Box Turtle Bulletin

Anti-gay Arguments We Don’t Bother With (And Should): Part 5

Gabriel Arana

March 3rd, 2009

This is the final post in a five-part a series about anti-gay arguments that get the short shrift in public debate. We examine them here. Readers are encouraged to contribute to the discussion below.

#5: If you pass pro-gay legislation, pastors and private citizens will not be able to voice opposing views.

This falls into the category of arguments that scare people with invented consequences (”You might not have a problem with gay marriage, but do you want to have your rights taken away?”). Anti-marriage advocates in California effectively used this argument to frame Prop. 8 as a referendum on the civil rights of preachers to express anti-gay views instead of what it was — an attempt to overrule judicial protections for gay people.

It was surprisingly how unthinkingly people debated the measure in these terms. The women on The View discussed this as if it were a natural consequence of voting down the marriage amendment. Sherri Shepherd said she voted for Prop. 8 because she respects her pastor and doesn’t want him jailed for speaking out against homosexuality. Barbara Walters was the only one to chime in and say that this consequence seemed “far fetched.” But it’s more than that: it’s blatantly untrue. One of the anti-Prop. 8 campaign’s many blunders was not responding to this charge.

Abortion was legalized decades ago, but this has not stopped anti-abortion activists from stating their views. This, however, isn’t entirely analogous. Certain anti-gay groups are afraid — or strategically instill fear — that if gays receive work protections and civil rights, those who oppose them will be sanctioned for speaking out, perhaps under “hate speech” laws like the ones adopted in many European countries. In the imagined scenario, a pastor decries homosexuality as immoral and is thrown in jail for it.

Such a thing is more plausible in places like Germany, where certain types of speech — i.e. “hate speech” — are banned. But the U.S. is unique among other Western nations in its broad application of “freedom of speech.” Here, you can say hateful things toward minority groups. Groups whose views the general public finds appalling — such as NAMBLA, the KKK or the Westboro Baptist Church — have the right to have their voices heard. The limit on free speech here is that you cannot say things that create a “clear and present danger” to public safety. For example, inciting a riot, directing an enraged mob to murder gays, or screaming “fire” in a crowded theater (when there is no fire) are not protected speech acts.

Adopting gay marriage — or passing any other pro-gay legislation, for that matter — does not change the legal standard of what constitutes free speech, a deeply rooted principle of American law. It might, if attitudes change over time, help relegate anti-gay views to the periphery of public discourse, but this is a social consequence, not a legal one. There is no connection between allowing gay marriage and people losing their right to freedom of speech.

Under Prop. 8, pastors would also not be forced to marry gay people. At issue was the civil right of marriage. In the same way you can have a “men only” club, a church can refuse to perform gay marriages.

Post script: The discussions this series have spawned have been thought-provoking, sometimes heated. We at Box Turtle Bulletin thank you all for sharing your ideas, which make clear the intellectual vibrancy and depth of our readership. A parting thought: a string of comments on one of the posts brought up the question of how effective reasoned argumentation is in changing people’s views. For committed anti-gay activists, commitment to ideology may trump reason. Others on the fence may be more open to the arguments we have dealt with here. The larger question is about how people and society change. It’s a broad question, but one thing I’m sure about is that when it comes to gay rights, one right answer is “too slowly.”

Certified Cameronite: Kathleen Gilbert, OneNewsNow and LifeSite

Jim Burroway

September 24th, 2008

As we reported today, Kathleen Gilbert has reached into the depths of “agenda-driven, pseudo-scientific gobbledygook” by a Nazi apologist to fuel her anti-gay propaganda on the web sites LifeSite News and OneNewsNow.

And so today we have triple-header: three Certified Cameronite Awards go to Gilbert, LifeSite and OneNewsNow. And to add to that, we have a full denunciation from a UK researcher whose study she misrepresented. That’s a home run! Congratulations.

Researcher: LifeSite and OneNewsNow Misrepresent Our Review

Jim Burroway

September 24th, 2008

A British researcher has denounced two North American anti-gay web sites for distorting his research. University College London professor Michael King, in a statement to Box Turtle Bulletin, clarified the findings of his research on depression and suicide among LGB people, and emphasized the importance that “all sectors of society welcome them as equal and valuable citizens.”

