A few years back, we noticed that CNSNews.com’s reporting on supposedly wasteful spending was disproportionately focused on LGBT-related issues — nor surprising since CNS has an anti-gay agenda and a managing editor who absolutely hates the LGBT community.
Now, CNS appears to be cranking up the wasteful spending outrage machine again — and the first two items, by Melanie Arter, are LGBT-related.
Arter lamented in a July 27 article: The National Institutes of Health awarded $569,028 in taxpayer funding to the Medical College of Wisconsin to study how the country’s “perceived immigration laws” impact the ‘HIV health behavior’ of Hispanic immigrants.” On Aug. 6 she attacked a similar NIH grant: “The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded Lehigh University $431,119 in taxpayer funds for HIV intervention among heroin and crack users along the U.S.-Mexico border.”
Arter doesn’t reference homosexuality in either article; both do reference drug use. But HIV and homosexuality are effectively synonymous in CNS’ eyes, so these articles count toward its anti-gay agenda. Both articles also reference either immigrants or the U.S.-Mexico border, so your typical right-wing anti-immigrant sentiment is touched upon as well.
Nor does Arter give the grantees sufficient time to respond to her attacks; instead, she states that neither grantee responded to her “by the time this article was published,” though she doesn’t say how much time she gave them to respond.
Finally, Arter never explains why this federal spending is so offensive to her. Is it the immigrants? The HIV? The universities that got the grants?
Absent that, there’s no reason not to suspect the most base and biased motives for CNS attacking these grants.