Peterson Toscano's A Musing

Lies and Purveyors of Lies

From Ex-Gay Watch: The Canadian Broadcast Company reports how Melissa Fryear, Focus on the Family's resident ex-lesbian,

"hijacked" and distorted Canadian research on lesbian teen suicide to support her employer's political beliefs.

The post goes on to provide details of the study and how Fryear misused it.

Shocking? Not really, this sort of thing goes on all the time. The anti-gay "researcher" formerly known as the licensed Dr. Paul Cameron, recently published a paper in the Journal of Biosocial Science. As Christine points out in a recent post,

The paper is called "Children of Homosexuals and Transsexuals More Apt to be Homosexual." The first words are "'Common sense' holds that homosexuality is 'contagious'" and goes downhill from there.

Where does he get his data from? He says he's getting it from three other "books." OK, so what are these books? Studies? Research books?

Nope, they're just books. Non-research books. Books you can buy on Amazon.com. Books that the authors never intended to have used to bolster anti-gay "research." Books that were not research to begin with, but books intended to approach a broad range of issues using the stories of kids with Gay parents.

One of these books is Abigail Garner's Families like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is. Abigail writes that when she found out about the paper, "I was shocked. I had interviewed over 50 adult kids for my book. Cameron had broken down my sample by gender and sexual orientation of the the parent, and the gender and sexual orientation of the offspring. He did the same for two other books, tallied up who dates men and who dates women and concluded that this sample is reflective of the broader population of people with gay parents."

She later clarifies, "In fact, I had made a point of having a roughly even number of straight kids and second generation kids so that both views would be evenly represented in the book. In other words, because of the goals of my book, I deliberately aimed to have 50% of the kids interviewed to be queer. Not because it is statistically reflective of the population, but to give it balance of perspective."

Jim Burroway provides analysis of Cameron's paper (and other Cameron "studies" that conservative Christian leaders use to disparage and slander same-gender loving people.)



The ninth commandment states, "Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor"--do not lie. This is exactly what folks like Fryrear and Cameron do when they twist other people's work to fit their own bias.

Wayne Besen called Fryer and Focus on the Faggot, um Family to account on their dishonest use of research. We also need to let people know about Cameron's recent attempt at misinformation.

But wait! That's not all you get. Since posting this I learned that Dr. Robert Spitzer announced that Focus on the Family "organization took his controversial 2001 study on sexual orientation 'out of context.'" Read Dr. Robert Spitzer Says Group Used His Work to Support Fight Against Gay Rights

posted by Peterson Toscano @ 7:18 AM