Subject: Incoming - Cameron article
From: James Yorton <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked] (QRD WWW Staff)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 1995 20:43:42 -0600 (CST)

This document is a version of a special supplement to the March 10 edition of 
the News-Telegraph prepared for on- line distribution.

The News-Telegraph is a semi-monthly newspaper for and about Gays and 
Lesbians, with offices in St. Louis and Kansas City, and serving Missouri, 
Kansas, Arkansas, the southern two-thirds of Illinois and western Tennessee.

Contact information is at the end of this document. Feel free to distribute 
this document in any format, as long as the News-Telegraph and the author is 
credited

THE MAN BEHIND THE MYTHS: 
A Report On The Chief Anti-Gay Researcher  Of The Theocratic Right

by Mark E. Pietrzyk

>> "Out of all the mass-murders in the US over the past seventeen years, 
homosexuals killed at least 68% of the victims."

>> "Homosexuals perpetrate between a third and a half of all recorded child 
molestations."

>> "37% of homosexuals engage in sado-masochism."

>> "29% of homosexuals urinate on their partners."

>> "17% ingest human feces."

>> "The average life span of a homosexual is 39 years; fewer than 2% survive 
to the age of 65."

These claims, as well as others no less slanderous to Gay people are beginning 
to appear with an alarming frequency in public debates over Lesbian and Gay 
rights. Whether in the form of a written report, speech, letter to the editor, 
or videotape, such statistics have the effect of lending scientific authority 
to anti-Gay stereotypes, and thus are proving to be a potent weapon in the 
theocratic right's "culture war" against Gays and Lesbians.

However, few have bothered to trace these statistics to their original source: 
one Paul Cameron, chairman of the Family Research Institute in Washington DC. 
Dr. Cameron is the chief researcher for the various anti-Gay organizations of 
the theocratic right. He was the scientific consultant for both the Oregon 
Citizens Alliance and Colorado for Family Values, as well as the producers of 
the videotape, The Gay Agenda. Cameron's degree in psychology is useful in 
providing credibility for his claims; but a close examination of Cameron's 
publications and statements reveals that not only is Cameron's "research" 
deeply flawed, but Cameron himself has a very dangerous policy agenda.

CAMERON'S BACKGROUND

Until 1980, Dr. Paul Cameron was an instructor in psychology at the University 
of Nebraska. When his teaching contract was not renewed, Cameron devoted 
himself full-time to a think tank he had set up called the "Institute for the 
Scientific Investigation of Sexuality" (ISIS) in Lincoln, Nebraska. Under the 
auspices of this institute, Cameron touted himself as an expert on matters of 
sexuality, particularly on the societal consequences of homosexuality.  
Throughout the 1980s, Dr. Cameron's institute published a series of hysterical 
pamphlets variously entitled: Criminality, Social Disruption and 
Homosexuality; Child Molestation and Homosexuality; and Murder, Violence and 
Homosexuality. In these pamphlets, Cameron presented "findings" allegedly 
showing that homosexuals were disproportionately responsible for all sorts of 
heinous crimes, including serial killing, child molestation and bestiality.

Shortly after making these claims, however, Cameron came under fire by a 
number of psychologists whom he had cited in his publications, including Dr. 
A. Nicholas Groth,director of the Sex Offender Program at the Connecticut 
Department of Corrections---an expert on child molestation.  Dr. Groth and 
other psychologists complained that Cameron was deliberately distorting or 
otherwise misrepresenting the results of their studies in order to support his 
agenda.

In response to these complaints about Cameron from his fellow psychologists, 
the American Psychological Association launched an investigation of Cameron's 
research. The APA discovered that Cameron not only misrepresented other 
psychologists' findings, but that his own studies employed unsound 
methodologies. Citing Cameron's breach of the APA code of ethics, the APA 
expelled Cameron from its membership in December 1983.  Cameron claimed that 
he had actually resigned before the APA expelled him, but APA bylaws prohibit 
members from resigning while they are under investigation.

Cameron was also censured by the Nebraska Psychological Association, the 
American Sociological Association, and the Midwest Sociological Society. In 
1984, US District Judge Jerry Buchmeyer denounced Cameron for having made 
misrepresentations to the court in a case involving the Texas state sodomy law.

