Sunday, February 22, 2009

21 Reasons Why Gender Matters: Paul Cameron references

I go back to university soon, so I won't have much time to write here. I didn't get through nearly as many of the references of the local anti-gay pamphlet "21 Reasons Why Gender Matters" as I would have wanted over the holidays, but realistically I suppose it's too tough a job for one person. There are still a few things I have found, though. The most significant would probably be the use of not one, but two, direct references from Paul Cameron, an "expert on homosexuality" so discredited that there are even anti-gay groups who consider his work too shoddy and unreliable to use (and that's saying something).

The first is using his recent distortions about the average lifespan of gay and lesbian partnered people in Europe:
Scandinavian research has shown that married homosexuals’ and
lesbians’ life spans are 24 years shorter than heterosexual couples.
In Denmark over the 12 years after 1990, the average age of death
of hetero men was 74, whereas the 561 partnered homosexual men
who died in the same period did so at an average age of 51. Married
women died at an average age of 78, whereas the nine lesbian women
who died, did so at an average age of 56. In Norway the figures were
similar – married heterosexual men died at an average age of 77, the
31 homosexuals at 52; heterosexual women died at 81, while the 6
lesbians who died, did so at mean 56.151

With footnote 151 being none other than

151 Paul Cameron,. “Federal Distortion of The Homosexual Footprint.”:

which has already been debunked in detail by Box Turtle Bulletin.

The second is the usual conflation of homosexuality and child molestation
A recent review of the child molestation literature as it appears in
medical and psychological journals concluded that between 25 and 40
per cent of all recorded child molestation was homosexual.169

With footnote 161 being

169 Reported in Paul Cameron, Exposing the AIDS Scandal. Lafayette, Louisiana: Huntington House Publishers, 1988, p39.

Child molestation is child molestation of course, and it's only anti-gay activists who falsely treat molesters of boys and girls as subsets of the larger heterosexual and homosexual population. But I am somewhat amused by the description by the Gender Matters pamphlet of a Cameronite writing from 1988 as a "recent review of the child molestation literature". Getting desperate for relevance, these anti-gay types are.

1 comment:

Buffy said...

Good catch. That pile of bilge also cites NARTH (the rabidly anti-gay quack tank) and Joseph Nicolosi numerous times . There's not one piece of truth in that entire document. It's pure propaganda.