Blogger Brady of “Some Guys Are Normal” first noticed on June 14 that Exodus was distributing propaganda by long-discredited “researcher” Paul Cameron.
Cameron runs an antigay propaganda service called the “Family Research Institute,” based in Colorado Springs. Cameron was kicked out of several professional scientific organizations for distorting other researchers’ work and for distorting his own research to achieve predetermined antigay outcomes. Since then, his organization’s fraudulent propaganda has grown increasingly incendiary, earning it notoriety as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Exodus and other antigay groups under the Focus on the Family umbrella know that Cameron’s work is consistently fraudulent — that Cameron may credibly be viewed as a Fred Phelps with revoked academic credentials.
But Exodus seems to be increasing, rather than decreasing, its reliance upon fraudulent and incendiary propagandists:
After Brady noticed the Exodus “media blog” promoting already-discredited falsehoods about same-sex-attracted individuals’ life expectancy on June 13, Exodus did it again July 7.
This time, Exodus promotes a Cameron attack against anti-AIDS funding. Out of thin air, Cameron claims that AIDS costs Americans $51 billion per year, and he compares that to the $168 billion that the CDC says is spent by society to battle the effects of smoking.
Cameron bases his subsequent claim that AIDS costs each gay male American $25,000 per year on the belief that 1) AIDS is a gay disease, and 2) no more than two million men in the U.S. are sexually active with other men.
Cameron calculates those numbers by using the lowest possible number of gay Americans, derived from a 1996 CDC study whose count of gay Americans was lowest of any reputable study yet conducted: 1.3 percent. Other surveys have found two, three, or even five to eight percent depending on how each survey defines homosexuality and bisexuality, and how each survey is conducted (via mail, via door-to-door interviews in front of antigay family members and strangers, via telephone, and so forth).
(Given a politically motivated, lowball estimate that there are only 2 million gay men in America, it is remarkable that Exodus still claims it has delivered “hundreds of thousands” of people from homosexuality.)
Cameron then makes the absurd suggestion — not linked to any specific portion of the CDC survey, nor supported by a presentation of the statistic’s context — that 34 percent of all gay workers miss a day of work per month, versus an alleged 19 percent of the general population.
Cameron concludes that homosexuals are freeloaders, leeches upon hardworking society, and requires readers to obtain copies of his oddly described “scientific journal” in order to review his claims.
Exodus reprinted Cameron’s diatribes in full, without a trace of fact-checking, math calculation, or comparison to other surveys. And there is no indication that Exodus has offered anyone in reputable scientific communities an opportunity to respond.
Using Paul Cameron’s math:
only 1.3% of the population is gay
and 4% of the voters in the last national election were gay
therefore (cue the headline, agape news)
GAYS ARE THREE TIMES BETTER CITIZENS THAN HETEROS
(ain’t statisitics fun)
I think it’s time for Exodus to stop calling itself a Christian organization. The evidence that Paul Cameron is a fraud has been out there for years. If you take just a brief few minutes of time to ponder the nature of research methodology (which the UC Davis site explains so well), then look honestly at Cameron’s pattern of behavior and his ongoing insistence to use such flawed means to gather his “research,” you realize in less than an hour that the man is a liar and can’t be trusted.
Either the Exodus leaders all have a combined IQ of less than 50, or they are in on the lie and simply don’t care that Scripture says that bearing false witness against your neighbor (whether they are a Christian or not) is a grievous sin. In fact, I’m sure Ananias and Sapphira (who got zapped dead in the New Testament for lying to the Holy Spirit–just in case you’re unfamiliar with the story) would have something to say about why it’s not a good idea for a Christian to lie on a consistent basis.
I’d like to know where gay rights organizations have been hiding during the recent Love in Action scandal, or from issues like this. Are GLAAD, GLSEN and HRC so out of touch that they don’t see the value in hammering home this point about Exodus? The evidence of Cameron’s fraud is laid out on a silver platter. The work is done. It couldn’t be any easier. Get a good spokesman who actually knows how to talk to an evangelical audience, and you’re good to go. (Maybe that’s part of the problem.)
Perhaps Exodus knows that as long as gay rights organizations don’t make a big deal about a Christian group trafficking in lies–and why that undercuts any other “credibility” they claim to have–they can get away with this kind of thing.
Time to take the kid gloves off as far as I’m concerned.
It would probably be worth pointing out that Cameron’s Family Research Institute is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. If you go to their website, splc.org, you’d see it’s listed right alongside the KKK, Nazis, et. al.
Not the best PR move to list a hate group’s faux statistics as fact, at least IMO.
