Exposing Junk Science About Same-Sex Behavior

From Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters via Box Turtle Bulletin:

Two anti-gay activists closely associated with Paul Cameron have inserted themselves into the center of Florida’s gay adoption controversy.

Florida is the only state in the nation which explicitly bans adoption by gay parents. That law is now being challenged. The Miami Herald has obtained a transcript from an adoption trial which was closed the public. The trial ran on Oct. 1-6, and centered on a gay foster father’s petition to adopt the two small boys he has been raising since 2004. The trial featured testimony from a half-dozen expert witnesses in psychology, epidemiology, sociology and family studies.

The state of Florida, which is supporting the ban, relied on two so-called “expert witnesses” who are closely associated with discredited “researcher” Paul Cameron. George A. Rekers, is a retired professor from the University of South Carolina, who taught neuropsychiatry and behavioral science. Walter R. Schumm, is a  professor of family studies at Kansas State University.

According to the Miami Herald:

The lives of gay people can also be stressful to children, Rekers testified. The children may experience teasing and bullying from other children who don’t approve of their parents’ orientation. And children with gay parents are likely to suffer from repeated separations because gay people are more likely to have multiple failed relationships.

Rekers said he would, in fact, favor banning anyone from adopting who had more than 18 “sex partners” during a lifetime. “I think that would be a very good social policy,” he said in a deposition.

He said he would also consider banning Native Americans from adopting because research shows that they are also at much higher risk of mental illness and substance abuse. “They would tend to hang around each other,” Rekers testified. “So the children would be around a lot of other Native Americans who are … doing the same sorts of things.”

Rekers relies extensively on Cameron’s research, citing as many as nine separate Cameron articles in one 2005 paper. Rekers and Cameron together launched Cameron’s online “Journal,” the Empirical Journal of Same-Sex Sexual Behavior, in 2007. The EJSSB is purportedly an open-access peer-reviewed journal, but, in fact, it is nothing more than a dressed-up web site. Since its inception in 2007, the only articles “published” to date are three papers by Paul Cameron and one book review by Gerard J.M. van den Aardweg, another close Cameron collaborator….

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

Read the entry at Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters.

From Box Turtle Bulletin:

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….

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….

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

From Ex-Gay Watch:

As our readers may be aware, it was recently reported that the popular online insurance portal Insure.com has posted disturbing and completely inaccurate information about the lifespan of gay people. Worse, the source for their claims is the discredited and largely avoided Dr. Paul Cameron and his Family Research Institute.

Insure.com CEO Robert Bland defended the use of Cameron’s data in the articles, the core claim of which is that “a gay lifestyle takes away 8-20 years from the average lifespan.”

[...]

This is not the first time Bland has mixed a divisive personal platform with his openly traded corporation. He is also the chairman of the Illinois Right to Life Committee. As far back as 1999, financial forums contained chatter of concern over his poor judgment for combining that work with Insure.com….

Read the entire post by David Roberts.

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.

From Box Turtle Bulletin:

The New York Times last year ran a short profile on Moscow State University’s sociology department, where students have lodged complaints about that department’s academic standards and living conditions. Students allege that the dean, Vladimir Dobrenkov, has institutionalized anti-Western, xenophobic, nationalistic, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the department, which goes a long way toward explaining Cameron’s warm welcome there earlier this week.

Read the entire post at Box Turtle Bulletin.

From Talk To Action:

Anti-gay “psychologist” Paul Cameron is currently in Russia; Interfax Religion reports:

He urged Russians to back up such politicians as Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov who opposed gay parade in Moscow. Cameron also finds it joyful that representatives of the sociology faculty of the Moscow State University showed interest to his institute’s research and plan to conduct similar independent analysis.

Perhaps Cameron would be less “joyful” if he read a report about that very same department which appeared in the New York Times last year, and which quoted dissatisfied students.

Read the entire post at Talk To Action.

From Box Turtle Bulletin:

Paul Cameron is continuing his tour of Moscow, where he’s spreading his virulent form of anti-gay propaganda masquerading as “science” to receptive audiences. Yesterday, he spoke at a round table sponsored by the Russian Orthodox Church, where he claimed that gays are twice as likely to abuse alcohol and drugs, and avoid paying taxes. That last one is a new one, but likely a key part of his Nazi-inspired “homosexuals-as-parasites” argument.

Read the entire post at Box Turtle Bulletin.

From Box Turtle Bulletin:

Monday we warned that Paul Cameron was to speak yesterday before the sociology faculty of Moscow State University. Now we have a report of what he told that audience. Not surprisingly, it’s the same claptrap he’s been peddling here in the U.S.

In this glowing account of his talk (they describe him as a “famous” or “renowned” scientist three times), Cameron repeats the most chilling line of his standard stump speech. He contends that gays and lesbians don’t produce children and they allegedly cost society more than they produce. In recent writings where he pursues this line of reasoning, he concludes that gays and lesbians lead parasitic lives — with all of its implications and deserved consequences. This poor translation doesn’t reveal that he actually repeated the term “parasitic lives”, but that is an integral part of his speech. In fact, we have heard it very recently.

Read the entire post at Box Turtle Bulletin.

From Box Turtle Bulletin:

California may be about to issue its first marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples, but that doesn’t mean anti-gay extremists are crawling back into the woodwork anytime soon. Paul Cameron, of the Family “Research” Institute has no intention of fading away. He is in Moscow, where tomorrow he will speak at Moscow State University on a panel called “Social norms and prospects of development of society.”

According to this translated news item, Cameron will be spreading his discredited “research” to Russia, where he remains an unknown quantity. There, he will speak on “Homosexuality and the demographic problem.”

Read the entire post at Box Turtle Bulletin.

From Beyond Homophobia:

Q: What does the president of Iran have in common with certain antigay activists in the United States?
A: Both maintain that homosexuals don’t really exist.

Yesterday, when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denied the existence of homosexuals in his country, the audience at Columbia University responded with laughter and derision.

[...]

To most Americans, the idea that there are no homosexuals in Iran or any other country simply isn’t plausible.

But at least a few individuals apparently agree with the Iranian president, except for one detail: They would take issue with his assertion that there are homosexuals in the United States.

Purveyors of junk science on the topic of sexual orientation increasingly seem to be denying that anyone is really gay or lesbian.

An example of this sentiment can be found in the guidelines that antigay activist Paul Cameron and his collaborators are developing on their new Web vehicle for reporting the results of their “research.”…

Read the full post at BeyondHomophobia.com.

From Box Turtle Bulletin:

What do you do when you are having trouble getting your junk science published in reputable peer-reviewed journals? Well, one solution would be to improve the quality of your science. Or, if you’re Paul Cameron and you’re running an outfit called the Family Research Institute (FRI), you try something else:

FRI is doing something exciting — we are starting an online scientific journal! It is entitled the Empirical Journal of Same Sexual Behavior (EJSSB).

That exciting announcement went out to members of Paul Cameron’s mailing list. The brainchild of Paul Cameron and George Rekers, the EJSSB’s first articles were slated to appear sometime in September, although the pay-to-publish website (beginning at $500) appears to still be under construction. But even if it does go live, don’t look for this journal to appear in your local university library….

Read the entire post at Box Turtle Bulletin.