Professor King spoke out in response to an article that appeared last Wednesday in LifeSite, an unofficial Catholic web site, which claimed that the “homosexual lifestyle [is] strongly linked to depression [and] suicide.” The same article by Kathleen Gilbert appeared again Saturday on the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow. It began:

A new study in the United Kingdom has revealed that homosexuals are about 50% more likely to suffer from depression and engage in substance abuse than the rest of the population, reports Health24.com.

After analyzing 25 earlier studies on sexual orientation and mental health, researchers, in a study published in the medical journal BMC Psychiatry, also found that the risk of suicide jumped over 200% if an individual had engaged in a homosexual lifestyle.

The LifeSite/OneNewsNow article claims that the study proves lesbians, gays and bisexuals experience this risk not because of stigma or discrimination, but because homosexuality itself is a mental disorder:

Dr. Rick Fitzgibbons, a psychiatrist and member of the Catholic Medical Association, says there is evidence that homosexuality is itself a manifestation of a psychological disorder accompanied by a host of mental health problems, including “major depression, suicidal ideation and attempts, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, conduct disorder, low self-esteem in males and sexual promiscuity with an inability to maintain committed relationships.”

The BMC Psychiatry article by professor Michael King and colleagues is available online for free. This means that you don’t have to take anyone’s word for anything; you can read it yourself. And as you do, you’ll notice that the study bears little resemblance to Gilbert’s description of it.

First, the authors make it clear that participating in a “homosexual lifestyle” — and by that I presume Gilbert means sexual activity — is not a necessary risk factor. The studies that the authors analyzed defined homosexuality and bisexuality by many different standards, including sexual attractions and identity apart from behavior.

The authors also make it clear that while lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people appear to be at greater risk than heterosexual people of mental disorders and suicidal behavior:

LGB people are subject to institutionalised prejudice, social stress, social exclusion (even within families) and anti-homosexual hatred and violence and often internalise a sense of shame about their sexuality.

And:

Although our evidence does not specify the nature of such mechanisms, there is no evidence to suggest that homosexuality is itself a disorder that is thereby subject to a higher co-morbidity than is found in heterosexuals.

In fact, even if Gilbert hadn’t seen the study itself — even though it is available online — her “report” doesn’t even bear much resemblance to the Health24.com article that she claims to cite but doesn’t link.

We asked Professor King for his reaction to the LifeSite/OneNewsNow article. This was his reply:

LifeSite News and OneNewsNow have misinterpreted our review.  Evidence from around the world identifies the main stressors leading to mental distress in gay and lesbian people as discrimination, prejudice, bullying in schools and colleges, and the consequent need for many LGB people to keep their homosexual identity secret, even from their families.

Our review did not examine links between mental disorder and homosexual “behaviour” or “lifestyle”.  Our work reviewed studies of the mental health of lesbian, gay and bisexual people, and sadly, those studies showed that it is people (not behaviour) that are discriminated against, and not least by religious groups and organisations.

Discrimination on the grounds of sexuality is even more devastating than other forms of discrimination such as racism, as it reaches right into families and leaves no refuge for its victims.

We suggest in our review that the availability of alcohol and drugs at gay social venues may be a factor in the greater risk of drug and alcohol misuse in LGB people.  Reducing this problem is something for which LGB people must take greater responsibility.  However, the fact that discrimination still exists in our societies means that many are forced to use such venues to meet each other rather than through more common ways available to heterosexuals, such as at work, during the pursuit of hobbies and past-times, or at church.

There is now abundant evidence that homosexuality is not itself a mental disorder and that it is compatible with a healthy lifestyle.  We shall only begin to see a reduction in mental distress and deliberate self harm in LGB people when all sectors of society welcome them as equal and valuable citizens.

To throw more confusion into the mix, Gilbert tossed in a discredited 2007 study by Nazi-apologist Paul Cameron which supposedly demonstrated that “that the lifespan of a homosexual is on average 24 years shorter than that of a heterosexual.” She also used Cameron’s study to claim that discrimination hat nothing to do with it, saying that, “Homosexuals in the United States and Denmark – the latter of which is acknowledged to be highly tolerant of homosexuality – both die on average in their early 50’s, or in their 40’s if AIDS is the cause of death.”

