American College of Pediatricians Exposes Itself in Public

The American College of Perverts Pediatricians (ACPEDS to their fiends, those freaks obsessed with your junk to decent humans) can’t stop showing everyone their junk.

A link to an unsecured Google Drive published on the group’s website pointed users last week to a large cache of sensitive documents, including financial and tax records, membership rolls, and email exchanges spanning over a decade.

ACPEDS keeps describing these self-inflicted whoopsie doodles as cyberattacks, LOL.

The more than 10,000 documents lay bare the outsize influence of a small conservative organization working to lend a veneer of medical science to evangelical beliefs on parenting, sex, procreation, and gender.

ACPEDs is an anti-LGBTQ hate group, which has also jumped on the anti-choice train, masquerading as a medical organization that denies accepted science in order to do harm.

Because bothering God is never enough for these people.

Exactly the sorts who should not be allowed within 500 yards of a minor. I hope some outlet releases the full membership list ASAP so parents will know to either take their children to another provider or – if that isn’t feasible – warn Dr. Christofascist to keep their beliefs to themselves.

The American College of Pediatricians, which has fought to deprive gay couples of their parental rights and encouraged public schools to treat LGBTQ youth as if they were mentally ill, is one of a handful of conservative think tanks leading the charge against abortion in the United States. A federal lawsuit filed by the College and its partners against the US Food and Drug Administration seeks to limit nationwide access to what is today the most common form of abortion.

The group split off from the 67,000-strong American Academy of Pediatrics back in 2002 because the AAP had the temerity to say that science showed that all the oogaboogaing about same sex parents was just that. Why ACPEDS didn’t split in 1994, when the AAP’s Pediatrics in Review published an article that begins as follows is anyone’s guess.

There are no data to suggest that children who have gay or lesbian parents are different in any aspects of psychological, social, and sexual development from children in heterosexual families. There has been fear that children raised in gay or lesbian households will grow up to be homosexual, develop improper sex-role behavior or sexual conflicts, and may be sexually abused. There has been concern that children raised by gay or lesbian parents will be stigmatized and have conflicts with their peer group, thus threatening their psychological health, self-esteem, and social relationships. These fears and concerns have not been substantiated by research. Pediatricians can facilitate the health care and development of these children by being aware of these and their own attitudes, by educating themselves about special concerns of gay or lesbian parents, and by being a resource and an advocate for children who have homosexual parents.

It may be worth noting that in 1994 Fox News was minus two years old and the internet as used by the general public was just one tube. Perhaps monetizing hate was just too hard for perverted pediatric physicians in 94. Or maybe they didn’t read the journal articles.

To say the group has struggled to attract members since it’s creation is to say that Donald tRump’s combforward struggles to hide the fact he’s going bald. As the Wired article notes, despite a stated desire for a membership roll of at least 10,000, ACPEDS has attracted about 700 members in the past 20 years. I don’t know how selective they are about membership, but my guess is anyone willing and able to send them money is in.

And of course there’ll be grift.

A contract in the leaked documents dated April 2021 shows the ADF agreeing to legally represent the College free of charge. It stipulates that ADF’s ability to subsidize expenses incurred during lawsuits would be limited by ethical guidelines; however, it could still forgive any lingering costs simply by declaring the College “indigent.”

Evangelical ethics: Whatever they say is ethical at the moment they say it.

Unlike legitimate organizations like the AAP, ACPEDS spends most of its time worrying about people’s undercarriages and what they do with them. I searched the term “firearms” on the ACPEDS site and got zero results. The APP – more than 1,000.

Meanwhile ACPEDS is trying to draw members with crap like this.

The materials include links to a website instructing doctors on how to speak to children in a variety of scenarios about a multitude of topics surrounding sex, including in the absence of their parents. Practice scripts of conversations between doctors and patients advise, among other things, ways to elicit a child’s thoughts on sex with the help of an imaginative metaphor.

“Hey Billy, if you were a hotdog, would you want to be put in a hotdog bun or next to another hotdog?”

It is absolutely essential that anyone who is old enough to say they want to talk to the doctor alone (or nurse practitioner or social worker …) be able to do so. I seem to recall righties reacting poorly to the idea of that level of autonomy for their children, particularly girls. However, those conversations should be used for the purpose of providing medically necessary treatment based on accepted standards of care. NOT for the purpose of allowing some weirdo with a stethoscope to check the child for WrongThink as determined by a bunch of their fellow sweaty religious zealots.

Physicians lobbied by the group are also told to urge patients to purchase Christian-based parenting guides, including one designed to help parents broach the topic of sex with their 11- and 12-year-old kids. The College suggests telling parents to plan a “special overnight trip,” a pretext for instilling in their children sexual norms in line with evangelical practice. The group suggests telling parents to buy a tool called a “getaway kit,” a series of workbooks that run around $54 online. The workbooks methodically walk the parents through the process of springing the topic, but only after a day-long charade of impromptu gift-giving and play.

What I conclude from that paragraph is:

• There’s something about evangelical mating practices that is so mind-bendingly alarming that kids have to be lulled into a false sense of security by day of fun and toys if they’re to have any hope of surviving the discussion with their sanity intact. Perhaps Charles Stross was on to something.
• Evangelicals get such a thrill out of talking to kiddies about sex that they like the build up to the act with a stay in a hotel, gifts, toys, special games, and candles and mood music for all I know. Nasty.
• ACPEDS gets a kickback for every “getaway kit” sold.

Here’s the not funny part.

The College would gain notoriety early on by assailing the positions of the AAP. In 2005, a Boston Globe reporter noted how common it had become for the American College of Pediatricians “to be quoted as a counterpoint” to anything the AAP said.

More bluntly, news outlets gave ACPEDS a megaphone because outlets are willing to treat scientific consensus as a matter for “debate” if one side wants to shit all over marginalized people.

The institution had a rather “august-sounding name,” he wrote, for being run by a “single employee.” 

August-sounding name be damned. Part of the great game of journalisming is vetting potential sources so you don’t waste the readers’ time with crackpottery and give the impression that your outlet is infested with complete slobs. Any outlet that treats ACPEDS’ brain dead bigotry as a counterpoint to the science-based positions of the AAP just wants to give brain dead bigotry an airing.

It’s depressing. So I prefer to think of the moment after some inquisitive reporter clicked on the link to the ACPEDS Google Drive.

People who post off-topic comments are icky little panty sniffers.