAs you navigate through these items, your goal is to analyze certain areas to find incorrect or missing data. Foremost, look at the potentially negative items listed in their own section, which are typically missed payments. If any appear that shouldn’t make note of these as they are the most damaging to your score. Look at all of your open accounts and ensure the ages of the accounts and the standings are accurate. Older accounts in good standing are very beneficial to your score, so in the future don’t be eager to close any old accounts, or you’ll be deleting the proof that you’re capable of responsibly managing your credit lines. Make sure all of your accounts appear on the report because having a variety of account and associated payment structures will boost your score as well. Finally, ensure all of your credit limits are reported accurately.Credit Marvel Tip:If you find evidence of fraudulent use of your credit, immediately contact the credit bureaus to set up a fraud alert. This forces lenders to contact you to confirm your identity before allowing you to open a credit account with them. And, if someone has stolen your identity, this could hinder the continuing problem. You can also freeze your credit reports until you’ve managed the credit restoration process and repaired your report to full correctness.Experian’s Sample Credit Report3: File Your DisputesAt no cost to you, you can file your disputes with each agency. In turn, they must investigate each item within 30 days.Take advantage of how the law functions by not contacting each agency about each problem or reaching out to each information provider. The agency’s investigation will include the information provider, and if a correction is to be made, the information provider must contact each agency themselves to provide the correct data.Use the sample letter in the resources below as a template for your dispute. Please remember to never include the original copies of any documents that contain your proof of inaccuracies. Keep these for your records and supply only copies of these documents.You can also send a copy of your credit report with each problematic area highlighted and numbered in accordance with your dispute letter. Also, consider sending your letter by certified mail with a return receipt requested. This will provide proof that the dispute letter and accompanying documents were delivered.More Resources:Sample letter for disputing credit report errorsFile a dispute with ExperianFile a dispute with EquifaxFile a dispute with TransUnionStep 4: Wait for a ResponseThe credit bureaus and lenders must investigate and respond within 30 days. This means you should wait at least 45 days for any mail documents to arrive. A response will contain one of two replies for each disputed item: the inaccuracies were removed or they disagree with your claim. If they disagree, do not give up. Attempt to find more documentation supporting your position and contact the reporting agency again.For any items that are successfully removed, you will be provided another copy of your updated credit report. Legally, any items changed or removed cannot be restored to the original version without proof from the information provider. The provider must also contact you first about this proof. You may also request that the credit bureaus send notices of these corrections to any potential lender that requested your report in the last six months.Another Credit Marvel Tip:If the dispute is denied because the lender believes the information they provided is accurate, you can place a statement of dispute on your credit report. This won’t change your score, but it will give you the opportunity to let future lenders know that inaccuracies exist and to consider these when determining whether to offer you credit. These statements of dispute remain on your credit report for two years.That’s it!Follow all of the steps above with patience and diligence and you’ll have done all that can be done in the credit repair side of increasing your FICO score. It’s a lot of work and takes quite a large amount of time. If you don’t want to be bothered with it, we’ve provided a list of trusted credit repair professionals below that you can consult. They can manage the entire credit repair process for you, so you don’t have to get lost in this mess of paperwork and potential headaches.Consult a Credit Repair ExpertWhile a guide such as this one can make the process of credit repair easier, there’s no such thing as easy or quick credit restoration. The ordeal requires patience and focus to do well. Many people decide they don’t have it in them or would rather just not spend the time. However, if you have problem fixing your credit i advice you seek the help of a professional credit repair personnel to assist you in getting your credit fixed in real time, There are obviously many steps to apply when fixing credit on your own. I would recommend you reach out to George Gibbs here on quora and contact him via email in his bio, He is so effective and professional. I got my credit fixed very fast with his help and he has been helping so many people too and I would recommend you reach out to him .

There is a lot of public controversy over which “race” the ancient Egyptians belonged to. Western media has traditionally portrayed nearly all ancient Egyptians as having white skin. Unfortunately, some films are still portraying the Egyptians this way; the 2014 film Exodus: Gods and Kings and the 2016 film Gods of Egypt both received widespread criticism for the fact that nearly all the lead roles were played by white actors.Nevertheless, I think that, with a few exceptions, nowadays, most people realize that the idea of the ancient Egyptians as almost entirely what we consider “white” is nothing but a racist fantasy. A great deal of controversy still rages, though, over whether the ancient Egyptians were what we consider “black.” A number of authors have tried to argue that ancient Egypt was exclusively or primarily a “black civilization” and that the ancient Egyptians defined themselves as “black people.”Since the skin color of the ancient Egyptians is a matter of such great controversy, in this article, I want to take a thorough and honest look at the evidence. In this article, we will examine evidence from Egyptian iconography, from Egyptian mummies, from ancient Greek descriptions of the Egyptians, from genetics, and from the conquests and migrations of recorded history. We will discover that Egypt has always been a very ethnically diverse place and that the ancient Egyptians cannot be uniformly classified as belonging to any particular “race.”First, a little qualification about “race”People in ancient times did not think of race in the same way that we do. In the twenty-first century, we define “race” in terms of skin color, but, in the ancient world, the concept of skin-color-based racial classification did not exist. The concepts of a “black race” and a “white race” would be totally foreign to them. People recognized that some people had light skin and other people had dark skin, but they didn’t see these things as defining racial characteristics.Instead, people in the ancient world thought in terms of what we would call “nationalities.” The ancient Egyptians thought of themselves as Egyptians, not “black people” or “white people.” Likewise, all the other peoples of Africa thought of themselves as belonging to whatever nation they belonged. For instance, the people of the Kingdom of Kush thought of themselves as Kushites, not “black people.”If you walked up to a random man on the street in the Egyptian city of Waset (i.e. “Thebes”) in the fourteenth century BC and asked him, “Are you a member of the black race?” he would be totally confused and he would have no idea what you were talking about. It would be like asking someone on the street today with olive-colored skin, “Are you a member of the olive race?”The ideas of a “white race” and a “black race” were invented in modern times in order to justify the enslavement of people of African descent by people of western European descent. These concepts are based on extremely superficial physical characteristics and they are scientifically meaningless; anthropologists now regard racial divisions as a cultural phenomenon, not a biological one.When we apply modern racial divisions to the ancient world, it is very important that we realize that this is deeply anachronistic and that we are applying labels to people that they never would have used themselves and that have no real scientific meaning. Unfortunately, because racial divisions based on skin color are so utterly dominant and inescapable in modern culture, we find ourselves forced to apply them to the ancient world.ABOVE: Illustration from c. 1854 depicting white slave traders inspecting a black slave in preparation for the slave to be sold. The concepts of a “white race” and a “black race” were created in modern times primarily in order to justify the enslavement of people of African descent. Such concepts did not exist in antiquity.A little clarificationI also want to clarify that this article is not about the question of whether there were people in ancient Egypt whom we would consider “black.” There were undoubtedly many people in ancient Egypt whom we would consider “black,” just as there are many people in Egypt today who are considered “black.”One example of a man who lived in ancient Egypt who was definitely what we would consider “black” is Maiherpri, a powerful Egyptian nobleman who lived during the reign of Thutmose IV (ruled 1401 – 1391 BC or 1397 – 1388 BC) and was buried after his death in the Valley of the Kings in tomb KV36.Maiherpri’s copy of the Book of the Dead contains an illustration depicting him with black skin, rather than the usual brown skin that most Egyptians are depicted with in manuscript illustrations. His actual mummy, meanwhile, shows that he did indeed have naturally dark skin. His mummy also bears a wig of curly black hair, which is undoubtedly meant to represent the natural hair that he had when he was alive.ABOVE: Illustration of Maiherpri from his copy of the Book of Dead, showing him with black skinABOVE: Photograph of Maiherpri’s mummy, which has naturally dark skin and a wig of frizzy hair that is evidently meant to represent the hair he really had when he was aliveAnother famous example of an ancient Egyptian who was definitely what we would consider “black” is Lady Rai (lived c. 1560 – c. 1530 BC), who was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Ahmose-Nefertari. After her death, she was buried in a tomb at Thebes. Her mummy is one of the best preserved Egyptian mummies we have and it clearly reveals that she had naturally dark skin. Her elaborately braided hair is also preserved.The problem is that many Afrocentrists have tried to go beyond saying that there were people in ancient Egypt whom we would consider “black” and have tried to claim that ancient Egypt was mostly or even exclusively a “black civilization,” that the ancient Egyptians defined themselves as inherently black, and even that all black people are descended from the ancient Egyptians.None of these things are true.ABOVE: Photograph of Lady Rai’s mummy, which has dark skin and elaborately braided hairThe name “Kemet”Proponents of the view that ancient Egypt was an exclusively black civilization and that the ancient Egyptians defined themselves as black have claimed that the ancient Egyptians called their country “Kemet,” which they claim means “Land of the Black People.” Many of them further claim that this name referred not just to Egypt itself, but to the entire continent of Africa as a whole and that all black people are therefore Egyptians and people who are not black have never been true Egyptians.Contrary to these assertions, the ancient Egyptians did not call the continent of Africa “Kemet.” The ancient Egyptians do not seem to have had a name for the entire African continent. The Egyptians did, however, refer specifically to the land around the Nile River in which they themselves lived using the name “Kmt,” which is written in hieroglyphics as follows:The ancient Egyptians did not normally write using vowels, so we don’t know what the vowel sounds in the word “Kmt” were. Modern scholars have inserted the letter ⟨e⟩ between the consonants in order to make the name pronounceable in English, but we really don’t know exactly what the vowel sounds were. In modern Coptic Egyptian, the name for Egypt is ⲭⲏⲙⲓ (Khēmi), which comes directly from Ancient Egyptian “Kmt.”The name “Kmt” literally means “the black land.” This name almost certainly refers to the extremely fertile black soil that is found in the areas around the Nile River. The ancient Egyptians frequently contrasted the fertile “black” soil of the lands where they lived with the barren “red” sands of the desert that surrounded them. The ancient Egyptian name for the desert was dšṛt, which literally means “the red land.”Contrary to what the Afrocentrists have asserted, the name “Kmt” is almost certainly describing the land itself, not the color of the skin of the people who lived there. The ancient Egyptians did not define themselves in terms of their skin color and, as we shall see in a moment, there was, in fact, a great deal of variation in skin tone in ancient Egypt, just as there is in Egypt today.ABOVE: Photograph of Egyptian soil. The soil is extremely dark because it is extremely fertile.How the ancient Egyptians thought about skin colorToday, we generally think of skin color as marking a person’s ethnicity, but the ancient Egyptians generally did not think about skin color in the same way that we do. Instead, in ancient Egypt, skin color was widely seen not as a marker of ethnicity, but rather as a marker of gender. In ancient Egyptian art, Egyptian men are usually shown with brown or red skin and Egyptian women are usually shown with white or light brown skin.The use of different skin colors to signify men and women is a convention that is found in the art of the other cultures in the ancient eastern Mediterranean world as well. Notably, the ancient Minoans used the exact same artistic convention to signify gender; in Minoan frescoes, men are usually shown with brown skin and women are usually shown with white skin.The reason why the Egyptians and so many other ancient peoples did this is because women in the ancient world were generally expected to stay inside most of the time and remain pale, while men were expected to spend more time outside and become tanned.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a set of painted limestone statues dating to between c. 2649 and c. 2609 BC depicting Prince Rahotep and his wife Nofret. Notice that Rahotep, the man, is portrayed with brown skin and Nofret, the woman, is portrayed with white skin.ABOVE: Painting from the burial chamber of Nefertari, dating to between c. 1298 and c. 1235 BC, depicting Amentit, the goddess of the west, sitting beside the sun-god Ra. Notice that Ra, who is male, has darker skin than Amentit, who is female.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Minoan fresco from Knossos dating to the middle of the fifteenth century BC depicting a man leaping over a charging bull while one woman seizes the bull by the horns and another woman stands behind the bull with arms outstretched. Notice that the women have white skin while the man has brown skin.A more cautious look at how Egyptians are portrayed in their artIn addition to gender, all sorts of other societal ideas and artistic conventions affect the way that human beings are portrayed in ancient Egyptian art. We have very few artistic depictions from ancient Egypt from before the Hellenistic Era that can be reliably said to represent a particular person in a detailed and realistic manner.Because the color of a person’s skin in any work of ancient Egyptian art often has more to do with artistic conventions than with the actual color of that person’s skin in real life, it can be dangerous to use ancient Egyptian art as a guide to what color skin people in ancient Egypt really had.Nonetheless, we should take note that, in works of ancient Egyptian art where the original colors have been preserved, Egyptians are usually portrayed with skin in varying shades of brown. The men generally tend to have darker brown skin and the women generally tend to have lighter brown skin, although this is not always necessarily the case.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a painting of a man hunting from the tomb of Nebamun at Waset (i.e. “Thebes”), dating to c. 1350 BC or thereaboutsABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a painting of female musicians and dancers from the tomb of Nebamun at Waset, dating to c. 1350 BC or thereaboutsMeanwhile, in a few surviving works of ancient Egyptian art, brown-skinned Egyptians are contrasted with black-skinned Nubians. This shows that, despite the range of skin colors that certainly existed in ancient Egypt, the ancient Egyptians generally seem to have thought of themselves as having brown skin and the Nubians to the south as having black skin.A number of frescoes from the tomb of Seti I (ruled 1290 – 1279 BC) paired with the text of the Book of Gates depict various peoples of the ancient world as the Egyptians imagined them. Among the peoples depicted in the frescoes we see a stereotypical Nubian with black skin, a stereotypical Egyptian with brown skin, and a stereotypical southwest Asian with white skin.The temple built by Rameses II (ruled 1279 – 1213 BC), the most famous Egyptian pharaoh, at the site of Beit el-Wali, included a number of paintings depicting Rameses II’s conquest and subjugation of the Nubians. In these wall paintings, some of the Nubians are portrayed with black skin and others with brown skin, while the Egyptians are portrayed only with brown skin.Once again, it is important to emphasize that these representations are conventional ones rooted in stereotypes that the Egyptians had about how people belonging to various nations were supposed to look and they probably do not accurately reflect how all people belonging to those nations actually looked. Nonetheless, they do at least tell us how the Egyptians saw themselves in relation to the other peoples of the ancient world.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a painting from Rameses II’s temple at Beit el-Wali depicting the brown-skinned pharaoh charging in his chariot against his Nubian enemies, who are portrayed with both brown and black skinABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of another painting from Rameses II’s temple at Beit el-Wadi depicting subjugated Nubian peoples bearing tribute to the Egyptian pharaohABOVE: Nineteenth-century illustration of a Book of Gates fresco from the tomb of Seti I (ruled 1290 – 1279 BC), showing (from left-to-right) a stereotypical pale-skinned Libyan, a stereotypical black-skinned Nubian, a stereotypical pale-skinned southwest Asian, and a stereotypical brown-skinned EgyptianThe famous bust of NefertitiProponents of the view that all ancient Egyptians were black are constantly insisting that the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti currently held in the Neues Museum in Berlin must be a fake because it portrays Nefertiti with pale skin. They’ve tried to come up with all sorts of other arguments for why it must be a fake, with one of them being that the bust is too well-preserved to be over three thousand years old.None of these arguments hold up to any scrutiny; there are plenty of other representations of Egyptian women with pale skin and there are plenty of works of art that are even older than the Nefertiti bust that are just as well preserved.In reality, the bust is almost certainly authentic, but its authenticity is largely irrelevant to the question of what skin colors people in ancient Egypt had, since it is clearly an example of the standard Egyptian convention of portraying women with pale skin as a marker of their femininity.As is the case with most works of Egyptian art from before the Hellenistic Period, the Nefertiti bust tells us a lot more about the conventions of ancient Egyptian art than it does about Nefertiti’s actual appearance.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti in the Neues Museum in Berlin, which probably tells us a lot more about the conventions of Egyptian art at the time than it does about Nefertiti’s actual physical appearanceEvidence from mummiesPretty much all surviving representations of Egyptians from before the Hellenistic Period are heavily conventionalized, which makes it hard to judge how well they reflect the actual appearance of the people they are supposed to represent. They certainly provide us with information about how the ancient Egyptians imagined themselves, but, in most cases, they do not provide us with detailed information about what real individuals looked like.In the absence of realistic portraits of specific individuals from the pharaonic period, we can instead look at people’s mummies, which can give us some information about what these people looked like when they were alive. Nevertheless, we need to be careful about using mummies as evidence because oftentimes people’s mummies look very different from how the people looked when they were alive.Mummies’ facial features have often been damaged or distorted either by the embalming process itself or by deterioration after embalming. Many mummies have wigs instead of natural hair and, when they do have natural hair, it is often dyed. Meanwhile, the chemicals used in embalming can sometimes change the color of a person’s skin, making it appear darker or lighter than it would have appeared when the person was alive.One of the most famous surviving mummies from ancient Egypt is the mummy of Rameses II. From a superficial glance at Rameses II’s mummy, it appears as though he had splotchy brown skin and wavy reddish-blond hair. Things are more complicated than they seem, though. A forensic analysis published in 1987 concluded that Rameses II’s skin has actually been unnaturally darkened due to the chemicals that were used for his embalming and that his natural color would have been significantly lighter.Meanwhile, the analysis also concluded that his hair was naturally white at the time of his death, since he was about ninety years old at the time. His hair only appears reddish-blond on his mummy because it has been dyed that color with henna. Nonetheless, the analysis concluded that his hair was naturally red when he was a young man and that either Rameses II himself or his embalmers had dyed it red in effort to make it look the way it had when he was younger.The fact that Rameses II evidently had relatively light skin and wavy red hair illustrates that there evidently were some people in ancient Egypt who were what we would consider “white.”ABOVE: Photograph of the mummy of Rameses II. He had white hair at the time of his death and his hair only appears red here because it has been dyed with henna. Nonetheless, a forensic analysis of his hair concluded that he really did have red hair when he was a young man.Ancient Greek descriptions of the EgyptiansProponents of the view that ancient Egypt was an exclusively or predominately “black” civilization have also tried to point to descriptions of the Egyptians written by Greek authors. They claim that these descriptions clearly characterize the Egyptians as black people. The evidence, however, is a lot less clear-cut than the Afrocentrists claim.For instance, the Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BC) says in his Histories 2.104 that he knows that the people of the land of Kolchis (located in what is now western Georgia) are of Egyptian descent in part because the people of Kolchis and Egypt are both “μελάγχροες… καὶ οὐλότριχες,” which means “dark-skinned and curly-haired.” This line is often quoted by Afrocentrist writers with the mistranslation “black-skinned and curly-haired.”This translation, though, is certainly inaccurate; the word μελάγχροες comes from the Greek word μέλας (mélas), which just means “dark.” Sometimes this word can mean “black,” but it does not inherently mean “black” and the word is often used to describe anything that is of a generally dark color. The word μελάγχροες could therefore refer to anyone with skin that is any color from light brown to completely black.