The Seattle Times needs a refresher course on impartial journalism. Staff reporter Lornet Turnbull didn't even try to cover her liberal tracks as she embraced the LGBT agenda in a March 31 article [1]: “Census Will Count Gay Couples Who Check 'Husband or Wife.'”
Turnbull's article about the LGBT community's anger toward the Census Bureau tilted in favor of the homosexual agenda with sources stacked 3-to-1.
Josh Friedes, the executive director of a Seattle LGBT advocacy group, told Turnbull that “even in the absence of federal recognition of our relationships, we have an opportunity to say on an official form that, 'Yes, we are married,' 'Yes, our relationships are every bit as equal to everyone else's.'”
Friedes was heavily quoted in Turnbull's story: three direct quotes and his opinion was references two other times in the nearly 1,300 word article. Despite the fact that any LGBT person can fill out their census form and check “married” or “unmarried partner” if they choose, Friedes claimed that “the census will still leave many, if not most, LGBT people invisible.”
Turnbull failed to remind reader that the primary purpose of the census is to determine population counts so that Congressional districts can be apportioned, not to determine the sexual orientation of the American public.
She admitted that “people are free to fill out their [census] forms however they feel best reflects them,” so gay and lesbian couples that share a home can list themselves as married even if the marriage isn't legal.
The Obama administration has even made a big push to include gays, lesbians and transgendered in the census count by “bringing partnership specialists on board to do outreach and educating people around the issues,” Turnbull wrote.
Yet Turnbull and the LGBT advocates she filled her story with claimed that wasn't enough progress; it was just a “partial breakthrough.”
Marsha Botzer, co-chair of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, told Turnbull that LGBT's want the government to “queer the census,” by providing “clearer sexual orientation and gender-identity questions.”
Jaime Grant, director of the Policy Institute at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, told Turnbull that the government isn't doing enough and accused the Census Bureau of making “excuses.”
As if those three advocates weren't enough for the story, Turnbull also included Gary Gates, senior UCLA research fellow studying LGBT's, who argued that the LGBT community deserves special attention because “ same-sex relationships are very complicated.”
Only one opposing perspective was included in Turnbull's slanted article. That was Gary Randall, president of the Faith and Freedom Network, who said that giving gays such preference reflects “the president's agenda to advance the gay agenda – to build the numbers artificially so that consequently you create a power base that's unrealistic and inflated.”
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