WND Misleads on Controversial Seminar
Topic: WorldNetDaily
We shouldn’t be surprised that WorldNetDaily would avoid offering the full context surrounding controversial remarks -- after all, it happens so often. And it has happened once again in the case of a controversial seminar at a Boulder, Colorado, high school.
 
A May 21 WND article by Bob Unruh reported that a speaker "told students as young as 14 to go have sex and use drugs":

The instructions came from Joel Becker, an associate clinical professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles.
 
"I am going to encourage you to have sex and encourage you to use drugs appropriately," Becker said during his appearance at the school as part of a recent panel sponsored by the University of Colorado's Conference on World Affairs.
 
"Why I am going to take that position is because you are going to do it anyway," he continued. "I think as a psychologist and health educator, it is more important to educate you in a direction that you might actually stick to. So, I am going to stay mostly on with the sex side because that is the area I know more about. I want to encourage you to all have healthy, sexual behavior." 

But Unruh doesn’t offer the full context of Becker’s remarks. For that, we turn to ... another conservative, Dave Kopel of the Colorado-based Independence Institute. Kopel was so put off by false and misleading claims about the incident by the likes of Bill O’Reilly -- in an appearance on Fox News' "The O’Reilly Factor,” O’Reilly attacked Kopel, at one point saying, "If you’re not a secular progressive, then I’m Donald Duck," an absurdity even Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid criticized -- he wrote a report about it. While Kopel was critical of Becker’s speech, he also noted that Becker essentially reversed himself by the end of his talk, saying, "I'm not telling you whether you should or you shouldn't choose abstinence; I just think if you choose abstinence, it doesn't obviate your need to still be educated about sex.'
 
Unruh also repeated Becker's statement that "there are psychiatrists who will do sessions under the influence of ecstasy" without noting that, as Kopel told O’Reilly, ecstasy is, in fact, used in some psychiatric treatments in Europe.
 
Unruh repeated the out-of-context statements by Becker in a May 25 WND article; an unbylined June 16 article also repeats them.
 
All three of these articles made an attempt to tie the seminar to examples of other schools offering assemblies that "promote homosexuality" or, in one case, "a 'gay' indoctrination seminar." As we’ve noted, WND considers any non-negative reference to homosexuality to be "promotion" or "indoctrination."