We have already examined glaring flaws in Cameron’s study, as has Danish epidemiologist Morton Frisch who described his study as “humorous example of agenda-driven, pseudo-scientific gobbledygook.” Cameron’s false claims of presenting this “study” before the Eastern Psychological Association earned him an official condenmnation from EPA president Phile Hineline in April 2007.

Gilbert’s brief article in LifeSite and OneNewsNow combines the worst misrepresentations of legitimate science coupled with the worst example of phony pseudoscience — all in six short paragraphs. That’s quite a remarkable if dubious achievement. What Gilbert lacks in veracity, she certainly makes up for in ingenuity — and audacity. Maybe someday she’ll decide the truth ought to play a role as well. Somehow I doubt it.

[Thanks to regular reader Stefano A. for his help in gathering material for this post.]

Insure.com Pulls Cameron Quotes

Timothy Kincaid

August 15th, 2008

In June we noticed that Insure.com, an online insurance broker, was making false and defamatory statements about gay men in two of his articles. Specifically, the articles – which were written by Insure.com staff – relied on a non-representative AIDS study from the early 90’s and fraudulent “researcher” Paul Cameron to claim “the life expectancy of gay males to be at least 20 years below average”.

We brought this to the attention of Bob Bland, Insure.com’s CEO, and provided careful documentation and resources to show that he and his site were relying on Paul Cameron’s fraudulent “research” and on deliberately misstated conclusions from an HIV study at the height of the AIDS crisis. Bland promised to look into the situation.

After several inquiries and after the statements stayed up on Insure.com for another six weeks, we deduced that Bland had no intention of verifying our information or of removing the denigrating lies. So we brought the site and its claims to your attention.

In response, Bob Bland angrily accused us of wanting to “bash” him and his business. He also tried to equate orientation with HIV status and stood by Cameron’s dishonesty and his site’s defamatory falsehoods stating that he had “no intention of ‘taking (it) down’ because it contains no factual errors and no editorial bias or slant whatsoever.” For which we awarded him and his company the Certified Cameronite Award.

Now it appears that Bland has become better informed.

Gone is the article claiming that gay men die 20 years younger than their counterparts and in it’s place is one that purports to address The life insurance outlook for HIV-positive gay men.

In short, the life insurance outlook for HIV-positive gay men is identical to that of all HIV-positive persons, whatever their gender or orientation. Persons diagnosed with HIV are categorically turned down when wishing to purchase life insurance. While there is clear indication that HIV infected persons are living longer and that this may not be the death sentence that it once was, insurance companies treat HIV infection like heart disease, breast cancer, and other life threatening diseases: with denial.

But as for sexual orientation, this is not a question asked by insurance companies. Which clearly irks the author of Insure.com’s latest piece.

Life insurance pricing is all about assessing “risk,” but so far no life insurance company has taken the leap to collecting information on MSM and judging them to be engaging in “risky behavior.” Information on individual MSM behavior wouldn’t be verifiable, anyway.

Amusingly, Bland and his insurance site are only able to think of gay persons in terms of sex. His article is all about “behavior”, never acknowledging that gay people are defined by their attractions, not by what they do in bed.

And Insure.com isn’t content with providing information about life insurance coverage but feels it necessary to try and equate homosexuality and HIV infection.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) states in a June 2007 report, “HIV/AIDS Among Men Who Have Sex with Men,” that men who have sex with men (MSM) accounted for 71 percent of adult and adolescent males diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in 2005, thus rendering them ineligible for life insurance coverage at any price. Five to 7 percent of adult and adolescent men identify themselves as MSM, according to the report, so obviously MSM have a much higher risk of contracting the disease — they are anywhere from 32.5 to 46.5 times more likely than other men to be diagnosed. But insurance companies check for the disease, not the behavior.

Missing from that rant is the fact that while HIV is far more prevalent on a pro-rata basis within the gay community, about 88% of gay men and virtually all gay women are HIV-negative.

It’s very evident that Insure.com and its CEO Bob Bland remain dedicatedly anti-gay. And I continue to strongly encourage those persons who are gay and those who have a gay family member or coworker or neighbor or friend to avoid giving their business to an enterprise composed of those who so clearly wish ill of gay men.