Christopher —
Those are fantastic suggestions for how/why the national gay rights groups should get involved.
As to why they refuse, and why they might instead be tying themselves to unrelated Democratic Party or Hollywood entertainment initiatives… don’t get me started.
Phil —
Great idea. I’ll add the link later. Nudge me if I forget.
2 million gay men – who is he kidding? If the estimates I have seen elsewhere are correct, between 15 – 20% of the population of San Francisco is gay, as is 12% of the DC population.
Assuming these estimates are twice as high as in reality, that means there are 120,000 – 150,000 gay people in those two cities alone, and gay men make up a large portion of urban gays, problem 60 – 70%. So that’s 80,000 – 100,000 of the 2 million gay men in two cities in the US. That does not count the gay populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Atlanta, Houston, etc., etc. etc.
Christopher has hit on the singular frustration I have with “gay rights” groups. I ask the same thing: Where are they? GLAAD — the “Anti-defamation” folks — are too interested in Glaadhanding the media rather than going after the bigots directly. Who cares about image awards when there are charlatins like Cameron spouting lies and getting picked up by the mainstream media. We let these things go unchallenged far too often.
We need someone to do real honest-to-goodness oppositional research and post the results to expose the BS. I’d love to do this (I do what I can when I can), but I work fulltime (hard to tell by my comments here, huh?) and it definitely takes a lot of time and commitment. I’m willing to contribute time and money where I can, but shouldn’t our so-called advocacy groups be doing this?
B’nai Brith has done an excellent job of doing that for the Jewish community. When does our anti-defamation league grow a backbone?
CPT_Doom:
Cameron makes a classic disingenous claim in tying gay AIDS cases to 3% of the population. There’s a far greater difference between saying you’re gay for a survey and having sex with men. Closet cases, bisexuals, and occasional dalliances all get counted in the CDC’s “MSM” statistics.
AS I recall, the same surveys that claim only 3% of respondents identify themselves as being gay also tend to give figures well into the teens for men who have sex with men in their lifetimes. (I believe Laughman, et al., “The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practives in the United States” has that statistic — I can look it up when I get home.)
Amen to Jim and Chris. There are no gay organizations presently doing this. For almost over a year, I have been conducting oppositional research for a book I am writing. Cameron only scratches the surface of their errors. I have a chapter on him and it grows weekly.
But other than his lies, they employ other distortions. If there were any gay groups who would just take the time to look, all hell would break loose on them.
The book should be finished by October (I have written over 150 pages.) I am currently looking for a publisher now.
Jim, Mike,
GLAAD has a very narrowly defined mission. They only get involved in issues relating to gay images in the media. That’s it.
You may wish they had some other mission, but you can’t fault them for sticking to what they do. Actually, I’m glad they stay focussed on what they do and don’t try to venture off into debating research, endorsing candidates, fighting propositions, or any other gay cause of the moment.
HRC (mostly) sticks with lobbying on legislation issues.
We don’t have an organization who’s mission would include preaching to evangelicals about the fraud of the ex-gay movement. I don’t even know how one would go about doing that.
We don’t have access to Christian media. And frankly they are faith based rather than fact based anyway (they start from the conclusion and work backwards – so it doesn’t matter to their beliefs about us if Cameron is truthful or a complete raging loon). The secular media pretty much knows that Cameron’s a fraud.
I suppose we could start some campaign telling the public at large that the ex-gay movement uses fraud and deceipt – but most people haven’t heard of the ex-gays anyway and I’m not sure we would accomplish anything.
I think the best thing we could do is simply make sure that Log Cabin, Stonewall, and the various local groups all know about Cameron so that when the bigots pull out the lies on local TV, we can refute them and say something along the lines of “You do know that the statistic you quoted is fraudulent and that Paul Cameron, the guy who came up with it, was kicked out of the APA for distorting and lieing about the results of other peoples research as well as his own, don’t you”.
Jim,Needn’t bother! — Laumann and team considered 3 aspects of behaviour, identity and attraction. For behaviour since age 18, it is 5.2%. Adult men with all three (ie “gay men”) 2.4%. Attraction is 7.5%. And the combined sample of adult men that have at least one aspect is… 9.9% Jeepers, Kinsey was good!I just love it when I read someone — Chad of INqueery, or PFOX, or Throckmorton for example — refer to Laumann and quote “less than 3%”. Have they actually read Laumann???On the subject of the CDC categories it gets even more confused. Not only does MSM include anyone but those who have been excluesively het their entire life (i.e. more than the 3%) but they also have a category of “MSM and IDU”. Straight IDUs are not lumped in with “Heterosexual contact”. The question is — how do you know if that considerable slab of non-heterosexual men acquired their HIV via sex or injecting drugs?As for Cameron — he has made a career out of blaming everything done by non-heterosexuals on that 2.7% commonly known as openly gay men. That’s where he — and NARTH and FRC via Satinover — gets his “30% of child abuse is done by less than 3% of the population”.However, when someone bothers to check they soon find that openly gay men don’t figure very much at all. Nope, they all appear to be garden variety creeps or respectable church-going gay-thumping family men. Cameron avoids the obvious, and simply labels these men “homosexual” — regardless of their history, and even if they fiddled with one boy but raped 800 girls.
