Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyFebruary 13th, 2006
Dr. Paul Cameron, founder of the Family Research Institute, is one of the most influential researchers of the anti-gay movement. His statistics often show up in many pronouncements and writings of those who oppose equal rights for gays and lesbians, including such important figures as Coral Ridge Ministries pastor Dr. James Kennedy, the Traditional Values Coalition’s Rev. Lou Shelton, and former Secretary of Education William Bennett.
Dr. Cameron has gained most of his credibility by publishing dozens of articles in professional journals over the past two decades outlining what he considers to be the dangers of homosexual activity. But his research methods have come under fire from other social science professionals who claim that he routinely misrepresents the findings of their work. These allegations led to his being dropped from the American Psychological Association in 1983, as well as condemnations from the Nebraska Psychological Association (where he resided at the time) in 1984, and the American Sociological Association in 1985 (“Dr. Paul Cameron has consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented sociological research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism.”) and again in 1986 (“The American Sociological Association officially and publicly states that Paul Cameron is not a sociologist, and condemns his consistent misrepresentation of sociological research.”)
Despite all this, Dr. Cameron remains very influential among many who oppose equality for gays and lesbians. In 1985, he served as a consultant to California congressman William Dannemeyer shortly after advocating a quarantine of all homosexuals (presumably gay men in particular, since he was serving as an AIDS advisor). In 1992 he was a paid consultant to Colorado’s Attorney General Gale Norton (who is now President Bush’s Secretary of the Interior) as she defended a constitutional amendment to prohibit civil rights laws based on sexual orientation (She lost). And just last year, his claim that children in foster homes with same-sex parents are 11 times as likely to be sexually abused as those with heterosexual parents went unchallenged during a debate on CCN.
While much of his influence comes from the articles he writes for the pay-to-publish professional journal Psychological Reports, he also writes and distributes brochures and newsletters for a lay audience as well. One of his most influential pamphlets, Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do, provides a very typical example of what he writes and how he misuses legitimate social science research to back up his claims. While the pamphlet is written for the average lay audience, the thirty-three footnotes give it a scholarly tone. They also give us an opportunity to verify each of his more than 130 claims, including:
It’s not enough to simply say that his statistics are wrong, as so many of his opponents do. If he’s wrong, the burden of proof rests with those who disagree with him. That’s why, in what will become a twelve-part series, I methodically examine his each and every one of his claims, and in the process I reveal exactly how he misrepresents legitimate social science research to support his statistics. The first six parts of Point By Point: A Look At Paul Cameron’s Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do are now available, with the rest appearing in the next several weeks.
This represents the most comprehensive analysis of Paul Cameron’s work outside of the professional social science community. And all I had to do was to look at his footnotes.
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Phillips
May 27th, 2007
Yes, let’s go through this point by point, shall we?
Well, actually I probably won’t respond to everything I read, since most of your work is nit-picking, however:
You cite Judge Buchmeyer in two instances, but 1) Cameron didn’t rely on Kinsey’s data in his affidavit, the data had been presented by someone else and Cameron simply showed that it had been misrepresented, and 2) Cameron didn’t and never has used the work “proportional” when talkinga about molestations. Only “disproportional”, since while a majority of molestations are heterosexual, since gays make up some 3% of the population and make up some 1/3 of molestation cases, they thus have a higher molestation rate.
Phillips
May 27th, 2007
that’s not my homepage, testing.
Phillips
May 27th, 2007
gr, this’ll have to do.
Phillips
May 27th, 2007
Hurrah! I’ve made it through “Part 1”. Complaints, complaints. Here’s a question: in our politically correct, MSM biased environment, ARE there any such health studies that represent the ‘general gay population’?
Oh! but there is, however much they’ve tried to keep it in the dark…even today the CDC says things like “we’re hoping to draw information of sexuality” (homo. vs. het.) in the future, when, in fact, they already have…
http://familyresearchinst.org/Default.aspx?tabid=66
I’d like to see you pick this one apart. :-)
Oh, and they had already accepted his resignation. Only after he had, per request of the APA pres., submitted an editorial explaining his resignation decision (and showing them for what they’ve become) did they suddenly decide to ‘expell’ him…scanned letters, signatures included below:
http://familyresearchinst.org/Default.aspx?tabid=85
And another note on Buchmeyer, Cameron, in his affidavit, had actually even criticised the Kinsey study on its not be replicated.
http://familyresearchinst.org/Default.aspx?tabid=65
Fernandes
July 28th, 2007
Phillips responds to an article written three months before his own response, making the impression that his questionings couldn’t be responded.
Funny he says that Cameron didn’t rely on Kinsey’s data, but actually criticized it, since Cameron HEAVILY cites, ***uncritically***, the data elsewhere:
http://www.familyresearchinst.org/Default.aspx?tabid=82
“since gays make up some 3% of the population and make up some 1/3 of molestation cases, they thus have a higher molestation rate”
The myth that men who abuse boys are necessarily homosexual or bisexual.
http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/145/6/416
Look at the above article. It is a study on the sexual behavior of a random sample of New Yorker men. According to it, almost 73% of the men who reported having consensual sex with other men in the previous year self-identified as HETEROSEXUAL (the percentage of straight men involved in consencual sex with other men could’ve been even greater if the researchers concentrated in the entire lives of those men, instead of their sexual behavior in the previous year).
It makes one wonder: if men who have had consensual sex with other men are not to be robotically assumed to be homosexual, why do we assume men who force themselves against boys are homosexual?
Burroway has been wonderful in analyzing and pointing to data that deals with this question. Kurt Freund – which is often cited by “family” researchers – found that many men who abuse boys are attracted to females, as can be shown by these articles. He explicitly says in “Heterosexuality, homosexuality, and erotic age preference”:
In “The Discriminative Validity of a Phallometric Test for Pedophilic Interests Among Adolescent Sex Offenders Against Children”, Seto et. al. found that most of the male adults and teenagers who had abused boys, or both boys and girls, were mostly attracted by pictures of female nudes instead of male ones. They say:
In “Sexual offenders against male children: Sexual preference”, Marshall et. al.’s sample of men who sexually attacked boys similarly were shown to be more attracted to female nudes than to male ones – I have to say, however, that this sample was rather small to be said to represent all men who abused boys.
Eugene Abel, another researcher whose data in heavily cited by Christian researchers, seems to disagree with the conclusions drawn by them:
Married, with children, active Christian – is this a loyal portrayal of the 3-6% of the men who say they’re gay or bisexual? Abel continues:
One study by Abel reports findings in the greatest sample of self-admitted child molesters (more than 4000 men, 1400 of whom abused at least one boy) I know of. Says Abel:
Here is the study:
http://www.childmolestationprevention.org/pdfs/study.pdf
That’s all, folks!
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