But I cannot insist that Bob Bland favor equality and I cannot insist that Insure.com say only favorable things about their gay neighbors. Decency is a way of life that we each choose to adopt or reject. And those who seek to make smearing insinuations do so under a freedom that I cherish.

However, I am also grateful that Insure.com has ceased making statements that are flat-out lies and commend Bland on the removal of Cameron’s bogus “statistics” from his site.

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

Certified Cameronite: Jack Chick

Jim Burroway

July 22nd, 2008

I know you’ve seen them. You’ll usually find them deliberately left behind in some innocuous location where some unsuspecting soul can come across them and start flipping through the pages. You’ll find these strange little tracts just about anywhere: in car dealerships, dentist offices — for some reason I used to find them public men’s rooms.

As a Catholic growing up, I managed to run across the ones which painted the Catholic Church as the whore of Babylon and the Pope as the anti-Christ. That was one favorite theme for Jack Chick’s miniature comic books. Another one is the absolute, unblemished perfection of the King James Version and (and only the King James Version) of the Bible. Another still was the guy who was on his deathbed, facing the horrors of hell.

And, of course, there was homosexuality, with titles like Doom Town, Sin City, Birds and the Bees, and The Gay Blade. These were especially entertaining, laden with all the worst 1970s-style stereotypes, and they all seem to contain the same story of Sodom and Gomorrah. That is, after all, where fire and brimstone came from. But at the end of all the tracts is an invitation, like this charming one from Sin City:

If you choose Jesus Christ, all of your sins will be forgiven and you will receive God’s FREE gift of eternal life. If you do nothing, you’ll remain a condemned child of Satan…and one heartbeat from hell.

And in case you don’t think there’s a hell or a devil, Chick often included them in his tracts as well. In some of his comics they’re literally everywhere, usually standing just behind the evil-doer in case the reader is confused about who the bad guys are supposed to be. And sometime he places angels near the good guys, just so you’ll know.

Come to think of it, I think Chick ought to consider suing Oklahoma County commissioner Brent Rinehart for copyright violations. But I digress.

Anyway, it’s that last Chick comic that I mentioned, The Gay Blade, which caught my attention, because this one contains this so-called “fact” from our favorite Nazi-loving “researcher,” Paul Cameron.

I found this after a reader tipped me to an article in Battle Cry, Chick’s own monthly newsletter. (I was disappointed to find it was just an ordinary newsletter rather than a full-length comic book.) This article, “Homosexuals Hiding an ‘Inconvenient Truth’,” contains a similar claim:

Research by The Family Research Institute (FRI) of Colorado has discovered that the average lifespan of the male homosexual is only 39 years. Where 80% of married men lived past 65, only 2% of the homosexuals lived that long, as shown in the accompanying chart.

FRI found that sodomites “…were 116 times more apt to be murdered; 24 times more apt to commit suicide; and had a traffic-accident death-rate 18 times the rate of comparably-aged white males. Heart attacks, cancer and liver failure were exceptionally common. Twenty percent of lesbians died of murder, suicide, or accident—a rate 487 times higher than that of white females aged 25-44.”

In their web site at http:// www.familyresearchinst.org/ Default.aspx?tabid=73, FRI details the disgusting and unsanitary sexual practices that contribute to this early death sentence. The “outing” of the homosexual lifestyle in our culture has unleashed over 50 sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). AIDS is just one of them.

That link goes to Paul Cameron’s “Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do”, a brochure that I thoroughly investigated a few years ago in a project that gave birth to this very web site. And of course, a key component of Cameron’s brochure was his so-called “obituary study.”

It’s fitting that we finally got around to honoring Jack Chick as a Certified Cameronite. Chick joins other recent inductees like Insure.com and their CEO, Robert Bland and Oklahoma state rep. Sally Kern. They all make for some pretty good company.

But I didn’t want to honor Chick with our ordinary run-of-the-mill award that we’ve given to so many other deserving honorees. So I asked my good friend Bruce Garrett, a pretty good cartoonist in his own right, to see if he could come up with something special for Jack Chick.

So here it is, our Jack Chick Limited Collector’s Edition of the Certified Cameronite Award.