Chris, MikeI was going to, but see Timothy’s largely done it for me!I don’t think it’s too helpful to ask people with little contact or inclination on the matter to change the work they are doing. I feel HRC is a bloated entity, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to lump GLSEN in with them.I’d have to say I have been most impressed with how rapidly GLSEN — and PFLAG — have spread at a local level and have come to be seen as genuinely doing good work by all but the wingnuts and the people that the wingnuts confuse. I’d suggest that is why GLSEN and PFLAG are under sustained attack at the moment. Why was a PFOX even invented, afterall?And I thought there already was a national REPUBLICAN gay group??? Oh, that’s right there is… but they can’t even get invited out of their log cabins and along to the very party they are members of. What hope would the HRC or GLAAD have, even if they were inclined?I know it’s infuriating, but I just don’t think it’s solving much if you notice a gap and suggest someone else alters what they see as their role. Perhaps a louder voice directed at the churches should come from those within the churches? Hint Hint…I’m not having a go at you (really!) but I, for one, am certainly not going to be trawling for converts in evangelical churches. I wouldn’t belong there 🙂 And they dress bad.
Grant…
I wouldn’t be so foolhardy as to suggest we convert evangelicals. My hair, for one, makes me inelligable.
I am concerned more about the poison showing up in the well.
This stuff gets picked up and repeated by more mainstream (especially conservative) commentators, reporters, etc. and rarely goes unquestioned.
Besides, with Google becoming the research tool of choice for middle America, a few choice search terms quickly reveals we are being out-“researched” at every turn. And since even reporters use Google — along with every grandmother and high school student with a report due tomorrow — it is important that our side shows up to play.
Timothy, Re: “We don’t have access to Christian media”…
I have a dummy E-mail account that gets a bunch E-alerts, newsletters, whatever you want to call them, from Christian organizations from American Values (Gary Bauer) to Focus to Traditional Values Coalition (Lou Sheldon). They’re evangelicals, which means they want to convert the whole world and will do it for free. We not only have easy access to it, but it’s free.
A little oppositional research is not a difficult thing to do at all. And you can bet they’re reading everything HRC and GLAAD puts out, as well as subscribing to Advocate, Washington Blade, etc.
Right now, in case everyone is wondering what they’re spun up about more than anything … It’s not us, or if it is it is only indirectly. Virtually everything flooding my inbox is about the Supreme Court. Before that, it was fillibusters against appeals court nominees. They have their sights very focused “like a laser beam” on the courts.
They are concerned that if they don’t take over the courts now and in the next year, they will loose a golden opportunity. I guess they’re girding against possible losses in the mid-term elections. This way, they hope to influence policy via their own activist judges for the next twenty years, regardless of who is in Congress or the White House.
First I’d like to offer a correction, Southern Poverty Law Center’s url is splcenter.org.
That said, looking at the focus of all of the above-mentioned glbt organizations, none of them is in existence to discredit PFOX, Exodus, etc., or even to offer a dissenting opinion. Hate to say it, but the right wingnuts seem to have an undisputed monopoly on the “all gays are ‘curable'” claptrap. The mainstream professional associations who could do more to point out Cameron’s bogus science and dispute it wherever it shows its ugly head, are strangely silent.
I remember years ago (1989) in Oak Park, Illinois, when our local g/l organization was pushing for an amendment to the village’s human rights ordinance to include sexual orientation, the local evangelical church trotted out Cameron’s “studies” as fact. While no one on the village board bought this junk science, many otherwise intelligent people in this generally liberal community did not question it. It has to be called whenever it appears. However, aside of XGW, there seems to be no one whose mission it is to dispute this pseudo-science (I’m being kind by calling it this).
Any ideas?
Phil–
You’ve hit on exactly the kind of story I’m talking about. Paul Cameron’s “studies” are loaded with impressive footnotes from reputable journals. How many ordinary people will look at it and assume it is utterly bogus? They may not buy into the tone of the message, but they are very likely to come away with an impression that at least some of it is true.
