Paul Cameron

Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute is an “expert” cited by groups like the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America and the American Family Association, among others in the Religious Right. While his claims have been consistently discredited, Cameron is still a favorite of opponents of gay rights and appeared last week on Crosstalk with Jim Schneider of VCY America (Voice of Christian Youth).

Cameron suggested that President Obama, who recently announced his support for marriage equality, might be gay. He later maintained that “the long term goal of the homosexual movement is to get every little boy to grab his ankles and every little girl to give it a try,” warning that children might be “forced to at least once experience homosexual acts.”

Listen:

Well, the timing is I think miserable for his reelection. I would have expected him, as you did, to wait until he was the new president and say, “Guess what? I’ve changed my mind,” or, “I’ve evolved.” But homosexuality is the one sin, or the one habit, that is 24/7. It is homosexuality all the time. And actually, while I’m not sure about the claims by the various people who have reported that Obama has at least participated at times with them in homosexual acts, this certainly lends some credence.

…

Mark my words clearly; the long term goal of the homosexual movement is to get every little boy to grab his ankles and every little girl to give it a try. They will not rest until every one of our children at least gets to try, has the opportunity and maybe is forced to at least once experience homosexual acts. There is no retreating from that, they made it very clear earlier on—now they don’t take about it—but that’s what they want, they will not be happy until they get it, marriage is just a step along the way.

Cameron later said he “partially agreed” with a caller who said, “they gave blacks equal rights and that was a bad path and now look where we are, if I don’t feel like I want to hire a black man for my business I’m in all sorts of trouble and now it’s going to be some homo who is gonna have to get a job because I can’t do nothing about it.” Cameron claimed the push for LGBT equality “brings into question the civil rights mentality” because it created “special rights on the basis of certain characteristics,” calling gays and lesbians “mentally deranged” and transgender people “people that are really strange.” He went on to compare gays and lesbians to people who have a sexual attraction to “dirty socks” and said “we’re headed to a place where the weirder the people, the more rights they will obtain and the more normal the fewer rights you will have”:

Cameron told Schneider that “we almost need a second American Revolution” to defeat legislation like a bill in California that would limit ex-gay “reparative therapy,” which he warned would make the state take kids away from their parents:

But he went on to say that such “reparative therapy” does not work and instead advocated that homosexuality be made “illegal” in order “to protect our children”:

Cameron: Part of the problem with the Christian Church in the United States today is that’s it’s be psychiatricized or psychologilized [sic], we seem to think that it’s our job to be counselors or do something to help people change. The fact is that the Christian Church for 2000 years tried to and eventually got homosexuality to be made illegal, when you make it illegal a lot of people don’t get into it because it’s illegal, when you make it illegal a lot of people get out of it because it’s illegal, when you say ‘we don’t want to be unkind’—Hey, we have to protect our children! We have to have a future!

The Christian Church until just recently, just the last few years of time, said we must prevent homosexuality from corrupting our society, corrupting our kids, and so that’s the area where I think we ought to go. If you stake your efforts on trying to convert people who are into drinking heavily or drugging heavily or homosexuality you are going to fail by far most of the time. Some of them will come over but there is no known technique to take someone who is in a besetting sin like this and free them.

Schneider: But for the power of God.

Cameron: Yes but the Christian Church for almost 2000 years said we will protect the rest of society from these miscreants and we will be kind to those who come to us individually and say ‘help me blah blah blah’ and that’s fine. I hear Christian spokespersons saying things like ‘we must be kind to the homosexuals because we must get them to come to church and listen to us and maybe they’ll convert,’ good luck! Sometimes that happens but you’re really running a very bad bet and you’re going way outside of mainstream Christian history.

Under Chairman Paul Cameron, the mission of the Family Research Institute is "to generate empirical research on issues that threaten the traditional family, particularly homosexuality, AIDS, sexual social policy, and drug abuse."

The "research" produced by FRI has been widely discredited by social scientists and earned the organization a designation as an anti-gay hate group from the Southern Poverty Law Center, but is nonetheless routninely cited by other anti-gay Religious Right organizations.

Yesterday, FRI released its latest "scholarly" investigation into how the education and entertainment industries are "disproportionately populated by homosexuals and are in the midst of boy-molesting scandals" ... which can all be traced back to the introduction of the birth control pill:

Universities have a preponderance of heterosexuals. But, the perhaps 8% or so of employees who practice homosexuality are responsible for the great bulk of the child molestations! Everyone knows that homosexuals go ‘where the boys are.’ Thus the Boy Scouts and Catholic Priest scandals. But the University and Hollywood scandals exhibit another rule — ‘where gays cluster, boys suffer.’

Everyone knows ‘the pill’ freed heterosexuals from social control — but it also (indirectly) freed those who practice homosexuality. Before the 1960’s, ‘everyone’ had to conform to a norm that guaranteed a future — each citizen was responsible to get married and produce children. This social milieu was self-reinforcing: ‘If I must be disciplined in my sex life, then everybody else should be as well!’ Thus the citizenry generally worked to suppress those with deviant sexual habits.

But that changed radically with the invention of ‘the pill.’ Shielded by the anonymity of modern life, the pill assured that those with heterosexual tastes could live their sex lives almost free from social discipline. Pregnancies would no longer reveal your liaisons, and no one knew whether you were childless by fate or choice. Good news for homosexuals, because if heterosexuals could ‘do whatever they wanted’ sexually, the notion of fairness inevitably pushed heterosexuals to agree with ‘why punish those with other harmless sexual tastes?’

Of course, ‘harmless’ is the operative word. Is homosexuality indeed harmless?

Evangelizing for homosexuality, the entertainment industry (joining the psychiatric professions) began to flood the media with the message that ‘homosexuality is different, yet harmless.’ Hollywood asserted that homosexual practitioners were just as stable, just as worthy of marriage, just as worthy of parenthood, etc. The combination of these two new realities — the pill and Hollywood promotion of homosexuality — is the key to understanding where we are today.