[Hat tip: John Thorp]

Certified Cameronite: Insure.com

Jim Burroway

July 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 was expelled from the American Psychological Association in 1983 for ethical violations
• Cameron was censured by the Nebraska Psychological Association (where he lived at the time) in 1984 for misrepresenting legitimate social science research.
• U.S. District Court Judge Jerry Buchmeyer found that Cameron had committed “fraud or misrepresentations” in testimony before the court in 1986.
• Cameron was censured by the American Sociological Association in 1985 and 1986 for misrepresenting himself as a sociologist (after having been kicked out of the APA), and for ethical violations.
• Cameron was censured by the Canadian Psychological Association in 1996.
• Cameron was censured by the Eastern Psychological Association in 2007 for misrepresenting his own research and participation at the group’s convention.

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

Colorado Springs Gazette Defends Paul Cameron

Jim Burroway

April 28th, 2008

This was shocking. Two weeks ago, the Colorado Springs Gazette defended Paul Cameron against the Southern Poverty Law Center’s naming his Family Research Institute a hate group:

The story about elevated hatred included a list of Colorado hate groups, as identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center – a thoroughly discredited organization that labels organizations with opposing political philosophies as hate mongers.

The new Colorado list includes the Colorado Springs-based Family Research Institute. The conservative fundamentalist organization is headed by Paul Cameron, a psychologist and reviewer for the British Medical Journal, Psychological Reports and the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association. The organization’s mission is “to generate empirical research on issues that threaten the traditional family, particularly homosexuality, AIDS, sexual social policy, and drug abuse.”

There’s no question about it: The Family Research Institute opposes homosexuality, and goes out of its way to discourage and besmirch it. It’s controversial, ideological, politically incorrect and unpopular. But is it a hate group, like the Ku Klux Klan or a Nazi skinhead club? Far from it.

Far from it? Really? Cameron has more in common with a Nazi skinhead club than the Gazette seems to realize. Perhaps the editors of the Gazette needs to look over his 1999 article in which he admires how Nazi Germany (and specifically Rudolph Höss) “handled homosexuals” in Dachau and Sachsenhausen.

Instead of casting aspersions against the Southern Poverty Law Center and coming to the defense of a man who proposes similar draconian “solutions” for homosexuality in this country, the Gazette ought to consider engaging in a practice we like to call journalism. A hate group like a Nazi skinhead club? It’s exactly like a Nazi skinhead club.

The editorial board of the Colorado Springs Gazette is the latest to join our growing list of Cameron supporters. And I’ll once again ask the question I ask everyone who joins the list: Do the Gazette’s editors agree with Cameron’s draconian agenda?

Hat tip: Mike Airhart.

Janelle Hallman Cites Paul Cameron

Jim Burroway

April 26th, 2008

Also joining the list of Cameron supporters is Janelle Hallman. She’s the ex-gay therapist who reached for discredited “researcher” Paul Cameron in her brand new book, The Heart of Female Same-Sex Attraction: A Comprehensive Counseling Resource.

Hallman is a frequent speaker at NARTH and Exodus conferences. When social conservatives like Hallman reach for Cameron, they breath new life into his Nazi sympathizing agenda. At the very least, when they confuse his unethical and illegitimate faux “research” for the real thing, it rightly calls into question their own judgment as professionals.

LifeSite Continues to Cite Paul Cameron

Jim Burroway

April 26th, 2008

The unofficial Roman Catholic LifeSiteNews is an amazing piece of work. They managed to turn a study about large families into an anti-gay tract. And Paul Cameron was right there to help them:

While the UM study shows the health benefits of the traditional large family, other recent studies have revealed the health dangers of non-traditional social relations.

A recent study found that individuals taking part in legal same-sex “marriages” in Norway and Denmark lived 24 fewer years than individuals in traditional marriages, Drs. Paul and Kirk Cameron reported at the 2007 annual Eastern Psychological Association convention.

The man has no shame whatsoever. Not only was his so-called “study” completely bogus and easily refuted, Cameron is still repeating the lie that he “reported” his study at the 2007 annual Eastern Psychological Association convention. You may remember we obtained a statement from EPA president Dr. Phil Hineline exposing Cameron’s boldface lie just a little over a year ago.