Five years ago, Cameron’s research even showed up in a soundbite from William Bennett. (see slate.msn.com/?id=2098) He later retracted the statement.
And I’ll bet the local g/l organization had a very difficult time coming up with countering information to distribute.
Actually, Jim, in that particular case, it was not really an issue, but again, it was/is a very enlightened community.
However, several years later, one of the opponents of the glbt community brought up Exodus ministries and their related groups when the village was enacting a domestic partnership
registry. I remember that she mentioned that if only “you people” would find Jesus Christ, you wouldn’t need to push for legal recognition of your relationships. The jist was that if you just became ex-gay you wouldn’t want to register as domestic partners. As a non-Christian, I have no interest in finding Jesus, but I hate having my civil rights abrogated on that basis.
Again, many people dismiss Cameron’s propaganda as the junk that it is, but many others view it is having some validity.
Jim…
I am aware that we have access to what the Christian media poops out (I read way too much of it). I mean we don’t have access to Christian media input. There aren’t any of us on their go-to list.
So we can’t really reach the only group inclined to hear or believe (or care about) Cameron’s magic numbers.
As for Cameron’s crap, I think there’s some decent stuff out there on him. Maybe if someone had the time for it, you could do some internet work and compile a report. It would be great to have it in a booklet form that could be downloaded. I’m sure HRC or someone else would be glad to make it available if they didn’t have to do the work.
Sorry, I didn’t intend for my earlier comment to be quite so sweeping. (For what it’s worth, I’m a current HRC donor.)
However, I’ve been disappointed with NGLTF ever since it shut down its antidefamation/antiviolence unit in the early 1990s. Since then, antiviolence and anti-hatecrimes proponents have lacked the hard data that NGLTF used to collect and analyze.
Now these proponents are left with FBI undercounts, CUAV data from select localities, and local police reports that are inconsistent in both definition and measurement of hate crimes.
Sigh…. Rather than complain about what others aren’t doing, let’s focus on what WE can do.
I’m willing to do my own little part to organize people into an antidefamation, pro-free-speech group that would spotlight ex-ex-gay concerns.
Folks who are interested and have a bit of time or expertise to spare, please contact me — especially if you know a thing or two about starting and managing a small business or non-profit. I won’t run this hypothetical group, but I’ll help coordinate those who do wish to operate or participate in it.
My e-mail inbox remains overloaded, so prod me if you don’t hear from me within 7 days.
Mike, I can agree on the NGLTF.They do seem to have evaporated. I thought for a time that they’d get going somewhere with the IGLSS — some great core stuff from Lee Badgett in the late 1990’s (eg the income myth study etc), but what happened?Jim, ditto. I have no hope of doing a “the higher the hair, the closer to god” AKA Stephen Bennett even if I was so inclined. Besides, hubby would simply clipper it all right back off while I was asleep.Reflecting on what “collective we” do get involved in — perhaps “we” have been too inclined to focus on what “we” hope to achieve, rather than paying adequate attention to those who are seeking to deny us (and others) even the ability to do that. We’ve been busy planting out our garden beds and repainting the verandah; and barely noticed the barbarians at our gate.Understandable, because I see so many gay men and women disinclined to act AGAINST others (live and let live); but perhaps it’s time to understand that in this incremental struggle for equality we need to also tackle those who put barriers in our way as well as find a path forward.Is attack the best form of defence? I don’t know, but I’m sure as heck sure that nobody will do for us what we’re not prepared to go argue in the market place for ourselves.I want allies, not a fairy godmother.
the bottom line is that our leadership must make some effort into making the case that the religious right has engaged not only Cameron but other distortions to tell lies about GLBTs. But no organization seems to be doing this in detail. There are little pockets of information but there needs to be more of a concerted effort.
RE: Maybe if someone had the time for it, you could do some internet work and compile a report. It would be great to have it in a booklet form that could be downloaded.
Well, as it happens, I’m working on exactly that. But it’s a huge task and I have a real job on the side (pseudo-pun intended), so who knows when it will be finished.
Which of course, is why I’m so frustrated about this topic. I don’t have a lot of spare time, I’m certainly not a medical, psychological or social science professional (my degree is in Engineering), I’m just an ordinary schmo in Tucson, Arizona having to educate myself with tons of research published in arcane professional journals when there are far better qualified people who can do this same thing more accurately, more effectively and more quickly than I. Where are they?
Okay, off the soap box and back to work.
Timothy, Re: “I mean we don’t have access to Christian media input“
Ah, I get what you’re saying now.