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Roman marble copy of a Greek bust of the historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos, who described the Egyptians as “μελάγχροες… καὶ οὐλότριχες”Greek stereotypes about the EgyptiansFurthermore, we must absolutely bear in mind at all times that the descriptions we are given in ancient Greek sources of what the ancient Egyptians supposedly looked like reflect a stereotype of how ancient Greek writers imagined the appearance of the Egyptians. When Herodotos says that the Egyptians—or any other people for that matter—look a certain way, it would be a grave error to interpret what he says as an accurate description of all people belonging to that particular nationality, or even necessarily the majority of people belonging to that nationality.Indeed, ancient Greek writers are rather notorious for stereotyping what people of a certain culture were supposed to look like based on features that weren’t even necessarily held by the majority of the population. For instance, Greek writers stereotyped the peoples of the land of Thrake, located northeast of mainland Greece, as having reddish blond hair and blue eyes.Nevertheless, we know that this stereotypical appearance doesn’t hold true for all Thrakians or even the majority of Thrakians. It seems that the Greeks simply noticed that reddish blond hair and blue eyes were relatively common among the Thrakians compared to other peoples of the eastern Mediterranean and therefore began stereotyping the Thrakians in this manner.The same thing is probably true for ancient Greek descriptions of the Egyptians. Clearly, Herodotos and other Greeks noticed that some Egyptians had dark skin and curly hair and they decided that this was the “standard” appearance of an Egyptian person.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of part of a fresco from an ancient Thrakian tomb from a site near Kazanlak, Bulgaria. The ancient Greeks stereotyped Thrakians as having reddish blond hair and blue eyes, but not a single person in this whole fresco actually has red hair.A word of caution about genetic studiesNow that we’ve talked about evidence from Egyptian iconography, evidence from mummies, and evidence from ancient Greek descriptions, we need to talk about evidence from genetics. This is the evidence that usually tends to dominate the conversation. As I discuss in this article I wrote in February 2020 about the relationship between modern and ancient Greeks, though, we should really be extremely cautious of any sweeping claims made about the ethnicity of ancient peoples based on genetic evidence because genetics don’t work the way that most non-geneticists think they do.Companies like 23andMe and Ancestry have irresponsibly portrayed genetics as though a simple genetic test can tell you the exact percentage of your total genome that comes from ancestors of a specific nationality. In reality, the vast majority of genes are found in people of all nationalities and there is always much greater genetic diversity among individual people of any particular nationality than there is between the people of two different nationalities collectively.What genetics companies actually rely on are genetic markers—a handful of genes found within a person’s larger genome that generally tend to be associated with members of a certain reference population with documented ancestors from a certain part of the world.These genetic markers aren’t always totally reliable, since, in many cases, the same mutation may have occurred in several different parts of world at different times and may be associated with people of totally different backgrounds. For instance, the MTHFR C677T mutation is a genetic marker that is common in people of Mexican ancestry, but also in people Chilean, Chinese, and Italian ancestries. It is also less commonly found in other populations of people from all over the world, including western Europe, Britain, Ireland, and Colombia.If a geneticist examines the DNA from someone who has the MTHFR C677T gene, they have no way of knowing just from looking at the mutation itself whether the person inherited that mutation from an Italian ancestor, a Chinese ancestor, a Mexican ancestor, a Chilean ancestor, or some other ancestor.When a personal genome company tells you that you are a certain percent “from” a certain region, what they really mean is that that percentage of the genetic markers they identified within your larger genome are often associated with members of a reference group composed of people with known ancestry in that part of the world. Genetic evidence can be useful, but we need to be very careful with it because, when it comes to genetics, things are a lot more complicated than most people realize.ABOVE: Screenshot from an advertisement for a DNA ancestry test from Ancestry.com, showing a man looking surprised to find out “52%” of his DNA comes from “Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.” What that percentage really means is that 52% of the genetic markers the analysts found in his DNA are often associated with reference populations of people with known ancestry in that part of the world.A further word of caution about genetic evidence and ancient EgyptThings get especially complicated when we start talking about genetics in association with ancient Egypt, since Egypt is a geographically large country with a historically diverse population. Ancient Egyptian history also spans the course of roughly four thousand years, from the rise of Egyptian civilization in the late fourth millennium BC to the conquest of Egypt by the Rashidun caliphate in the seventh century AD. Egypt’s population has, naturally, changed to some extent over the course of its long history.Unfortunately, people seem to have a very pernicious habit of making grand, sweeping claims about the ancient Egyptians’ supposed “race” based on extremely limited genetic evidence. Both Eurocentrists who want to believe that the ancient Egyptians were all what we would consider “white” and Afrocentrists who want to believe that the ancient Egyptians were all what we would consider “black” are guilty of this.To give an especially ludicrous example of how genetic evidence has been distorted and misused, in August 2011, a Swiss personal genomics company called iGENEA claimed—supposedly based on an extremely small portion of Tutankhamun’s Y-chromosome DNA that was allegedly shown on screen in a Discovery Channel documentary—that Tutankhamun belonged to certain haplogroups that they claimed include more than half of all men in western Europe.iGENEA’s already dubious claims became even more distorted and exaggerated in the press. The National Post ran an article with the headline “King Tut DNA more European than Egyptian.” The Daily Mail ran an article with the headline “We've got the same mummy! Up to 70% of British men are 'related' to the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun.”Soon ordinary people who read these headlines were saying that a study had proven that the ancient Egyptians were ethnically western Europeans. The problem is that there wasn’t even a real genetic study at all; the whole story was born from a single genetics company claiming something about one pharaoh’s DNA based on what they thought was a portion of that pharaoh’s Y-chromosomal DNA that had been inadvertently shown on screen in a Discovery Channel documentary.In fact, the actual researchers who had extracted and decoded Tutankhamun’s DNA denounced iGENEA’s conclusions, saying that the company had acted irresponsibly and unscientifically and that they had misinterpreted the data that had been shown on the screen in the Discovery Channel documentary. Carsten Putsch, one of the geneticists involved in the original project, told LiveScience that iGENEA’s conclusions were “simply impossible.”Meanwhile, proponents of the view that all ancient Egyptians were what we would consider “black” have made similarly irresponsible claims based on extremely little evidence, often citing the presence of certain genetic markers that tend to be associated with people of sub-Saharan African ancestry in the genomes of certain Egyptian pharaohs as “proof” that all Egyptians were “black.” This, of course, at best only proves that some Egyptian pharaohs had some ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a highly conventionalized representation of Tutankhamun and his wife from the back of Tutankhamun’s throne, on display in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. This is the man that The Daily Mail apparently claims was ethnically British.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikipedia Commons of a highly conventionalized mannequin of Tutankhamun that was discovered in his tombA genetic study on Egyptian mummies published in 2017A genetic study published in May 2017 in the journal Nature Communications examined DNA samples from a much larger selection of ancient Egyptian mummies than any other previous study had done and concluded that modern Egyptians actually tend to have a much higher number of genetic markers associated with people of sub-Saharan African ancestry than the ancient Egyptians did.The study concluded that the ancient Egyptians had relatively little genetic affinity with modern people of sub-Saharan African ancestry and that, due to the trans-Saharan slave trade that flourished in the Early Modern Period, the presence of genetic markers associated with sub-Saharan Africa has dramatically grown in the Egyptian population since the Arab conquest of Egypt in the seventh century.Remarkably, the study also concluded that the ancient Egyptians whose DNA they analyzed tended to have more genetic markers in common with modern peoples of the Near East than with modern Egyptians. If this study is correct, this means that the exact opposite of what Afrocentrists claim is the truth.Afrocentrists often claim that the ancient Egyptians were all or mostly what we consider “black” and that modern Egyptians are descendants of the Arab conquerors, but this study suggests that the ancient Egyptians had a close genetic affinity with modern peoples of the Middle East and that modern Egyptians actually have a closer genetic affinity with peoples of sub-Saharan Africa than their ancient ancestors did.Of course, this study also has some serious methodological limitations. Notably, it only examined DNA samples from 151 mummies, all of which came from the site of Abusir el-Meleq in Lower Egypt. Furthermore, judging from Supplementary Data 1, nearly all of the mummies included in the study seem to have belonged to individuals who lived after 1000 BC.The fact that all the mummies examined in this study came from the same site in Lower Egypt means we should be very careful about making generalizations based on it. I suspect that, if the study had examined mummies from Upper Egypt, they would have found more genetic markers associated with sub-Saharan Africa.Nonetheless, this was the first genetic study that has ever been conducted using DNA from such a large sample of Egyptian mummies and, despite its very serious limitations, it represents an important step forward in our understanding of the population history of Egypt.ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the findings of the 2017 genetic study, which concluded that ancient Egyptians from the site of Abusir el-Meleq in Lower Egypt had the most genetic markers in common with modern peoples of the Near East and that they had relatively little genetic affinity with modern sub-Saharan AfricansRealistic portraits of ordinary people from Lower Egypt from the Hellenistic and Roman periodsImages of people from the early periods of Egyptian history are highly conventionalized and they do not normally portray the specific details of the appearances of individual people. Mummies can be misleading, since the process of embalming can change a person’s appearance significantly. Greek sources describing the Egyptians’ appearance are largely based on stereotypes. Finally, genetic studies on ancient Egyptian remains are limited.Our sources for what people during pharaonic times looked like, then, is complicated to say the least. They do, however, give us a general picture of what Egypt looked like during the time of the pharaohs: an eastern Mediterranean country with a diverse population of people, the majority of whom seem to have had brown skin, but substantial minorities of whom seem to have had darker or lighter skin tones.Once we start getting into the Hellenistic Period (lasted c. 323 – c. 31 BC) and Roman Period (lasted c. 31 BC – c. 646 AD) of Egyptian history, though, we finally start to get realistic portraits of what real people looked like when they were alive. In particular, we have a pretty good impression of what people from Lower Egypt during the Hellenistic and Roman Periods looked like thanks to the wealth of highly detailed, realistic encaustic panel portraits that have survived from the region from these periods of Egyptians history.These are funerary portraits that originally covered the faces of the mummified bodies of the individuals they depict. They are conventionally known as the “Fayum mummy portraits” because many of them were found at sites located near the Fayum Basin in Lower Egypt. They depict ordinary people from the upper and