Exposing Junk Science About Same-Sex Behavior

From the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Watch:

“It’s a loaded subject, but let’s get right down to it: gay men, on average, die significantly younger than the rest of the population.”

So begins “Gay Men Die 20 Years Younger,” an article posted on insure.com, a publicly traded online insurance brokerage. The source for the article, written by one Joseph White of insure.com, is identified as none other than “Dr. Paul Cameron, the President of the Family Research Institute, [who] published a study in Psychological Reports that confirmed a 20-year life expectancy gap for actively gay men.”

The study in question in fact did nothing of the sort. Its author is a notorious anti-gay propagandist who for more than 25 years has circulated bogus, homophobic “research findings” in pay-to-publish vanity magazines like Psychological Reports (which will publish most anybody willing to pay $27.50 a page).

Cameron’s goal, as he says quite candidly, is to provide “ammunition for those who want laws adopted banning homosexual acts throughout the United States.” (In fact, such laws were struck down as unconstitutional by the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas.) Cameron’s propaganda is so transparently false and aimed merely at defaming homosexuals that the Southern Poverty Law Center added his Family Research Institute to its list of hate groups in 2005….

Read the entire post at HateWatch.

From Box Turtle Bulletin:

Last Friday, Timothy Kincaid revealed for the first time that a popular insurance portal, Insure.com, is hosting false and defamatory anti-gay claims. This follows nearly six weeks of private communications with Insure.com CEO Robert Bland, in which we tried to work with them in resolving the situation.

Soon after Kincaid’s exposé appeared, Mr. Bland wrote a response defending his company’s material, and he has left other comments on this web site which suggest that Insure.com has little interest in factual accuracy or professional responsibility. With these latest comments, whatever hope we first held that Insure.com would act responsibly and in the best interests of their customers, shareholders and participating agencies has now vanished.

Read the entire entry by Timothy Kincaid and Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin.

From Box Turtle Bulletin:

The trend in business relations has been towards an acceptance and welcoming of gay and lesbian clients and appreciation of them as customers. This may be because of the perception that product loyalty is particularly strong in gay consumers or because businesses generally believe that moralistic rants drive away not only gay customers but also those who love them.

Which made it all the more surprising to find that Insure.com, an online insurance purveyor, has been hosting articles that make false and defamatory statements about gay men and women.

Insure.com is a publicly traded company with an advisory board ranging from a former US Senator to executives with various companies, including AT&T. The company is a major sponsor of Bill O’Reilly’s radio talk show and Bill gives voice to their commercial.

In addition to selling insurance, they provide information about the insurance industry. Joe White, an employee and company blog contributor, wrote two pieces in which he claimed that “being gay” was a health risk, and not just a minor one….

Read the full blog post by Timothy Kincaid at Box Turtle Bulletin.

From Beyond Homophobia:

• Take one US antigay activist who happens to have earned a Ph.D. in psychology and has been denounced by major professional associations of psychologists and sociologists in his home country and Canada.
• Add one Russian university department where the training is substandard, the faculty don’t publish in their field’s academic journals, the dean has been charged with plagiarism, and xenophobia is encouraged in students’ work.
• Combine and season with dubious research findings published in a low-prestige academic journal.

That’s the recipe for Paul Cameron’s recent visit to the Sociology department of Moscow State University. It was a seemingly perfect match, teeming with possibilities for public pronouncements based on junk science and chock-full of sexual prejudice.

And it didn’t disappoint. Press service dispatches from Russia suggest that Cameron has found a highly receptive audience for his antigay rants…

Read the full post at BeyondHomophobia.com.