Challenges to Cameron's credibility only seemed to spur Cameron to accelerate 
his anti-Gay activities. In 1987, Cameron moved to Washington DC and set up 
shop under the auspices of the Family Research Institute, a "non- profit 
Educational and Scientific Corporation." From this location, Cameron has 
continued to crank out his propaganda, periodically updating his brochures and 
aiming to influence the policy-making community. As Cameron has stated in one 
brochure, "Published scientific material has a profound impact on society... 
In a clash between theoretical ethics and hard, cold statistics, the 
data-linked opinion will always win."

THE NATURE OF CAMERON'S "RESEARCH"

The original wrongdoing which led to Cameron's expulsion from the American 
Psychological Association---distortion and falsification of others' studies 
and employment of unsound methodologies---continue to be found in Cameron's 
current research studies. Indeed, Cameron often pads his brochures and 
articles with citations of his own previous studies, studies which have 
already been discredited.

The 1983 Isis Survey

Cameron's most oft-cited study is a survey of sexual and social behavior of 
4340 adults in five American cities conducted by Cameron's Institute for the 
Scientific Investigation of Sexuality in 1983. The results of this survey were 
subsequently published in a number of Cameron's pamphlets and in an article 
"Effect of Homosexuality Upon Public Health and Social Order."

Cameron was initially inspired to conduct his 1983 ISIS survey shortly after 
he spearheaded a drive to defeat a Lesbian and Gay rights ordinance in 
Lincoln, Nebraska in1982. Making no effort to hide his objectives, Cameron 
told reporters before the results of the study were in that the purpose of his 
survey was to provide ammunition for activists wishing to overturn Gay and 
Lesbian rights laws.  Sure enough, Cameron got the results he wanted.

As anyone who has had a basic course in statistics knows, a survey study is 
valid only to the extent that one can be reasonably sure that one's sample is 
representative of the population as a whole. To that end, statisticians have 
developed a complex array of methodologies for ensuring that researchers 
acquire a sufficiently large, random sample to use as the basis of those 
studies. Sexuality surveys pose particular problems insofar as people are 
reluctant to share information about their personal habits and those who are 
personally conservative are least likely to willingly participate in such 
surveys. Cameron, however, apparently prefers to ignore these methodologies 
whenever it suits his purpose to do so.

Consider his sampling method. Although Cameron was allegedly able to get 
thousands of heterosexuals to respond to his survey, he was only able to get 
41 male homosexuals and 24 Lesbians to respond. The extremely small sample of 
Gays would in itself invalidate any attempts to draw conclusions about the 
sexual behavior of the Lesbian and Gay population. Yet this is precisely what 
Cameron does.

Even worse, the extremely skewed results of Cameron's survey indicate that he 
did not even get an adequate random sample of heterosexuals either. According 
to his survey, 52% of male heterosexuals have shoplifted; 34% have committed a 
crime without being caught; 22% have been arrested for a crime; and 13% have 
served time in prison.  Twelve percent of male heterosexuals have either 
murdered or attempted to murder another person. Any researcher who obtained 
these kinds of results for the American male heterosexual population would 
have given serious thoughts to tossing out his survey as tremendously flawed. 
Cameron,however, has chosen to use his survey results to depict Gays and 
Lesbians as essentially depraved and violent, while skirting over his 
bizarrely skewed findings on male heterosexuals.

MURDER, VIOLENCE AND CRIMINALITY

Cameron has published three pamphlets which allegedly prove the existence of 
violent and homicidal tendencies among Gays: Murder, Violence and 
Homosexuality; Criminality, Social Disruption and Homosexuality; and more 
recently, Violence and Homosexuality, which is a revised version of the first 
two pamphlets.

The pamphlet Murder, Violence and Homosexuality asserts the following "facts":

>> You are 15 times more apt to be killed by a Gay than a heterosexual during 
a sexual murder spree,

>> Homosexuals have committed most of the sexual conspiracy murders,

>> Homosexuals have killed at least 350 (68%) of the victims,

>> Half of all sex murderers are homosexuals,

>> Homosexuals committed 7 of the 10 worst murder sets.