middle classes. Here are a few examples:ABOVE: Portrait of a young woman from the city of Antinopolis in Lower Egypt dating to around the second or third century AD or thereaboutsABOVE: Portrait of a young military officer from Lower Egypt, dating to the time of the Roman EmpireABOVE: Portrait of a young man from the city of Antinopolis in Lower Egypt dating to around the second or third century AD or thereaboutsABOVE: Portrait of an elderly Egyptian man from the Roman periodABOVE: Portrait of a young man from the site of Hawara in Lower EgyptABOVE: Portrait of a woman dating to the early second century ADABOVE: Portrait of a military officer from Lower Egypt from the middle of the second century ADABOVE: Portrait of an Egyptian man from the Staatliche Museum in BerlinABOVE: Portrait of an Egyptian woman dating to the late second century ADABOVE: Portrait of a young man from Fayum dating to around the second or third century AD or thereaboutsABOVE: Portrait of a woman from Lower Egypt dating to around the late second century AD or thereaboutsABOVE: Portrait of a man from Fayum, dating to around the mid-second century AD or thereaboutsThese portraits reflect the incredible diversity of people that existed in Egypt during the Hellenistic and Roman Periods. In these portraits, we see real, ordinary people with all different colors of skin who lived in Egypt during this time period.This is the way Egypt has always been and the way it still is today: a place with people of diverse backgrounds and diverse colors of skin. Literally any one of these people could easily pass as a modern Egyptian.The population of modern EgyptThe modern population that is most directly descended from the population of ancient Egypt is the population of modern Egypt. Modern Egyptians have a range of different skin tones; some have pale skin, others have dark skin, but the majority generally tend to have brown skin. All the evidence we have just examined indicates that the ancient Egyptians exhibited the same range of skin tones.It is true that Egypt was conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century AD. It is also true that most modern Egyptians are Muslims who speak Arabic, but this doesn’t mean that modern Egyptians aren’t descendants of the ancient Egyptians. As I discuss in this article about whether modern Greeks are related to the ancient Greeks, once you go back to ancient history, matters of ancestry get really complicated. The Arabs conquered Egypt, but they didn’t massacre the Egyptian population and it is likely that most modern Egyptians have more Egyptian ancestors than Arab ancestors.Furthermore, it is worth pointing out the existence of modern Coptic Egyptians, who make up somewhere around one twentieth of the population of Egypt. These are people who never converted to Islam and instead have remained Christian to the present day, just like the majority of Egyptians in late antiquity. Historically Coptic Egyptians have been highly endogamous, meaning that, historically speaking, they have generally avoided marrying Muslim Egyptians.For most of their history, Copts even continued to speak Coptic, a later form of the same Egyptian language that was spoken by the pharaohs of old. Today, Coptic is mostly only used as a liturgical language and most Coptic Egyptians speak Arabic like their Muslim neighbors. Nonetheless, Copts have maintained their own culture and their own religion.I am not going to say that Copts are “pureblooded” descendants of the ancient Egyptians because there is no such thing as a “pureblooded” descendant of any people who lived over a thousand years ago, but, of all the people in the world, they are the ones who have the closest cultural ties to the ancient Egyptians. It so happens that Coptic Egyptians generally tend to have similar skin tones to Muslim Egyptians. Here is a video from 2011 of thousands of Coptic Christians singing in one of the cave churches near the city of Cairo:If you look at the people in this video, you will see they are mostly varying shades of brown. This is consistent with how the pharaonic Egyptians generally portrayed themselves in art and how the late antique Egyptians shown in the Fayum mummy portraits are represented.Egypt’s ever-diverse and changing populationProponents of the view that ancient Egypt was a primarily or exclusively black civilization like to latch onto the date of the Arab conquest as the date when Egyptians supposedly stopped being black, but they are ignoring the fact that people coming to Egypt from the southwest Asia and even Europe is not at all a recent phenomenon in any sense. From the very earliest period in Egyptian history, we have records of people coming to Egypt from all parts of southwest Asia, especially from Canaan, and even from parts of southern Europe.As early as the nineteenth century BC, there were already people immigrating to Egypt from Canaan and Syria in massive numbers. Some of these Canaanites established a territory in the eastern Nile Delta, where they established the Fourteenth Dynasty of Egypt, which ruled contemporaneously with the Egyptian Thirteenth Dynasty.In around the middle of the seventeenth century BC, a people from southwest Asia known as the Hyksos conquered nearly all of Egypt and ruled for about a hundred years before the Hyksos rulers were finally driven out. During the time when Egypt was ruled by Hyksos, it is impossible to imagine that there was no intermarriage between the Egyptians and the ruling people from southwest Asia.From at least the eighteenth century BC onwards, the Minoans, a people from the Aegean islands, also had a very significant presence in northern Egypt. Many Minoan artifacts have been found in Egypt. The palace at Avaris in the Nile Delta, most likely dating to the reign of Hatshepsut (ruled c. 1479 – 1458 BC) or the reign of her nephew Thutmose III (ruled 1479 – 1425 BC), was even decorated with a large number of frescoes in a distinctively Minoan style, suggesting that the Egyptians employed Minoan artists.ABOVE: Reconstruction of a Minoan fresco from the palace at Avaris in the Nile Delta, dating to the fifteenth century BC. Peoples from southeast Europe and southwest Asia have had a significant presence in Egypt since the very beginning.Of course, it is worth noting that, at the same time that there were people coming to Egypt from southwest Asia, there were also large numbers of people coming to Egypt from the south, from what is now Sudan. Indeed, the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty of Egypt (lasted 744 – 656 BC) was made up of rulers who came from the Kingdom of Kush in what is now modern-day Sudan.It is also worth noting that, long before the Arab conquest, Egypt was ruled by the Achaemenid Persians from 525 BC to 404 BC and then again from 343 BC to 332 BC. In 332 BC, Egypt was conquered by Alexander the Great, the king of Makedonia, a kingdom located in northern Greece. After Alexander’s death in 323 BC, Egypt fell under the rule of his general Ptolemaios I Soter, who established a dynasty of Greek rulers that lasted until the death of Cleopatra VII Philopator and the annexation of Egypt by the Roman Empire in 30 BC.Egypt was ruled by Rome all the way until the Arab conquest. In other words, by the time the Arab conquest happened, Egypt had already been ruled by various foreign nations almost continuously for over a millennium. The Arab conquest, then, is perhaps not such an era-defining event as some people have supposed.Meanwhile, as noted above, since the time of the Arab conquest, many people from sub-Saharan Africa have been brought to Egypt through the trans-Saharan slave trade. If the genetic study referenced above is correct, this trade has apparently left quite a substantial mark on the present population of Egypt.None of the foreign nations that have ruled Egypt have ever made any successful effort to exterminate the native population of Egypt. The population of Egypt hasn’t been replaced, but new peoples have moved in and, in some cases, intermarried with members of the local population. There is still direct population continuity from the earliest Egyptians to the Egyptians of the present day.Modern Egyptians are probably not “pureblooded” descendants of the ancient Egyptians, but it is important to remember that the ancient Egyptians were certainly not “pureblooded” descendants of earlier Egyptians either. Egypt has always been a melting pot with inhabitants from all over the place.ABOVE: Hellenistic mosaic from the site of Thmuis dating to around 200 BC depicting Queen Berenike II as the personification of the city of AlexandriaKleopatra VII Philopator’s skin colorThe debate over the skin color of the ancient Egyptians has spilled over into debate over the appearance of Kleopatra VII Philopator, the Greek queen of Egypt whom we know in English as “Cleopatra.” In January 2020, when word came out that Angelina Jolie and Lady Gaga were the main contenders for the role of Cleopatra in an upcoming biopic, many people accused the filmmakers of whitewashing, saying that the Egyptian queen should be portrayed by a black actress.The first problem here is that Cleopatra was not ethnically Egyptian at all; in fact, we know almost her entire family history and, as far as we know, she did not have even a single Egyptian ancestor. Nearly all her ancestors came from the region of Makedonia in northern Greece, bordering on Thrake. Her only known non-Greek ancestor is Apama, the Sogdian wife of her distant ancestor, the Greek king Seleukos I Nikator.Furthermore, as I discuss in this article I wrote in January 2020 about what Cleopatra looked like, we have a tremendous wealth of surviving depictions of Cleopatra from the time when she was alive and none of them give us any evidence that she was what we would consider “black.”In fact, there is a fresco from the city of Herculaneum dating to the first century AD that definitely represents either Cleopatra herself or a member of her family as a pale-skinned redhead. Although the fresco certainly represents a queen belonging to the Ptolemaic dynasty and it most likely represents Cleopatra VII, since it closely resembles the known portraits of her found on coins, we can’t be completely certain that it is her and, if it is indeed her, we can’t be completely certain that it is accurate.Likewise, here too we have to be wary of conventions. The ancient Greeks and Romans also tended to portray women as pale-skinned because pale skin was seen as a marker of feminine beauty. Also, the artist who painted this fresco would have certainly known that the Ptolemies were of Makedonian descent and that Makedonia was in the northern reaches of Greece, near Thrake, meaning we can’t totally rule out the possibility that he may have simply assumed that Cleopatra had red hair based on Greek stereotypes of northerners.ABOVE: First-century AD Roman fresco from the city of Herculaneum representing a Ptolemaic queen of Egypt, probably Cleopatra VII, as a pale-skinned redheadHypatia of Alexandria’s skin colorThere is also some popular contention over the skin color of the Egyptian mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria. I wrote a whole article on this subject in October 2019, but I will summarize the information in that article here.Hypatia was born at some point in the second half of the fourth century AD and was assassinated in March 415 AD by supporters of Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, due to her involvement in a heated political dispute between Cyril and Orestes, the Roman governor of Egypt. (For more information about her life in general, you can read this article I wrote about her in August 2018 or this article I wrote in February 2020, in which I debunk an especially inaccurate portrayal of her in popular culture.)We have far less information about Hypatia than we do about Cleopatra. All we know about her ethnic background is that she came from Alexandria, which is a city in northern Egypt that was founded in Greeks; both she and her father Theon have Greek names; and both she and her father wrote exclusively in Greek. None of this necessarily means that she was ethnically Greek, though, since many people in Egypt during the Hellenistic and Roman Periods who had no Greek ancestors adopted Greek culture.We have no surviving ancient depictions of Hypatia and our only surviving description of her physical appearance is a vague statement from the Greek Neoplatonist philosopher Damaskios of Athens (lived c. 458 – c. 538 AD) that she was “exceedingly beautiful and fair of form.”We have little