But LifeSite really seems to like Cameron. This is the eighth time they’ve turned to him. Like I said, they’re a real piece of work.

Certified Cameronite: Sally Kern

Jim Burroway

March 29th, 2008

One thing you can say about Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern is this: She doesn’t give up. And the more she talks, the more she embarrasses herself and the good citizens of Oklahoma’s District 84. Today, the Bethany Tribune published a letter to the editor (A permanent copy is available here as PDF.) Kern’s letter contains the usual misinformation from the usual sources.

Kern’s very first paragraph cites a study titled, “The Lifespan of Homosexuals,” immediately following a sentence which references the CDC. The way it’s written, casual readers may assume that “The Lifespan of Homosexuals” was a CDC study, but they’d be wrong. That so-called “study” is actually from none other than Paul Cameron, the discredited “researcher” who has been censured and/or kicked out of virtually every professional association he’s ever been associated with for repeated ethics violations and gross professional misconduct. Most recently, he was censured by the president of the Eastern Psychological Association for misrepresenting his participating at their 2007 conference. In 1999, Paul Cameron wrote “Gays in Nazi Germany,” in which he whitewashed the treatment of gays in Nazi concentration camps, and he has advocated similar draconian measures throughout his career here in the U.S.

Sally Kern will reach for anything to demonize gay and lesbian citizens of her district and beyond, including the rantings of a Nazi sympathizer and holocaust revisionist. We first awarded Kern the LaBarbera Award for her outrageous fear-mongering comments, saying that gays were “the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam.” As a Certified Cameronite, Kern has completed her own evolution to the lowest depths of extremist rhetoric. She now joins the ranks of so many others who care neither for the truth, ethics, or simple human decency in their zeal to render LGBT citizens as second class — or worse.

Hat tip: Alvin McEwen

See also:
Sally Kern Is a Little Confused
Sally Kern’s Economic Fallout
Sally Kern’s Meeting with PFLAG on Tape
Exodus’ Local Ministry Aligns with Sally Kern
Certified Cameronite: Sally Kern
Kern Speaks to College Republicans
Sally Kern: Out of Context? The Complete Transcript
We Be Jammin’
Muslims and Gays United
OK State Rep. Sally Kern’s Son is “Straight and Not Gay”
Sally Kern Exaggerates Death Threats
A Letter to Sally Kern
LaBarbera Award: Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern

Peter Sprigg Apologizes

Jim Burroway

March 27th, 2008

Current immigration laws deny the foreign partners of gay Americans the ability to immigrate to the U.S, unlike their heterosexually-married counterparts. A bill is stalled in Congress which would address this problem. Last week, we awarded the LaBarbera Award to the Family “Research” Council’s Peter Sprigg for suggesting that instead of uniting gays and lesbians with their partners, we should export gays instead:

I would much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States than to import them into the United States because we believe homosexuality is destructive to society.

Today, Peter Sprigg issued an apology:

In response to a question regarding bi-national same-sex couples who are separated by an international border, I used language that trivialized the seriousness of the issue and did not communicate respect for the essential dignity of every human being as a person created in the image of God. I apologize for speaking in a way that did not reflect the standards which the Family Research Council and I embrace.

Of course, the Family “Research” Council’s standards still allow him to cite the discredited “research” of holocaust revisionist Paul Cameron. No apology or retraction for that. Nevertheless, a start is a start.

Certified Cameronite: Mary Frances Forrester

Jim Burroway

March 17th, 2008

Mary Frances Forrester, the wife of a conservative North Carolina state senator James Forrester (R-Gaston County) published an incredible anti-gay screed in the Christian Action League web site. Mrs. Forrester led off her piece with “evidence” for what she calls “the real homosexual agenda” — you know, the one that begins:

“We shall sodomize your sons, emblems of your feeble masculinity, of your shallow dreams and vulgar lies. We shall seduce them in your schools, in your dormitories, in your gymnasiums, …”

And so on. Anti-gay extremists love quoting this essay, but when they do, they always omit the preface:

This essay is an outré, madness, a tragic, cruel fantasy, an eruption of inner rage, on how the oppressed desperately dream of being the oppressor.