These conclusions are based on a sample of 34 serial killers Cameron selected 
from the years 1966 to 1983. Cameron stacks the deck not only by including 
phony figures (he includes in his sample the claims of the notorious Henry 
Lucas, who subsequently recanted his boast that he murdered hundreds of 
people) but by examining only those serial killers with an apparent sexual 
motive, allowing him to include John Wayne Gacy and his victims, but exclude 
the overwhelming majority of serial killers and their victims. This manner of 
selection distorts the reality of mass murder considerably. As sociologist 
Jack Levin, author of Mass Murder: America's Growing Menace points out, "The 
typical mass murderer is a family man. He kills his wife and his children in 
order to get even. The typical serial killer is a white heterosexual male, 
like Ted Bundy...Of course there are homosexual serial killers, but they are 
in the minority."

Cameron's pamphlet Criminality, Social Disruption and Homosexuality consists 
almost entirely of conclusions reached by Cameron's other studies, including 
the above-mentioned study on mass murder and Cameron's 1983 ISIS study. On the 
basis of the 1983 survey, the pamphlet argues that Gays are more likely to use 
drugs and alcohol, get involved in a traffic accident, murder someone, cheat 
on their income tax, and serve time in prison (a remarkable 13.4% of Gays 
versus "only" 7.7% of male and female heterosexuals have been in prison). 
Concludes the pamphlet, "Homosexuality is a crime against humanity."

CHILD MOLESTATION AND HOMOSEXUALITY

Linking homosexuality to child molestation is a favorite theme of the 
religious right, and Cameron happily obliged his friends with statistical 
"evidence" to support this slander.  Cameron's literature on child molestation 
consists of two pamphlets: Child Molestation and Homosexuality (an early and 
revised version) and two published articles,"Homosexual Molestation of 
Children/Sexual Interaction of Teacher and Pupil" and "Child Molestation and 
Homosexuality."

Cameron's Conclusions:

>> Gays have perpetrated between a third and a half of all child molestations,

>> Homosexual teachers have committed between a quarter and four-fifths of all 
molestation of pupils,

>> Gays are at least twelve times more apt to molest children than 
heterosexuals (revised to "10 to 20 times" more in a later study),

>> Homosexual teachers are at least seven times more likely to molest a pupil.

Cameron's findings are based in large part upon a review of other researchers' 
work on child molestation, but in order to get the results he wants, Cameron 
has to distort the findings of the original studies. For example, Cameron 
defines all cases of molestation between an adult male and a male child as 
molestations committed by homosexuals; however this definition is rejected by 
the very experts Cameron cites. One of these experts, Dr. A. Nicholas Groth, 
has in fact explicitly stated that the molestation of young boys by adult men 
has nothing to do with homosexuality:

"...(I)t is a faulty assumption that if an adult male selects a young boy as 
his victim, his sexual orientation is homosexual. We found that some (73, or 
49%) offenders responded exclusively to children---boys, girls, or both---and 
showed no interest in adults or age-mates for sexual gratification. These men 
were pedophile in the true sense of the word.

"Other (75 or 51%) offenders showed no persistent sexual preference for 
children but turned to them as the result of conflicts or problems in their 
adult relationships. Although this group regressed to sexual encounters with 
children, their predominant sexual orientation was towards adults. In 
examining the adult sexual lifestyle of this latter group, it was found that 
the large majority (62, or 83%) of these subjects led exclusively heterosexual 
lives, and the remaining subjects (13, or 17%) were bisexually oriented-that 
is, their adult sexual activities involved both male and female partners, 
although here, too, their preference was for women.

"It appears, then, that the heterosexual adult constitutes more of a threat of 
sexual victimization to the underage child than does the homosexual adult. The 
offender who selects young boys as his victims has either done that 
exclusively in his life or does so having regressed from adult heterosexual 
relationships. Offenders attracted to boy victims typically report that they 
are uninterested in or repulsed by adult homosexual relationships and find the 
young boy's feminine characteristics and absence of secondary sexual 
characteristics, such as body hair, appealing."

