Why does Miss California’s church believe that homosexuality and pedophilia are linked?

Church cites discredited Paul Cameron data

When the Miss America controversy started, I defended Carrie Prejean, Miss California, for her answer to Perez Hilton’s question regarding same-sex marriage. I felt that it was her right to answer the question as she felt.

But now we are in totally different territory.

Someone has alerted me to the fact that her church, The Rock Church of San Diego, uses junk science in order to villify the lgbt community.

I looked at the church’s webpage and found there to be a lot of inaccurate information, particularly regarding gays and HIV:

male homosexuals are 430 times more likely to contract HIV than a heterosexual, while heterosexuals have a 1-in-750,000 chance of contracting the virus responsible for HIV, a male homosexual has a 1-in-165 chance of getting HIV. A 20 year old gay male has a 30% chance of either dying or contracting AIDS before the age of 30. They are also 23 times more likely to get other sexually transmitted diseases than a heterosexual.

But it’s the next section that caught my eye like a blinking light:

There are also moral repercussions stemming from homosexual behavior as evidenced by the fact that one third of all sexual crimes against children are committed by homosexuals even though they are representative of only one percent of the population. Pedophilia has even been called central to the gay lifestyle. The agenda of the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) is to lower the age of consent so that sex with children will be legal.

The idea that homosexuality and pedophilia are linked is a lie that has been refuted continuously. The American Psychological Association, the National Association of Social Workers, the American Academy of Child Psychiatrists and the Child Welfare League of America all say that the homosexuality and pedophilia are not linked.

So where did that notion come from? The discredited researcher Paul Cameron:

In a 1985 article published in Psychological Reports, Cameron purported to review published data to answer the question, "Do those who commit homosexual acts disproportionately incorporate children into their sexual practices?" (p. 1227). He concluded that "at least one-third of the sexual attacks upon youth are homosexual" (p. 1228) and that "those who are bi- to homosexual are proportionately much more apt to molest youth" than are heterosexuals (p. 1231).

By the way, Cameron got into trouble with the Nebraska Psychological Association for that particular study regarding homosexuality and pedophilia. He distorted the work of one A. Nicholas Groth to make his claims. Groth complained, saying the following:

“(Cameron) misrepresents my findings and distorts them to advance his homophobic views. I make a very clear distinction in my writing between pedophilia and homosexuality, noting that adult males who sexually victimize young boys are either pedophilic or heterosexual, and that in my research I have not found homosexual men turning away from adult partners to children . . . I consider this totally unprofessional behavior on the part of Dr. Cameron and I want to bring this to your attention. He disgraces his profession.”

So apparently this Christian church has no problem with using data by a discredited researcher who has been kicked out of the American Psychological Association as well as rebuked and censured by organizations such as the American Sociological Association and the Canadian Psychological Association due to his tendency to distort credible research in order to stigmatize the lgbt community.

Cameron's organization, the Family Research Institute, is listed as an official hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, by the way.

As I said before, I respect Ms.Prejean’s religious beliefs. And I have rolled my eyes and turned the channel every time I heard about the controversy with a prayer on my lips that it would soon leave the news cycle.

But here is the thing that bothers me - if a racist were to use FBI crime statistics to infer inaccuracies about the African-American community, he would have no credibility.

How is it that a church can say some of the ugliest things about the gay community and use bad science to back it up without fear of reprisal?

You see this is the issue that doesn’t get talked about much.

There is a plethora of bad information out there which stigmatizes the lgbt community as disease ridden sexual deviants.

And the people who are pushing this bad information aren’t wearing hoods and sheets. They don’t burn crosses or use secret handshakes.

They are the people in America’s churches; in the pews and in the pulpits.

They are also the spokespeople of these so-called traditional values groups who get on television and take self-righteous stances knowing fully well that they are engaging in lies.

And why do they get away with it? Because no one seems to have caught on to their game.

When Tony Perkins, Matt Barber, Peter LaBarbera, Maggie Gallagher, and the rest go into their routine, we know they are lying. We know that behind their words are inaccuracies that would be called out for the bigoted lies they are if they were about groups other than the lgbt community.

The sad thing is that there are so many people like Prejean who don’t know; who fall for it with unsurprising ease.

Prejean is not the one who we should be fighting. She never was.

She is merely a symptom of the bigger problem.