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 lobbyJuly 17th, 2008
Insure.com, a popular online insurance quote-comparison portal, is proud of its numerous awards. Its web site brags that it was named “best web site” for two years in a row by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine, and the “best life insurance site on the web” by Forbes.com. Insure.com is mentioned every day as a sponsor of Bill O’Reilly’s radio program, with O’Reilly himself voicing the commercials.
Now Insure.com can add another feather to its cap: the Certified Cameronite award for citing the discredited research of holocaust revisionist Paul Cameron.
Last Friday, BTB’s Timothy Kincaid first exposed Insure.com’s false and defamatory article which uses Cameron’s widely-discredited research to claim that gays die, on average, twenty years younger than non-gays. He also reported how Insure.com engaged in deceptive Cameronesque tactics by misrepresenting the findings of another legitimate study from Vancouver conducted at the very height of the AIDS crisis, long before life-saving Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART) became widely available.
We have been very hesitant to issue this award to a publicly traded company like Insure.com because we recognize that many people who are not familiar with Cameron’s research may fall prey to his deceptive tactics. We were, however, disturbed to see that the author of Insure.com’s anti-gay smear also engaged in similar Cameron-like misrepresentations by deliberately misquoting from Dr. Robert Hogg, the Canadian researcher who wrote to denounce the widespread misuse of his research by anti-gay extremists.
So Timothy wrote to Insure.com on June 1 to notify them of the problems with their online post. Communications were cordial at first as CEO Robert Bland personally assured us that they don’t have a political stance and that he would look into the claims himself. He asked for one to four weeks to investigate; we ultimately gave him six. Today, those false claims are still on Insure.com’s web site, and Bland has written numerous comments on this web site repeatedly touting Cameron’s credentials.
Since Insure.com still appears to be willfully ignorant about Cameron’s credentials, here they are in a handy, one-stop reference:
Cameron has written approvingly of how the Nazis “dealt with” homosexuality at the Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, and he once suggested that exterminating homosexuals might be an option here unless we got “medically lucky.” His obvious hatred for gays and lesbians so poisons everything he writes that Focus On the Family scrubbed their materials of all mention of him more than a decade ago.
In fact, the only people who rely on Cameron anymore are those who occupy the most radical fringes of anti-gay extremists. Insure.com, CEO Robert Bland, and author Joseph White are now officially in their company.
See also:
Aug 15: Insure.com Pulls Cameron Quotes
Jul 17: Certified Cameronite: Insure.com
Jul 14: Insure.com CEO Defends Paul Cameron
Jul 11: Insure.com’s CEO Bob Bland Responds
Jul 11: Insure.com’s Anti-Gay Propaganda
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John
July 17th, 2008
Jim Burroway wrote: “His obvious hatred for gays and lesbians so poisons everything he writes that Focus On the Family scrubbed their materials of all mention of him more than a decade ago.”
I thought that Focus on the Family only got rid the Cameron’s material after Cameron started insulting Dobson publicly about some ballot measure in Colorado. I think you may be giving Focus on the Family more credit than they deserve by implying their actions were due to concern about the truth when in comes to social science research about gays and lesbians.
Patrick ONeill
July 17th, 2008
Could someone in CA PLEASE file a complaint against this company ?
Jim Burroway
July 17th, 2008
John,
You may be thinking of this incident in 2006. FOTF had long since gotten rid of any mention of Cameron by then.
John
July 17th, 2008
Jim,
I stand corrected. Perhaps Cameron felt emboldened at that point, since he had nothing further to lose.
Serves me right for doubting you…(grin).
Richard Rush
July 20th, 2008
A letter from Robert Bland to Reason Magazine in 2002 concerning sexual abuse by Catholic priests may help illuminate his mindset and agenda. This sentence jumped out as a smoking gun (emphasis mine):
This would seem to tell us most of what we need to know about Mr. Bland.
The full letter can be found here. It’s near the bottom of the page. (I doubt that it could be from a different Robert Bland since his location is listed as Darien, IL, the same as Insure.com’s mailing address.)
Matt Algren
August 14th, 2008
I was doing some research on Cameron and ran across this article. The article from insure.com is gone, with the link redirecting to an article called “The life insurance outlook for
HIV-positive gay men”, which shows an update on July 31, 2008. Not sure about the veracity of their new statistics, but Bland’s name is nowhere near the article.
Incidentally, we may have a new Certified Cameronite waiting in the wings, depending on interpretation of paragraph 13 of George Guthrie’s article “No True Compassion Apart From Revelationâ€.
(More information at my blog, plug plug plug.)
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