News, analysis and fact-checking of anti-gay rhetoric
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Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America, by Mel White
The Antigay Agenda: Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right by Didi Herman
Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality, by Simon LeVay
Anything but Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth, by Wayne Besen
Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement, by Tanya ErzenColorado 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’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 Perpsectives 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.