reason to think that even this description is reliable, though, since Damaskios was not even born until nearly half a century after Hypatia’s death and we have no evidence that he knew anyone who had known her when she was alive. His description of her as extraordinarily beautiful, then, may just be his own male fantasy.In short, we know almost absolutely nothing about what Hypatia looked like. The best guess is that she probably looked somewhat similar to some of the women shown in the Fayum mummy portraits, which give us a vague impression of what ordinary Egyptian women looked like in the time when Hypatia was alive.ABOVE: Image of two different modern portrayals of Hypatia that I featured in this article I published in October 2019. In reality, both of these portrayals are fictional. We have no idea what Hypatia really looked like.Summary and conclusionsThe concepts of a “white race” and a “black race” are modern and would be utterly foreign to the ancient Egyptians. Contrary to what some people have claimed, the name “Kmt” does not mean “Land of the Black People” and the ancient Egyptians did not define themselves in terms of their skin color.Surviving artistic depictions from the pharaonic periods must be treated with caution because they are often highly conventionalized. Nevertheless, they reveal that Egyptians of the pharaonic periods generally tended to portray themselves with brown skin. There are surviving mummies of people in ancient Egypt who would be considered “white,” people who would be considered “black,” and people who fall somewhere in between.Genetic evidence must be treated with caution, since genetics is a lot more complicated than most people realize. Nonetheless, a genetic study of Egyptian mummies published in 2017 concluded that the people in ancient Egypt—or at least people who lived at the site in Egypt where the mummies came from—had a close genetic affinity with modern peoples of the Near East.More realistic surviving depictions of people from Egypt from the Hellenistic and Roman Periods portray them with a range of skin colors, but with brown skin being predominate. This same range of colors still exists in Egypt today and, although the population of Egypt has changed, there is still population continuity between the people of Egypt from the very earliest times and the people of Egypt today.(NOTE: I have also published a version of this article on my website titled “Were the Ancient Egyptians Black?” Here is a link to the version of the article on my website.)

MYTH # 1Gay men molest children at far higher rates than heterosexuals.THE ARGUMENTDepicting gay men as a threat to children may be the single most potent weapon for stoking public fears about homosexuality — and for winning elections and referenda, as Anita Bryant found out during her successful 1977 campaign to overturn a Dade County, Fla., ordinance barring discrimination against gay people. Discredited psychologist Paul Cameron, the most ubiquitous purveyor of anti-gay junk science, has been a major promoter of this myth. Despite having been debunked repeatedly and very publicly, Cameron's work is still widely relied upon by anti-gay organizations, although many no longer quote him by name. Others have cited a group called the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) to claim, as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council did in November 2010, that "the research is overwhelming that homosexuality poses a [molestation] danger to children." A related myth is that same-sex parents will molest their children.THE FACTSAccording to the American Psychological Association, children are not more likely to be molested by LGBT parents or their LGBT friends or acquaintances. Gregory Herek, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who is one of the nation's leading researchers on prejudice against sexual minorities, reviewed a series of studies and found no evidence that gay men molest children at higher rates than heterosexual men.Anti-gay activists who make that claim allege that all men who molest male children should be seen as homosexual. But research by A. Nicholas Groth, a pioneer in the field of sexual abuse of children, shows that is not so. Groth found that there are two types of child molesters: fixated and regressive. The fixated child molester — the stereotypical pedophile — cannot be considered homosexual or heterosexual because "he often finds adults of either sex repulsive" and often molests children of both sexes. Regressive child molesters are generally attracted to other adults, but may "regress" to focusing on children when confronted with stressful situations. Groth found, as Herek notes, that the majority of regressed offenders were heterosexual in their adult relationships.The Child Molestation Research & Prevention Institute notes that 90% of child molesters target children in their network of family and friends, and the majority are men married to women. Most child molesters, therefore, are not gay people lingering outside schools waiting to snatch children from the playground, as much religious-right rhetoric suggests.Some anti-gay ideologues cite ACPeds’ opposition to same-sex parenting as if the organization were a legitimate professional body. In fact, the so-called college is a tiny breakaway faction of the similarly named, 60,000-member American Academy of Pediatrics that requires, as a condition of membership, that joiners "hold true to the group's core beliefs ... [including] that the traditional family unit, headed by an opposite-sex couple, poses far fewer risk factors in the adoption and raising of children." The group's 2010 publication Facts About Youth was described by the American Academy of Pediatrics as not acknowledging scientific and medical evidence with regard to sexual orientation, sexual identity and health, or effective health education. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, was one of several legitimate researchers who said ACPeds misrepresented the institutes’ findings. “It is disturbing to me to see special interest groups distort my scientific observations to make a point against homosexuality,” he wrote. “The information they present is misleading and incorrect.” Another critic of ACPeds is Dr. Gary Remafedi, a researcher at the University of Minnesota who wrote a letter to ACPeds rebuking the organization for misusing his research.In spite of all this, the anti-LGBT right continues to peddle this harmful and baseless myth, which is probably the leading defamatory charge leveled against gay people.MYTH # 2Same-sex parents harm children.THE ARGUMENTMost hard-line anti-gay organizations are heavily invested, from both a religious and a political standpoint, in promoting the traditional nuclear family as the sole framework for the healthy upbringing of children. They maintain a reflexive belief that same-sex parenting must be harmful to children — although the exact nature of that supposed harm varies widely.THE FACTSNo legitimate research has demonstrated that same-sex couples are any more or any less harmful to children than heterosexual couples.The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry affirmed in 2013 that “[c]urrent research shows that children with gay and lesbian parents do not differ from children with heterosexual parents in their emotional development or in their relationships with peers and adults” and they are “not more likely than children of heterosexual parents to develop emotional or behavioral problems.”The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) in a 2002 policy statement declared: "A growing body of scientific literature demonstrates that children who grow up with one or two gay and/or lesbian parents fare as well in emotional, cognitive, social, and sexual functioning as do children whose parents are heterosexual." That policy statement was reaffirmed in 2009 and in 2013, when the AAP stated its support for civil marriage for same-gender couples and full adoption and foster care rights for all parents, regardless of sexual orientation.The American Psychological Association (APA) noted in 2004 that "same-sex couples are remarkably similar to heterosexual couples, and that parenting effectiveness and the adjustment, development and psychological well-being of children is unrelated to parental sexual orientation." In addition, the APA stated that “beliefs that lesbian and gay adults are not fit parents have no empirical foundation.” The next year, in 2005, the APA published a summary of research findings on lesbian and gay parents and reiterated that common negative stereotypes about LGBT parenting are not supported by the data.Similarly, the Child Welfare League of America's official position with regard to same-sex parents is that "lesbian, gay, and bisexual parents are as well-suited to raise children as their heterosexual counterparts."A 2010 review of research on same-sex parenting carried out by LiveScience, a science news website, found no differences between children raised by heterosexual parents and children raised by lesbian parents. In some cases, it found, children in same-sex households may actually be better adjusted than in heterosexual homes.A 2013 preliminary study in Australia found that the children of lesbian and gay parents are not only thriving, but may actually have better overall health and higher rates of family cohesion than heterosexual families. The study is the world’s largest attempt to compare children of same-sex parents to children of heterosexual parents. The full study was published in June 2014.The anti-LGBT right continues, however, to use this myth to deny rights to LGBT people, whether through distorting legitimate research or through “studies” conducted by anti-LGBT sympathizers, such as a 2012 paper popularly known as the Regnerus Study. University of Texas sociology professor Mark Regnerus’ paper purported to demonstrate that same-sex parenting harms children. The study received almost $1 million in funding from anti-LGBT think tanks, and even though Regnerus himself admitted that his study does not show what people say it does with regard to the “harms” of same-sex parenting, it continues to be peddled as “proof” that children are in danger in same-sex households. Since the study’s release, it has been completely discredited because of its faulty methodology and its suspect funding. In 2013, Darren Sherkat, a scholar appointed to review the study by the academic journal that published it, told the Southern Poverty Law Center that he “completely dismiss[es]” the study, saying Regnerus “has been disgraced” and that the study was “bad … substandard.” In spring 2014, the University of Texas’s College of Liberal Arts and Department of Sociology publicly distanced themselves from Regnerus, the day after he testified as an “expert witness” against Michigan’s same-sex marriage ban. The judge in that case, Bernard Friedman, found that Regnerus’ testimony was “entirely unbelievable and not worthy of serious consideration,” and ruled that Michigan’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. Despite all this, the Regnerus Study is still used in the U.S. and abroad as a tool by anti-LGBT groups to develop anti-LGBT policy and laws.MYTH # 3People become homosexual because they were sexually abused as children or there was a deficiency in sex-role modeling by their parents.THE ARGUMENTMany anti-gay rights activists claim that homosexuality is a mental disorder caused by some psychological trauma or aberration in childhood. This argument is used to counter the common observation that no one, gay or straight, consciously chooses his or her sexual orientation. Joseph Nicolosi, a founder of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, said in 2009 that "if you traumatize a child in a particular way, you will create a homosexual condition." He also has repeatedly said, "Fathers, if you don't hug your sons, some other man will."A side effect of this argument is the demonization of parents of gay men and lesbians, who are led to wonder if they failed to protect a child against sexual abuse or failed as role models in some important way. In October 2010, Kansas State University family studies professor Walter Schumm released a related study in the British Journal of Biosocial Science, which used to be the Eugenics Review. Schumm argued that gay couples are more likely than heterosexuals to raise gay or lesbian children through modeling “gay behavior.” Schumm, who has also argued that lesbian relationships are unstable, has ties to discredited psychologist