I guess my suggestion is that the Conservative Christians are trying to reach two groups 1) Fellow conservative Christians and 2) mainstream Americans indirectly via the influence of their next door neighbors, conservative Christians.
So yes, we don’t have acces to their media on the input side, but that’s okay because most conservative Christians are not all that reachable — or where they are, probabilities for success are too slim to warrent spending too much resources on. Looking at it in a cost-benefit trade, it’s probably not a good investment.
But as you pointed out in your downloadable pamphlet idea, we do have opportunities to access the second group via the internets. And absent any information to the contrary, that second group is just as inclined to believe Cameron’s numbers as readily as anybody else. What’s not to believe — he has footnotes! 😉
Mike A
For what it’s worth, I’m not sure NGLTF can even be considered a “gay rights organization” any more. They seem to be more focused on progressive issues than on issues that impact the full community (maybe they are a “gay lefts organization”?)
Anyway.. I don’t have the time to take on a project of this magnatude, but I’d be happy work with someone else.
Do you think it would be possible for us to all kinda work together on this and come up with a tangible obtainable goal. Maybe (just as an example) we could set out to have a pamphlet written by the end of August which could be called something like LIES THE ANTI-GAY ACTIVISTS TELL. We could address the following issues:
The percentage of the population
Number of ex-gays
Life expectancy
Income is higher/lower/whatever
Cost of AIDS
Assumptions about AIDS
“All Christians agree that…”
Marriage since the beginning of time has been one man and one woman (I can’t believe they actually say that with a straight face… and supposedly know about Solomon)
“No society has ever accepted gays” (my brother actually told me this… it wasn’t malice, just ignorance)
All cultures agree… (except spain, canada, netherlands, belgium…. and to some degree all of western europe)
And probably many more.
If it’s done well I’m pretty sure we could get someone to host it or maybe even email it to their various local organization contacts.
The problem I see here is that the responses to such statements exist in the works of gay intellectuals and the academic literature about gay people. Most of it is well thought out, densely (to put it mildly) writen and hard to compress into a sound bite. Steven O Murray’s Homosexualities addresses many of these issues. He draws upon centuries of observation and commentary. Unfortuneately, this requires a commitment of time and effort to understand.
Just explaining how marriage has varied over the ages, and within cultures is a big problem. Most people do not realize that for most of Western history, wives were the property of their husband. My own experience has been that explaining this is a waste of time. People think you are making it up. Or refuse to even listen.
So, what I see going on is that gay intellectuals do respond. The political groups find this to be adaquate, so they don’t do a lot. The net result being that misconceptions and outright fraud perpetrated by conservative Christians mutates into urban legends. And there is not a whole lot we can do at this point.
I do not believe the issues of civility and truth should belong to gay or religious intellectuals alone.
The issues can be simplified and summarized, with links to appropriate sources for additional research or intellectual analysis. IGF does this with issues to some degree (though it avoids the religious right’s mudslinging). Dr. Gregory Herek developed a fine intro to Paul Cameron that could be updated.
I think it would be quite reasonable to set tangible, reachable, short-term goals, and then work toward them.
that 34 percent of all gay workers miss a day of work per month, versus an alleged 19 percent of the general population
Interesting, and in my experience as being ‘gay’, in the last 7 years of working, I’ve taken a grand total of around 6 weeks off, 5 weeks due to recovering after getting hit my a car whilst riding to the gym, and the other 5 days bits here and there; in terms of holidays, I take less holidays than my pairs, normally around a week per year – so going by own reputation, I’m actually carrying the ‘freeloading straights’ at my work – if one wishes to be a bigot.
Timothy… That’s an excellent idea.
I say that because I’ve been trying to work on something quite similar for quite a while, but it takes an incredible investment of time and energy. So far, I’ve been tackling two issues.
The first is Dr. Cameron’s distortions in “Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do”, which is not only probably his most influencial pamphlet, but contains in one location more or less every charge he has ever made, especially his famous life expectancy figures, “gerbling” and his “biological swapmeet” characterizations. As a part of that, I covered the percentage-of-population and life expectancy topics you mentioned.
The second issue I’ve been working on is the myth of gays as child molesters, which has been much in the news lately.
Another subject I’ve been reading up on is the so-called “effects” of gay parenting on children. I’m a little overwhelmed by that one because the charges are so broad and wide ranging, and the actual existing research on the subject limited (yet they distort it nonetheless). I guess it needs to be broken down into smaller pieces.
I would also like to revisit the topic of hate crimes — what they are, what they are NOT, their impact and their underreporting. I already covered one aspect of their underreporting.
So, that’s my long-winded way of saying “count me in”!