Even the conservative Washington Times has rejected the myth of the male 
homosexual as child molester. In a three-part series on child molestation in 
the Boy Scouts, the paper reported:

"For decades, Boy Scout leaders have tried to protect Scouts from sex abusers 
by watching out for men they thought were Gay. They were watching out for the 
wrong people.  Most men who have sexual relations with boys are heterosexual 
adults, according to several studies of child abusers. They have sexual 
relationships with women, but children may be their primary or secondary 
sexual interest...in several cases where a Scout leader was caught molesting 
boys, other leaders explained they had no reason to suspect the man was 
homosexual. But some sex abuse experts say that pedophilia seems to be a 
sexual orientation of its own, rather than a spin-off of a person's adult 
sexual preferences...The Scouts' "Youth Protection Guidelines," distributed to 
Scout leaders, says it is a "myth" that "children are at a greater risk of 
sexual victimization from Gay adults than from straight adults."

"It is also worth noting that historically, heterosexuals have paid little 
heed to the rights of female children vis-a-vis adult males. Indeed, the very 
notion of child sex as a crime is a fairly recent invention. Throughout most 
of history, children were regarded conceptually as small adults. Talmudic law 
specified that, although recommended age for marriage was twelve for a female, 
sexual intercourse and betrothal was permissible with a female child as young 
as three years and one day (as long as the permission of the father was 
obtained). Intercourse with one younger than this was invalid from the 
standpoint of betrothal, but was not a crime. Christian Canon law set the age 
for legal marriage at twelve for the bride and fourteen for the groom; 
however, it also permitted intercourse and betrothal with females as young as 
seven.

"Church doctrine subsequently influenced the development of statutory rape 
laws. Until the late nineteenth century, English civil law placed the age of 
consent for sexual intercourse at ten years, violation of the law being merely 
a misdemeanor. The age of consent in most American states in the nineteenth 
century was also ten, except for Delaware, which set its limit at seven. It 
was not until the efforts of social reform movements in the late nineteenth 
century that the age of consent was raised in most American states to between 
fourteen and eighteen. Thus, the religious right's argument that child 
molestation is invariably connected with homosexuals' undermining of moral 
tradition could not befurther from the truth."

WHAT  GAYS DO

Cameron has provided anti-Gay organizations with a great deal of research 
material indicating absurdly high rates of various extreme sexual practices 
and venereal diseases among Gays and Lesbians. Pamphlets on these subjects 
include What Homosexuals Do, Medical Aspects of Homosexuality and Medical 
Consequences of What Homosexuals Do. According to Cameron's pamphlets, the 
frequency of various sexual practices among Gay men areas follows:

>> oral sex: 99% to 100%

>> anal sex: 93% to 98%

>> anilingus: 92%

>> urine sex: 29%

>> fisting: 41% to 47%

>> sadomasochism: 37%

>> average number of partners per year: 20 to 106

In regard to venereal diseases, Cameron concludes that Gay men are:

>> fourteen times more apt to have had syphilis

>> three times more apt to have had gonorrhea

>> three times more apt to have had genital warts

>> eight times more apt to have had hepatitis

>> three times more apt to have had lice

>> five times more apt to have had scabies

>> over 5000 times more likely to have had AIDS

As for Lesbians, they are:

>> nineteen times more apt to have had syphilis

>> two times more apt to have had genital warts

>> four times more apt to have had scabies.

Cameron's "findings" are based upon two main sources: Cameron's own 1983 ISIS 
survey and various studies which do not employ random sample survey 
methodology. Indeed,one of the authors Cameron has cited has complained, "For 
[Cameron] to use our figures to estimate differences between homosexuals and 
heterosexuals across the board in the general population is ludicrous." 
Several studies which Cameron cites to support his conclusions about the 
behavior of Gays are actually studies about Gay men recruited entirely from VD 
clinics.

Cameron even repeats as fact the outrageous urban legend that Gay men 
supposedly like to insert gerbils in their rectum (Medical Consequences of 
What Homosexuals Do), citing a column by the popular journalist Cecil Adams as 
evidence. However, after extensive research trying to track down the source of 
the gerbil story, Adams has come to the conclusion that it is a fabrication.

What is particularly odd about Cameron's attempts to link Gays with perverted 
sex practices is that he is not at all disapproving of the same practices when 
heterosexuals perform them. In his 1981 book Sexual Gradualism, Cameron 
approved of heterosexual sodomy, remarking, "The anus is potentially 
'sexy'...Animals do not use the anus to sexual advantage, but many humans 
do."  He also approved of heterosexual "golden showers" (urinating on one's 
partner), though he found the practice personally distasteful, because 
"anything both partners do is OK. "Cameron also gave qualified approval to 
heterosexual adolescents having pre-marital sex, on the grounds that"active 
heterosexuality inhibits the formation of homosexuality."