and anti-LGBT fabulist Paul Cameron, the author of numerous completely baseless “studies” about the alleged evils of homosexuality. Critics of Schumm’s study note that he appears to have merely aggregated anecdotal data, resulting in a biased sample.THE FACTSNo scientifically sound study has definitively linked sexual orientation or identity with parental role-modeling or childhood sexual abuse.The American Psychiatric Association noted in a 2000 fact sheet available on the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists, that dealing with gay, lesbian and bisexual issues, that sexual abuse does not appear to be any more prevalent among children who grow up and identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual than in children who grow up and identify as heterosexual.Similarly, the National Organization on Male Sexual Victimization notes on its website that "experts in the human sexuality field do not believe that premature sexual experiences play a significant role in late adolescent or adult sexual orientation" and added that it's unlikely that anyone can make another person gay or heterosexual.Advocates for Youth, an organization that works in the U.S. and abroad in the field of adolescent reproductive and sexual health also has stated that sexual abuse does not “cause” heterosexual youth to become gay.In 2009, Dr. Warren Throckmorton, a psychologist at the Christian Grove City College, noted in an analysis that “the research on sexual abuse among GLBT populations is often misused to make inferences about causation [of homosexuality].”MYTH # 4LGBT people don't live nearly as long as heterosexuals.THE ARGUMENTAnti-LGBT organizations, seeking to promote heterosexuality as the healthier "choice," often offer up the purportedly shorter life spans and poorer physical and mental health of gays and lesbians as reasons why they shouldn't be allowed to adopt or foster children.THE FACTSThis falsehood can be traced directly to the discredited research of Paul Cameron and his Family Research Institute, specifically a 1994 paper he co-wrote entitled "The Lifespan of Homosexuals." Using obituaries collected from newspapers serving the gay community, he and his two co-authors concluded that gay men died, on average, at 43, compared to an average life expectancy at the time of around 73 for all U.S. men. On the basis of the same obituaries, Cameron also claimed that gay men are 18 times more likely to die in car accidents than heterosexuals, 22 times more likely to die of heart attacks than whites, and 11 times more likely than blacks to die of the same cause. He also concluded that lesbians are 487 times more likely to die of murder, suicide, or accidents than straight women.Remarkably, these claims have become staples of the anti-gay right and have frequently made their way into far more mainstream venues. For example, William Bennett, education secretary under President Reagan, used Cameron's statistics in a 1997 interview he gave to ABC News' "This Week."However, like virtually all of his "research," Cameron's methodology is egregiously flawed — most obviously because the sample he selected (the data from the obits) was not remotely statistically representative of the LGBT population as a whole. Even Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has called Cameron's methods "just ridiculous."Anti-LGBT organizations have also tried to support this claim by distorting the work of legitimate scholars, like a 1997 study conducted by a Canadian team of researchers that dealt with gay and bisexual men living in Vancouver in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The authors of the study became aware that their work was being misrepresented by anti-LGBT groups, and issued a response taking the groups to task.MYTH # 5Gay men controlled the Nazi Party and helped to orchestrate the Holocaust.THE ARGUMENTThis claim comes directly from a 1995 book titled The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams. Lively is the virulently anti-gay founder of Abiding Truth Ministries and Abrams is an organizer of a group called the International Committee for Holocaust Truth, which came together in 1994 and included Lively as a member.The primary argument Lively and Abrams make is that gay people were not victimized by the Holocaust. Rather, Hitler deliberately sought gay men for his inner circle because their "unusual brutality" would help him run the party and mastermind the Holocaust. In fact, "the Nazi party was entirely controlled by militaristic male homosexuals throughout its short history," the book claims. "While we cannot say that homosexuals caused the Holocaust, we must not ignore their central role in Nazism," Lively and Abrams add. "To the myth of the 'pink triangle' — the notion that all homosexuals in Nazi Germany were persecuted — we must respond with the reality of the 'pink swastika.'"These claims have been picked up by a number of anti-gay groups and individuals, including Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, as proof that gay men and lesbians are violent and sick. The book has also attracted an audience among anti-gay church leaders in Eastern Europe and among Russian-speaking anti-gay activists in America.THE FACTSThe Pink Swastika has been roundly discredited by legitimate historians and other scholars. Christine Mueller, professor of history at Reed College, did a 1994 line-by-line refutation of an earlier Abrams article on the topic and of the broader claim that the Nazi Party was "entirely controlled" by gay men. Historian Jon David Wynecken at Grove City College also refuted the book, pointing out that Lively and Abrams did no primary research of their own, instead using out-of-context citations of some legitimate sources while ignoring information from those same sources that ran counter to their thesis.The myth that the Nazis condoned homosexuality sprang up in the 1930s, started by socialist opponents of the Nazis as a slander against Nazi leaders. Credible historians believe that only one of the half-dozen leaders in Hitler's inner circle, Ernst Röhm, was gay. (Röhm was murdered on Hitler's orders in 1934.) The Nazis considered homosexuality one aspect of the "degeneracy" they were trying to eradicate.When Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party came to power in 1933, it quickly strengthened Germany's existing penalties against homosexuality. Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's security chief, announced that homosexuality was to be "eliminated" in Germany, along with miscegenation among the races. Historians estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality (or suspicion of it) under the Nazi regime. These men were routinely sent to concentration camps and many thousands died there.Himmler expressed his views on homosexuality like this: "We must exterminate these people root and branch. ... We can't permit such danger to the country; the homosexual must be completely eliminated."MYTH # 6Hate crime laws will lead to the jailing of pastors who criticize homosexuality and the legalization of practices like bestiality and necrophilia.THE ARGUMENTAnti-gay activists, who have long opposed adding LGBT people to those protected by hate crime legislation, have repeatedly claimed that such laws would lead to the jailing of religious figures who preach against homosexuality — part of a bid to gain the backing of the broader religious community for their position. Janet Porter of Faith2Action, for example, was one of many who asserted that the federal Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act — signed into law by President Obama in October 2009 — would "jail pastors" because it "criminalizes speech against the homosexual agenda."In a related assertion, anti-gay activists claimed the law would lead to the legalization of psychosexual disorders (paraphilias) like bestiality and pedophilia. Bob Unruh, a conservative Christian journalist who left The Associated Press in 2006 for the right-wing, conspiracist news site WorldNetDaily, said shortly before the federal law was passed that it would legalize "all 547 forms of sexual deviancy or 'paraphilias' listed by the American Psychiatric Association." This claim was repeated by many anti-gay organizations, including the Illinois Family Institute.THE FACTSThe claim that hate crime laws could result in the imprisonment of those who "oppose the homosexual lifestyle" is false. The First Amendment provides robust protections of free speech, and case law makes it clear that even a preacher who publicly suggested that gays and lesbians should be killed would be protected.Neither do hate crime laws — which provide for enhanced penalties when persons are victimized because of their "sexual orientation" (among other factors) — "protect pedophiles," as Janet Porter and many others have claimed. According to the American Psychological Association, sexual orientation refers to heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality — not paraphilias such as pedophilia. Paraphilias, as defined (pdf; may require a different browser) by the American Psychiatric Association, are characterized by sexual urges or behaviors directed at non-consenting persons or those unable to consent like children, or that involve another person’s psychological distress, injury, or death.Moreover, even if pedophiles, for example, were protected under a hate crime law — and such a law has not been suggested or contemplated anywhere — that would not legalize or "protect" pedophilia. Pedophilia is illegal sexual activity, and a law that more severely punished people who attacked pedophiles would not change that.MYTH # 7Allowing gay people to serve openly will damage the armed forces.THE ARGUMENTAnti-gay groups have been adamantly opposed to allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the armed forces, not only because of their purported fear that combat readiness will be undermined, but because the military has long been considered the purest meritocracy in America (the armed forces were successfully racially integrated long before American civil society, for example). If gays serve honorably and effectively in this meritocracy, that suggests that there is no rational basis for discriminating against them in any way.THE FACTSGays and lesbians have long served in the U.S. armed forces, though under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) policy that governed the military between 1993 and 2011, they could not do so openly. At the same time, gays and lesbians have served openly for years in the armed forces of 25 countries (as of 2010), including Britain, Israel, South Africa, Canada and Australia, according to a report released by the Palm Center, a policy think tank at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The Palm Center report concluded that lifting bans against openly gay service personnel in these countries "ha[s] had no negative impact on morale, recruitment, retention, readiness or overall combat effectiveness." Successful transitions to new policies were attributed to clear signals of leadership support and a focus on a uniform code of behavior without regard to sexual orientation.A 2008 Military Times poll of active-duty military personnel, often cited by anti-gay activists, found that 10% of respondents said they would consider leaving the military if the DADT policy were repealed. That would have meant that some 228,000 people might have left the military the policy’s 2011 repeal. But a 2009 review of that poll by the Palm Center suggested a wide disparity between what soldiers said they would do and their actual actions. It noted, for example, that far more than 10% of West Point officers in the 1970s said they would leave the service if women were admitted to the academy. "But when the integration became a reality," the report said, "there was no mass exodus; the opinions turned out to be just opinions." Similarly, a 1985 survey of 6,500 male Canadian service members and a 1996 survey of 13,500 British service members each revealed that nearly two-thirds expressed strong reservations about serving with gays. Yet when those countries lifted bans on gays serving openly, virtually no one left the service for that reason. "None of the dire predictions of doom came true," the Palm Center report said.Despite the fact that gay men and lesbians have been serving openly in the military since September 2011, anti-LGBT groups continue to claim that openly gay personnel are causing problems in the military, including claims of sexual abuse by gay and