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| Paul Cameron |
From a favorite site of mine, Box Turtle Bulletin, comes news that an old adversary of the gay community is taking a trip to Moldavia:
Scott Long, former director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch, has learned that American anti-gay extremist Paul Cameron is headed to Moldova to oppose proposed anti-discrimination legislation which would include sexual orientation. Long writes:
Moldova is a splinter of a country between Romania and Ukraine, a point of contention between Russians, Turks, and others for centuries, and one of the poorest states in Europe. An anti-discrimination bill that prohibits unequal treatment on grounds including sexual orientation is before its Parliament, due for debate at month’s end.In the days before the debate starts, Paul Cameron is coming to town. An e-mail from the Alianţa pentru Salvarea Familiilor din Moldova (Alliance to Save the Family in Moldova) announces that the “U.S. sociologist, founder and president of Family Research Institute” will stay from October 24-29, and “will share the U.S. experience in implementing anti-discrimination legislation.” There will be a roundtable with “representatives of various parliamentary committees, ministries and other institutions of the state,” plenty of lobby meetings with lawmakers — and, of course, media will be saturated with Cameron’s fake statistics.
For the younger folks in the gay community and for the rest of the folks who may not be aware of Paul Cameron, allow me to introduce you to a little bit of sordid anti-gay history. Every lie, every piece of distorted of junk science about the gay community, even some ways in which religious right groups distort actual science to demonize the gay community were either formulated or "improved upon" by Paul Cameron.
He is the man is responsible for pushing the following myths about the gay community:
Lesbians are more likely to die in car wrecks,
Gay men molest children at a high rate and are more likely to be serial killers,
Gay men stuff gerbils up their rectums,
Gays and lesbians in the military are more likely to rape their heterosexual counterparts.
Basically, it was Cameron who in the 80s came up with the idea of aggressively using science to prove that homosexuality is a "dangerous lifestyle." The problem is to do this, Cameron attained a reputation for either distorting legitimate science or distorting his own work to gain the conclusions he wanted from his "studies." He has also been discredited and censured by many group and individuals on the left, the right, and in the middle due to his bad research techniques. Several of his studies have been criticized for such errors as having small sample sizes, showing an anti-gay bias in interviews, and not having enough responses to establish a suitable analysis.