THE HOMOSEXUAL LIFE SPAN

A recent study of Cameron's which has received a great deal of attention among 
the religious right is "The Lifespan of Homosexuals," a paper comparing 6516 
obituaries gathered from sixteen American Gay newspapers over a twelve-year 
period to a sample of obituaries from regular newspapers (findings of the 
paper are published in Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do). Cameron 
comes to the following conclusions:

>> Less than 2% of Gay men survived to old age

>> If AIDS was the cause of death, the median age of Gay males was 39,

>> For those who died of other causes, the median age was 42, and only 9% died 
old,

>> Lesbians had a median age of 45; 23% died old,

>> 2.8% of Gays died violently,

>> Gays were 116 times more apt to be murdered; 24 times more apt to commit 
suicide; eighteen times more likely to die in a traffic accident,

>> 20% of Lesbians died of murder, suicide or accident, a rate 487 times 
higher than that of white females aged 25-44.

Now it is obvious that AIDS in America is having a hugely disproportionate 
impact on Gay men, and this would have the effect of lowering the average 
statistical life expectancy of the Gay population. However, this is not enough 
for Cameron; he must prove that AIDS is not the result of unsafe sexual 
practices but is merely one manifestation of self-destructive behavior on the 
part of Gays and Lesbians.  Thus he resorts to culling obituaries from Gay and 
Lesbian newspapers, a methodology which would be laughed at by any reputable 
research scholar.

There are a number of reasons why obituaries from Gay newspapers are not 
representative of deaths among the Gay population as a whole. Gay newspapers 
were created by and for the urban Lesbian and Gay communities which have only 
recently flourished (within the past two decades).  These communities consist 
of Gay men and women who are disproportionately young, open, and socially 
active among their fellow urban Gays. Obituaries in Gay newspapers are not 
meant to provide a public record of deaths among all Gays, but to allow 
members of the urban Gay and Lesbian community to express mourning, 
particularly for those whose lives have been cut short by illness or 
accident.  Lesbians and Gays who live outside these communities or who die of 
natural causes are not nearly as likely to be reported in a Gay newspaper.

Taking into account these factors would seem to explain some of Cameron's more 
bizarre findings, such as the fact that the median age of Gays who died from 
causes other than AIDS is nearly as low as the age of those who died from 
AIDS, and that Gays are more likely to be murdered, die in traffic accidents, 
die from heart attacks, cancer, etc. than heterosexuals. Moreover, the fact 
that Cameron was only able to obtain 133 Lesbian obituaries out of a total of 
6516 Gay obituaries over twelve years would seem to suggest that obituaries 
from Gay newspapers are hardly reflective of the Gay and Lesbian population, 
unless one is willing to conclude that the vast majority of Lesbians live 
forever.

CAMERON'S POLICY PROPOSALS

Cameron's diatribes against Gays and Lesbians are bad enough, but even they 
pale in comparison to the policy proposals he has put forth to deal with the 
AIDS crisis.  Cameron apparently believes that the spread of AIDS is a 
positive development in helping to rid the world of "perverts." He has told 
one reporter, "I think that actually AIDS is a guardian. That is I think it 
was sent, if you would, about forty years ago, to destroy Western civilization 
unless we change our sexual ways. So it's really a Godsend."

On the other hand, Cameron also views AIDS as being such a large threat to 
"innocents" that he has proposed nationwide testing for HIV and the forcible 
quarantine of all those testing positive, either by confinement to their homes 
or in regional detention centers. He has also advocated the outlawing of 
homosexuality and the forcible closing of all Gay bars; homosexuals would be 
required to register with government authorities and have their movements 
tracked.

At times Cameron has called for even more extreme measures. At least twice 
Cameron has advocated the tattooing of AIDS patients on the face, so that 
people would know when they were meeting with an infected person. The penalty 
for trying to hide the tattoo would be banishment to the Hawaiian island of 
Molokai, a former leper colony. In the event that a vaccine were developed to 
prevent AIDS, Cameron has proposed that homosexuals be castrated to prevent 
them from "cheating" on nature.