lesbian soldiers of straight soldiers. The Palm Center refutes this claim, and in an analysis, found that repealing DADT has had “no overall negative impact on military readiness or its component dimensions,” including sexual assault. According to then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in 2012, the repeal of DADT was being implemented effectively and was having no impact on readiness, unit cohesion or morale. Panetta also issued an LGBT Pride message in 2012.MYTH # 8Gay people are more prone to be mentally ill and to abuse drugs and alcohol.THE ARGUMENTAnti-LGBT groups want not only to depict sexual orientation as something that can be changed but also to show that heterosexuality is the most desirable "choice," even if religious arguments are set aside. The most frequently used secular argument made by anti-LGBT groups in that regard is that homosexuality is inherently unhealthy, both mentally and physically. As a result, most anti-LGBT rights groups reject the 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. Some of these groups, including the particularly hard-line Traditional Values Coalition, claim that "homosexual activists" managed to infiltrate the APA in order to sway its decision.THE FACTSAll major professional mental health organizations are on record as stating that homosexuality is not a mental disorder.The American Psychological Association states that being gay is just as healthy as being straight, and noted that the 1950s-era work of Dr. Evelyn Hooker started to dismantle this myth. In 1975, the association issued a statement that said, in part, “homosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgment, reliability or general social and vocational capabilities.” The association has clearly stated in the past that “homosexuality is neither mental illness nor mental depravity. … Study after study documents the mental health of gay men and lesbians. Studies of judgment, stability, reliability, and social and vocational adaptiveness all show that gay men and lesbians function every bit as well as heterosexuals.”The American Psychiatric Association states that (PDF; may not open in all browsers) homosexuality is not a mental disorder and that all major professional health organizations are on record as confirming that. The organization removed homosexuality from its official diagnostic manual in 1973 after extensive review of the scientific literature and consultation with experts, who concluded that homosexuality is not a mental illness.Though it is true that LGBT people tend to suffer higher rates of anxiety, depression, and depression-related illnesses and behaviors like alcohol and drug abuse than the general population, that is due to the historical social stigmatization of homosexuality and violence directed at LGBT people, not because of homosexuality itself. Studies done during the past several years have determined that it is the stress of being a member of a minority group in an often-hostile society — and not LGBT identity itself — that accounts for the higher levels of mental illness and drug use.Richard J. Wolitski, an expert on minority status and public health issues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, put it like this in 2008: "Economic disadvantage, stigma, and discrimination ... increase stress and diminish the ability of individuals [in minority groups] to cope with stress, which in turn contribute to poor physical and mental health."Even as early as 1994, external stressors were recognized as a potential cause of emotional distress of LGBT people. A report presented by the Council on Scientific Affairs to the AMA House of Delegates Interim Meeting with regard to reparative (“ex-gay”) therapy noted that most of the emotional disturbance gay men and lesbians experience around their sexual identity is not based on physiological causes, but rather on “a sense of alienation in an unaccepting environment.”In 2014, a study, conducted by several researchers at major universities and the Rand Corporation, found that LGBT people living in highly anti-LGBT communities and circumstances face serious health concerns and even premature death because of social stigmatization and exclusion. One of the researchers, Dr. Mark Hatzenbuehler, a sociomedical sciences professor at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, said that the data gathered in the study suggests that “sexual minorities living in communities with high levels of anti-gay prejudice have increased risk of mortality, compared to low-prejudice communities.”Homosexuality is not a mental illness or emotional problem and being LGBT does not cause someone to be mentally ill, contrary to what anti-LGBT organizations say. Rather, social stigmatization and prejudice appear to contribute to health disparities in the LGBT population, which include emotional and psychological distress and harmful coping mechanisms.MYTH # 9No one is born gay.THE ARGUMENTAnti-gay activists keenly oppose the granting of "special" civil rights protections to gay people similar to those afforded black Americans and other minorities. But if people are born gay — in the same way that people have no choice as to whether they are black or white — discrimination against gay men and lesbians would be vastly more difficult to justify. Thus, anti-gay forces insist that sexual orientation is a behavior that can be changed, not an immutable characteristic.THE FACTSModern science cannot state conclusively what causes sexual orientation, but a great many studies suggest that it is the result of both biological and environmental forces, not a personal "choice." A 2008 Swedish study of twins (the world's largest twin study) published in The Archives of Sexual Behavior concluded that "[h]omosexual behaviour is largely shaped by genetics and random environmental factors." Dr. Qazi Rahman, study co-author and a leading scientist on human sexual orientation, said: "This study puts cold water on any concerns that we are looking for a single 'gay gene' or a single environmental variable which could be used to 'select out' homosexuality — the factors which influence sexual orientation are complex. And we are not simply talking about homosexuality here — heterosexual behaviour is also influenced by a mixture of genetic and environmental factors." In other words, sexual orientation in general — whether homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual — is a mixture of genetic and environmental factors.The American Psychological Association (APA) states that sexual orientation “ranges along a continuum,” and acknowledges that despite much research into the possible genetic, hormonal, social and cultural influences on sexual orientation, scientists have yet to pinpoint the precise causes of sexual orientation. Regardless, the APA concludes that "most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation." In 1994, the APA noted that “homosexuality is not a matter of individual choice” and that research “suggests that the homosexual orientation is in place very early in the life cycle, possibly even before birth.”The American Academy of Pediatrics stated in 1993 (updated in 2004) that “homosexuality has existed in most societies for as long as recorded descriptions of sexual beliefs and practices have been available” and that even at that time, “most scholars in the field state that one’s sexual orientation is not a choice … individuals do not choose to be homosexual or heterosexual.”There are questions about what specifically causes sexual orientation in general, but most current science acknowledges that it is a complex mixture of biological, environmental, and possibly hormonal factors but that no one chooses an orientation.MYTH # 10Gay people can choose to leave homosexuality.THE ARGUMENTIf people are not born gay, as anti-gay activists claim, then it should be possible for individuals to abandon homosexuality. This view is buttressed among religiously motivated anti-gay activists by the idea that homosexual practice is a sin and humans have the free will needed to reject sinful urges.A number of "ex-gay" religious ministries have sprung up in recent years with the aim of teaching gay people to become heterosexuals, and these have become prime purveyors of the claim that gays and lesbians, with the aid of mental therapy and Christian teachings, can "come out of homosexuality." The now defunct Exodus International, the largest of these ministries, once stated, "You don't have to be gay!" Meanwhile, in a more secular vein, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality describes itself as "a professional, scientific organization that offers hope to those who struggle with unwanted homosexuality."THE FACTS"Reparative" or sexual reorientation therapy — the pseudo-scientific foundation of the ex-gay movement — has been rejected by all the established and reputable American medical, psychological, psychiatric and professional counseling organizations. In 2009, for instance, the American Psychological Association adopted a resolution, accompanied by a 138-page report, that repudiated ex-gay therapy. The report concluded that compelling evidence suggested that cases of individuals going from gay to straight were "rare" and that "many individuals continued to experience same-sex sexual attractions" after reparative therapy. The APA resolution added that "there is insufficient evidence to support the use of psychological interventions to change sexual orientation" and asked "mental health professionals to avoid misrepresenting the efficacy of sexual orientation change efforts by promoting or promising change in sexual orientation." The resolution also affirmed that same-sex sexual and romantic feelings are normal.A very large number of professional medical, scientific and counseling organizations in the U.S. and abroad have issued statements regarding the harm that reparative therapy can cause, particularly if it’s based on the assumption that homosexuality is unacceptable. As early as 1993, the American Academy of Pediatrics stated that “[t]herapy directed at specifically changing sexual orientation is contraindicated, since it can provoke guilt and anxiety while having little or no potential for achieving change in orientation.”The American Medical Association officially opposes reparative therapy that is “based on the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder or based on an a priori assumption that the person should change his/her homosexual orientation.”The Pan-American Health Organization, the world’s oldest international public health agency, issued a statement in 2012 that said, in part: “Services that purport to ‘cure’ people with non-heterosexual sexual orientation lack medical justification and represent a serious threat to the health and well-being of affected people.” The statement continues, “In none of its individual manifestations does homosexuality constitute a disorder or an illness, and therefore it requires no cure.”Some of the most striking, if anecdotal, evidence of the ineffectiveness of sexual reorientation therapy has been the numerous failures of some of its most ardent advocates. For example, the founder of Exodus International, Michael Bussee, left the organization in 1979 with a fellow male ex-gay counselor because the two had fallen in love. Other examples include George Rekers, a former board member of NARTH and formerly a leading scholar of the anti-LGBT Christian right who was revealed to have been involved in a same-sex tryst in 2010. John Paulk, former poster child of the massive ex-gay campaign “Love Won Out” in the late 1990s, is now living as a happy gay man. And Robert Spitzer, a preeminent psychiatrist whose 2001 research that seemed to indicate that some gay people had changed their orientation, repudiated his own study in 2012. The Spitzer study had been widely used by anti-LGBT organizations as “proof” that sexual orientation can change.In 2013, Exodus International, formerly one of the largest ex-gay ministries in the world, shut down after its director, Alan Chambers, issued an apology to the LGBT community. Chambers, who is married to a woman, has acknowledged that his same-sex attraction has not changed. At a 2012 conference, he said: “The majority of people that I have met, and I would say the majority meaning 99.9% of them, have not experienced a change in their orientation or have gotten to a place where they could say they could never be tempted or are not tempted in some way or experience some level of same-sex attraction.”1. “We need to protect marriage.”The