The Human Rights Campaign's Sham Rankings

The grievance-industry racket is as old as the culture war itself. But rarely has it been practiced as transparently as it was this past week by the Human Rights Campaign.

You may recall the Human Rights Campaign from its two-decade drive to legalize same-sex marriage, which HRC cleverly packaged as an apolitical, universal "human right." Having won their victory through the majesty of Anthony Kennedy's pen, however, the folks at HRC decided not to press on for same-sex marriage in, say, Saudi Arabia and China, but rather to throw themselves fully into shakedown mode here at home, where they make busy with corporate outreach (companies pay them to achieve bronze, silver, gold, or platinum "partnerships") and fundraising (you can get a specialty HRC Visa card to automate donations) and bullying the occasional doctor or scientist who will not parrot the current orthodoxy on human sexuality.

Last fall, for instance, Lawrence Mayer and Paul McHugh published a report on sexuality and gender in the New Atlantis, a journal on technology and society. Mayer is an epidemiologist trained in psychiatry who is a resident scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Paul McHugh is a professor of psychiatry at Hopkins. Their report, a review of the scientific literature on the nature of sexual orientation, sexuality, and gender identity, was a detailed yet accessible document written for a general audience. (We covered it in these pages at the time, "Studying the Unstudiable," September 12, 2016.)

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