Cameron has also argued that the extermination of homosexuals should also be 
considered a "viable option." At the 1985 Conservative Political Action 
Conference, Cameron announced to the attendees, "Unless we get medically 
lucky, in three or four years, one of the options discussed will be the 
extermination of homosexuals. "According to an interview with former Surgeon 
General C. Everett Koop, Cameron was recommending the extermination option as 
early as 1983.

It is not known how many of Cameron's colleagues in the religious right 
support some of Cameron's more extreme policy recommendations. When Will 
Perkins, chairman of Colorado for Family Values, was asked whether hesupported 
Cameron's call for quarantine of AIDS victims, he replied, "It's a very 
complex question, but it has puzzled me that AIDS has not been handled the 
same way as any other deadly disease in an epidemic form." Kevin Tebedo, a 
co-founder of Colorado for Family Values, has not been so shy, having been 
quoted as favoring tattooing and quarantine of those who test HIV positive. 
Reverend Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition has come out in 
favor of quarantining AIDS patients in what he calls "cities of refuge." David 
Caton, head of the Florida chapter of the American Family Association, has 
suggested that homosexuality be discouraged by photographing patrons entering 
Gay bars and posting these photos in public places such as the post office. In 
any case, not a single prominent figure in the religious right has publicly 
repudiated Paul Cameron's writings.

WHO USES CAMERON'S STUDIES?

Nearly every anti-Gay organization has employed Cameron's research studies at 
one time or another. Dr.James Dobson's "Focus on the Family" has distributed 
thousands of copies of a packet by Brad Hayton entitled The Homosexual Agenda, 
a guide to activists wishing to overturn Lesbian and Gay rights legislation. 
The packet quotes extensively from Cameron's studies, alleging that 
homosexuals "perpetrate between a third and a half of all recorded child 
molestations," "killed at least 68 percent of the victims [of mass murder]," 
and "ingest, on the average, the fecal material of 23 different men per 
year."Nevertheless, Domino's Pizza CEO Tom Monaghan saw fit to award Dr. James 
Dobson the "Domino's Pizza Humanitarian Award" in 1993 for Dobson's "unselfish 
contributions to the community."

Gary Bauer's Family Research Council, formerly a division of Focus on the 
Family, has also relied upon Cameron's research. Robert H. Knight, a policy 
analyst for the FRC, has used Cameron's article on child molestation to allege 
that there is a "major pedophilic undercurrent among homosexuals" and has 
cited "The Homosexual Lifespan" to support his claim that "most male and 
female homosexuals show a pattern of self-destructive behavior."

During the 1992 anti-Gay referendum campaigns in Oregon and Colorado, Paul 
Cameron served as the chief scientific consultant to both Lon Mabon's Oregon 
Citizens' Alliance and Will Perkins' Colorado for Family Values. The OCA and 
CFV used Cameron's statistics in various fliers, videos and public 
presentations throughout their campaigns. When asked if CFV accepted Cameron's 
research claims, Will Perkins was quoted as saying "I can tell you we do, or 
we wouldn't use it." When Gay and Lesbian groups challenged the validity of 
Colorado's Amendment 2 in court, Colorado Attorney General Gale A. Norton 
consulted extensively with Cameron and requested affidavits from Cameron's 
Family Research Institute. (After Norton was informed of Cameron's reputation, 
however, she refused to submit Cameron's affidavits to the court.)

Recently, Cameron's statistics have found a new venue: the videotape. During 
the Oregon referendum campaign, the Antelope Valley Springs of Life 
Ministries, run by televangelists Ty and Jeannette Beeson, produced a 
videotape for the Oregon Citizens' Alliance entitled Dangerous Behaviors: A 
Growing Pattern of Abuse. The video, complete with explicit pictures of 
certain outlandish elements of the San Francisco Gay community, quoted 
directly from Cameron's studies. As the video flashed pictures of serial 
killer Jeffrey Dahmer, the narrator recited Cameron's studies linking 
homosexuality to violence, mass murder and child molestation. However, even 
OCA sympathizers were turned off by the extreme content of thevideo.