word “protect” implies that gay people are a threat to the institution of marriage. To imply that including same-sex couples within the definition of marriage will somehow be detrimental or even destructive for the institution is to suggest gay people must be inherently poisonous. It also implies a nefarious gay mafia that is out to wreck marriage for straight people. Naturally if such a mafia existed I would be bound by a code of honour to deny its existence. However, it doesn’t exist.2. “We must preserve traditional marriage.”Given that marriage has always changed to suit the culture of the time and place, I would refrain from ever calling it “traditional”. If marriage was truly traditional, interracial couples would not be allowed to wed, one could marry a child, ceremonies would be arranged by parents to share familial wealth and the Church of England would still be under the authority of the Pope.3. “Marriage is a sacred institution.”The word “sacred” suggests marriage is a solely religious institution. The Office for National Statistics shows how civil, non-religious marriage made up 68 per cent of all marriages in the UK during 2010. Let us not forget matrimony existed long before Jehovah was even a word you weren’t allowed to say.4. “Marriage has always been a bond between one man and one woman.”This declaration ignores the legally married gay couples in Canada, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Belgium, Netherlands, and South Africa. It conveniently forgets the 48 countries where polygamy is still practised. It also omits from history the married gay couples of ancient China and Rome, Mormon polygamy, and the ancient Egyptians who could marry their sisters. The assertion is obviously false.5. “Gay marriage will confuse gender roles.”This hinges on the idea that gender roles are or should be fixed, as dictated by scripture, most often cited for the sake of healthy child development. The love and care homosexual couples routinely provide children are, it would seem, irrelevant. Perhaps it would help to reiterate that gay people are not confused about gender, they are just gay. It is the churches who are deeply confused about gender and sexuality. I would ask them to stop focusing on my genitals, and start paying attention to my humanity.6. “Gay marriage will confuse the terms ‘husband’ and ‘wife’, or ‘mother and ‘father’.”Another form of the previous argument. It is not hard but I’ll say it slowly just in case … married men will refer to themselves … as “husbands”, and married women will refer to themselves … as “wives”. Male parents will be “fathers” and female parents will both be “mothers”. Not so confusing really.7. “Gay people cannot have children and so should not be allowed to marry.”The Archbishop of York John Sentamu used a barely disguised version of this argument in a piece for the Guardian when he referred to “the complementary nature of men and women”. He is insinuating, of course, that homosexual relationships are not complementary by nature because they cannot produce offspring, and therefore they are unnatural and undeserving of the word “marriage”.May I refer him to the elderly or infertile straight couples who cannot produce children? If a complementary relationship hinges on procreative sex, are these relationships unnatural? Should they be allowed to marry?8. “But studies have shown heterosexual parents are better for children.”No, they have not. Dozens of studies have shown gay people to be entirely capable of raising children. While it is true that many reputable studies have shown two-parent families tend to be most beneficial, the gender of the parents has never been shown to matter.The studies cited by actively homophobic organisations like the Coalition for Marriage were funded by anti-gay organisations, or have basic methodology flaws – for example, they would compare married straight couples with un-wed gay couples, or they would take a person who may have had a single curious experience with the same sex and define them as exclusively homosexual. Sometimes, the even more disingenuous will reference studies [PDF] which do not even acknowledge gay parents. Same-sex parents are simply presumed by biased researchers to be equivalent to single parents and step-parents, and therefore use the data interchangeably, which as anyone with an ounce of scientific literacy knows is not the way such studies work.Arguments based on “traditional family” will always be insulting, not just to the healthy, well-adjusted children of gay couples, but to the children raised by single parents, step-parents, grandparents, godparents, foster parents, and siblings.9. “No one has the right to redefine marriage.”Tell that to Henry VIII. When marriage is a civil, legal institution of the state, the citizenship has a right to redefine marriage in accordance with established equality laws.10. “The minority should not have the right to dictate to the majority.”Asking to be included within marriage laws is certainly not equivalent to imposing gay marriage on the majority. No single straight person’s marriage will be affected by letting gay people marry.Another form of the above argument is “Why should we bother changing the law just to cater to 4% of the population?” By this logic, what reason is there to provide any minority equal civil rights?11. “Public opinion polls show most people are against gay marriage.”A petition by the Coalition for Marriage claimed to have 600,000 signatures in opposition to gay marriage in the UK. It should come as no surprise that the directors of the organisation are religious and manipulation of the results was easy. A single person could submit their signature online multiple times providing they used different email addresses (which were not verified). Programs that allow for anonymity of IP addresses also enabled anyone around the world to add their signature.The majority of UK polls demonstrate a majority in favour of gay marriage. These include a 2004 Gallup poll, a 2008 ICM Research poll, a 2009 Populus poll, a 2010 Angus Reid poll, a 2010 Scottish Social Attitudes survey, a 2011 Angus Reid Public Opinion survey, and a 2012 YouGov survey.Even if most people were against gay marriage, which polls consistently show is not the case, majority will is no justification for the exclusion of a minority.12. “Why is it so important for gay people to have marriage?”For the same reason it is important to straight people. Our relationships are just as loving and valid as heterosexual relationships, but our current marriage laws suggest it is not. We are equally human and we should be treated by the law as such.13. “Why do gay people have to get society’s approval?”To turn the argument on its head, one simply has to ask why society feels the need to segregate our rights from those of heterosexuals. It has nothing to do with approval, and has everything to do with equality.14. “There are two sides to the argument. Why can’t we compromise?”Should women have compromised their right to vote? One does not compromise equal rights otherwise they are not equal rights.15. “Gay people in the UK already have civil partnerships which provide all the same rights as marriage.”Civil partnerships were born out of politicians pandering to homophobia. A step in the right direction, perhaps, but they are a separate form of recognition that reaffirmed society’s wish to keep homosexuals at arm’s length should we somehow “diminish” true marriage.Type B: The Arguments That Don’t Even Bother to Hide Their HomophobiaWhile we must look closely to spot the homophobia inherent in some arguments against gay marriage, with others the prejudice is barely disguised at all.16. “I am concerned about the impact gay marriage will have on society/schools.”There is no concern here, only prejudice. We can conclude this because there is absolutely no evidence to suggest gay marriage will harm society. Have the 11 countries where gay marriage is legal crumbled yet? Ultimately the argument turns out to be hyperbolic nonsense designed to instil confusion, fear, and mistrust of gay people.17. “Gay marriage is immoral.”If there is something immoral about legally acknowledging the love between two consenting adults, it would help the argument to state precisely what that is. “God says so” is not an argument. And this article, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, is the real “grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right”.18. “Gay people should not be allowed to marry because they are more likely to be promiscuous.”This claim is based on the degrading preconception that gay people do not feel true love and just have sex with as many people as possible. It is also beside the point - straight couples are not precluded from marriage on the basis they may be unfaithful, so why should gay people?19. “I love my best friend, my brother and my dog. That does not mean we should have the right to marry.”Thank you for reducing the love I have for my long-term partner to friendship, incest or bestiality. May also take the form: “The state should not be blessing every sexual union.”Thank you, again, for reducing my long-term, loving relationship to just sex.Type C: The Really Silly Homophobic Arguments20. “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”Clearly not a Biology graduate.21. “If everybody was gay, mankind would cease to exist.”Ignoring the fact not everyone is gay, and also ignoring the fact gay people can and do have children through donors and surrogates, I actually quite enjoyed the apocalyptic images this argument conjured.22. “Gay rights are fashionable right now.”The Suffragettes famously marched together because they needed an excuse to compare clothing. Civil rights activists looked fabulous with hoses and guns turned on them. Nooses around gay Iranian necks are totally “in” right now. We are all mere lambs of our Queen Gaga.People actually use this argument.23. “The only people who want gay marriage are the liberal elites.”If this was really true, how come hundreds of everyday gay people protest outside anti-gay marriage rallies? How come thousands of people voice their support for gay marriage in polls? I do not imagine there are many people who believe they deserve fewer rights or who desire to be second-class citizens.24. “Gay people do not even want marriage.”Yes, Ann Widdecombe, we do. We do not appreciate you mischaracterising what millions of us do and do not want, and squaring reality to fit your Catholic bigotry.25. “Gay people can already get married – to people of the opposite gender.”This is Michele Bachmann’s demented logic. Yes, gay people can already get married … to people of the opposite gender. No, they are not allowed to marry the people they actually love. This is not just bigotry, it’s also stupidity.26. “There will be drastic consequences for society if we accept gay marriage.”Person A: “Have you been to Canada lately? They have free health care, they play hockey, and they’re very peaceful and polite.”Person B: “That sounds nice.”Person A: “They have gay marriage too.”Person B: “Sounds like Sodom and Gomorrah.”27. “Gay marriage will cause the disestablishment of the church.”Or to put it another way: “If you don’t stop all this silly talk, we will be forced to go away and leave you in peace.” Scary!28. “Gay marriage will lead to polygamy/bestiality/paedophilia/etc.”The truth is that the legalisation of gay marriage will lead to the legalisation of gay marriage. Dire warnings of slippery slopes are scaremongering. In the countries that have so far legalised same-sex marriage, courts have always rejected calls for the legalisation of polygamy.29. “Gay marriage caused the end of the Roman Empire/September 11th/etc.”The Roman Empire disintegrated as barbarians from the north overwhelmed them, forcing the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, to abdicate to the Germanic warlord Odoacer. This had nothing to do with homosexuality.The attacks on the World Trade Center were orchestrated by Al-Qaeda, an extremist Muslim group that detests America. The gay mafia was not involved.30. “You are too emotionally involved to make a rational argument.”Of course I’m angry. Wouldn’t you be if you had to listen to arguments like these? I’m passionate about achieving equality and combating prejudice. But, as everyone should know, passion and reason are complementary.31. “We are in an economic crisis, so we should not be wasting time on gay marriage.”Is it too much to wish for politicians who can multi-task? And for leaders who don’t consider equality a luxury add on?