That’s right. This “agenda” is a complete work of fiction — a satire, more specifically — and the author said so when it first appeared in 1987 in the now defunct Gay Community News. In fact, the anonymous writer used the pseudonym “Michael Swift,” which is an obvious tip of the hat to the English language’s most famous satirist, Jonathan Swift. Unfortunately, Forrester, like so many anti-gay extremists, aren’t swift enough to pick up on the obviously satirical nature of the work.

But that’s not why Forrester has been branded a Certified Cameronite. It’s this:

Did you know that the average life span of a homosexual is 39 years as opposed to 78 for heterosexual women and 76 for heterosexual men?

This statistic comes straight from Paul Cameron’s 1994, “The Longevity of Homosexuals: Before and After the AIDS Epidemic” (Omega 29, no. 3: 249-272), which in turn was based on Cameron’s laughable “Obituary Studies.” Nick Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute said Cameron’s study was “just ridiculous.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were similarly unimpressed with Cameron’s work. And yet this statistic, more than any other, is the one that refuses to die.

And then there’s this one:

Read your social history and you will find that most societies that condoned homosexual behavior did not survive past one generation.

Which society is she referring to? Certainly not Greece — they managed to last for centuries. Maybe she’s getting her information from Sally Kern.

Mary Frances Forrester can’t seem to distinguish satire from fact, or “research” from the crazed imagination of a holocaust revisionist. And for that, she joins a long list of those who have lined up behind Cameron’s Nazi-admiration society.

Cameronite Updates: How To Cite Cameron Without Citing Cameron

Jim Burroway

December 1st, 2007

As I went about organizing my library over the weekend, I re-opened the book, Staying the Course: Supporting the Church’s Position on Homosexuality (Maxie D. Dunnam & H. Newton Malony, editors). And as I often do, I take a quick glance through the bibliographies, and among the many things I look for is whether they cite Paul Cameron or not. Nope. His name was nowhere to be found.

Then, I skimmed through H. Newton Malony’s chapter, “Homosexuality In the Postmodern World.” And there it was:

Longevity is another area in which homosexuality has been a determining factor. A 1991-92 survey of newspapers available to homosexual communities found that among homosexuals not suffering from AIDS, the median age of death for 5,371 persons to be 42 years of age, [sic] with only 9 percent living to old age. Among lesbians, the average age at death was 45 years. Both these figures are dramatically below the life expectancy of the population in general.²²

Footnote 22 was this:

22. Malony, Perspectives on Homosexuality, 37.

See? No Cameron. Unless of course, you happened to have access to Malony’s 1998 Perspectives on Homosexuality: The Transforming Point of View from Integration Press. And if you could find access to that obscure and now out-of-print book, you would eventually discover that this nugget came from an earlier version of Cameron’s pamphlet, “Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do.” (In fact, those earlier statistics were published in the April-June, 1991 edition of Cameron’s newsletter, Family Research Report, which is sometimes cited as though it were a legitimate journal.)

So the list of Cameron’s collaborators has now been updated to include H. Newton Malony, Senior Professor at the Fuller Theological Seminary’s Graduate School of Psychology in Clairemont, California.

Malony joins other recent additions, including Timothy Dailey and Peter Sprigg’s 2004 book, Getting it Straight: What the Research Shows About Homosexuality, and the web sites of the Howard Center and the World Congress of Families.

Cameron Promoter George Rekers: New Ex-Gay Study “Meets High Research Standards”

Jim Burroway

September 9th, 2007

When InterVarsity Press issued this press release announcing upcoming release of “Ex-Gays? A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation,“ by Stanton L. Jones and Mark A. Yarhouse, they included this endorsement:

George A. Rekers, Professor of Neuropsychiatry and Behavioral Science Emeritus at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, states that the study “meets the high research standards set by the American Psychological Association that individuals be validly assessed, followed and reported over time with a prospective, longitudinal outcome research design.”

I would question Rekers’ ability to recognize studies which “meets the high research standards set by the APA.” In 2002, he held one of Paul Cameron’s studies in pretty high regard:

In the study of homosexual parenting with the best research methodology to date, Cameron and Cameron obtained a random sample by a one-wave, systematic cluster sampling of six U.S. metropolitan areas… [emphasis mine]

I reviewed that study that impressed Rekers so much here.