The Springs of Life Ministries obligingly produced a more sanitized version of 
the video, entitled The Gay Agenda.  The new video dropped references to 
serial killing and did not mention Paul Cameron by name. However, it did use 
Cameron's statistics, particularly those from his 1983 ISIS survey. In the 
video, Dr. Stanley Monteith, a former director of the Santa Cruz, California, 
chapter of the John Birch Society, recited Cameron's startlingly high 
percentages of Gays practicing various extreme sexual practices, while an 
anonymous narrator repeated some of Cameron's other statistics. Not 
surprisingly the video did not report on Cameron's statistical findings for 
heterosexual males (34% have committed a crime; 22% have been arrested; 12% 
have either murdered or attempted to murder someone; etc.) both the OCA and 
CFV distributed thousands of copies of the videotape during their referendum 
campaigns.

The national debate over Gays in the military provided a huge boost to the 
producers of The Gay Agenda. Pat Robertson plugged the video on his television 
program, The 700 Club, resulting in more then 6000 calls for the video in the 
space of 24 hours. Copies of the tape were distributed throughout the ranks of 
the military and on Capitol Hill. A two-star army general wrote to the Springs 
of Life Church praising the tape as "a splendid teaching tool" and assuring 
the producer that the tape was being watched by other high-ranking officers. 
Marine Corp commandant Carl Mundy gave copies of the tape to his fellow 
service chiefs and the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff. Today, The Gay 
Agenda is being distributed by the tens of thousands across the country, 
bringing Cameron's lies into the homes and churches of Americans everywhere.

Focus on the Family, the Oregon Citizens Alliance, and Colorado for Family 
Values are now deeply involved in assisting the formation and operation of 
anti-Gay organizations in many other states. In Idaho, Kelly Walton, former 
political director of the OCA, is now directing the Idaho Citizens Alliance 
and continues to spout Cameron's nonsense statistics. David Caton, an admitted 
former cocaine user and pornography addict (he says his $300-a-month 
pornography habit made him masturbate uncontrollably) is now heading the 
Florida chapter of the American Family Association and is using Cameron's 
research to support his accusations that Gays are sexually obsessed perverts. 
Frank Meliti, chairman of Arizonans for Traditional Values (associated with 
Lou Sheldon's Traditional Values Coalition), is using Cameron's researchin an 
attempt to pass an anti-Gay referendum in Arizona.

The list of individuals and groups who rely on Cameron is endless. Columnists 
Patrick Buchanan and Don Feder have found Cameron's research quite useful in 
their diatribes against homosexuals. Concerned Women for America has cited 
Cameron's research in their letters. Accuracy in Media has employed Cameron as 
an expert in a conference on homosexuality aired by C-SPAN. Pat Robertson has 
had Cameron appear as a guest on The 700 Club. The Boy Scouts of America 
consulted with Cameron during a recent legal case involving a Gay scoutmaster. 
Officials from the US Army and Navy have complimented Cameron on his pamphlet 
Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do in helping to stop President Bill 
Clinton's attempt to lift the ban on Gays in the military in 1993. Amazingly, 
even Clinton's Department of Justice finds Cameron a credit-worthy researcher, 
having cited one of his studies in the administration's brief prepared for the 
Steffan v. Aspin case, which sought to prevent a Gay Naval midshipman from 
gaining his officer's commission.

The coming years are likely to see a sharp increase in the intensity of the 
public debate over Gay rights.  Approximately half of the nation's state 
legislatures have already been involved in battles over Lesbian and Gay rights 
issues. The issue of Gays in the military is far from settled, and nearly a 
dozen states faced efforts to place anti-Gay referenda on the ballots for 
November 1994. Paul Cameron has promised that he will be in the forefront of 
these campaigns with his latest book, The Gay Nineties. Others on the right 
are likely to use Cameron's research without mentioning the source. Gay rights 
groups should be prepared to recognize Cameron's slurs and quickly rebut them.

Mark E. Pietrzyk is a research analyst for Log Cabin Republicans in Washington 
DC, and a doctoral student in political science at the George Washington 
University. He is a former research assistant for the Heritage Foundation.

This report has been made available from the Log Cabin Republicans, a 
Washington DC-based information and advocacy organization, and is reprinted 
here with the author's permission.

Log Cabin Republicans can be contacted at 202/347-5306,or write them at
1012 14th Street NW Suite 703,Washington DC 20005.

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