When President Bush declared in January that ''studies have shown that the ideal is where a child is raised in a married family with a man and a woman", one man was ready to take credit: Paul Cameron, a long-time anti-gay activist and psychologist who was expelled from the American Psychological Association in 1983.
Cameron believes that adoption by gay couples can be linked to high levels of child sex abuse, and although a Bush aide later clarified that the President has not intended to make any reference to same-sex adoptions, Cameron claimed that Bush had been influenced by his writings and the work of his Family Research Institute (FRI).
At the end of July Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe profiled Cameron and drew attention to the rise of "small think tanks, researchers, and publicists who are open about their personal beliefs" and who "are providing what they portray as medical information on some of the most controversial issues of the day." Cameron’s claims are rejected by the mainstream American Academy of Pediatrics, but the much smaller American College of Pediatricians (ACP) shares his objections to gay adoptions. When the AAP endorsed gay adoptions in 2002, the ACP was set up by Dr Joseph Zanga, a former AAP president, as a Judeo-Christian counterbalance.
Cameron has been in the public eye for a long time: back in the mid-1980s the gay press dubbed him "the most dangerous antigay voice in the United States today." In 1999 Robert Dreyfuss wrote an article on Christian anti-gay activism for Rolling Stone that noted:
One thing that [Fred] Phelps has in common with the Family Research Council, the Christian Coalition and ex-gay ministries like Exodus is that they all refer to the work of Dr. Paul Cameron, founder of the Family Research Institute and ISIS, the institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality.
Cameron, 59, a former psychologist based in Colorado Springs, issues a stream of data often used by anti-gay activists: that gays are far more likely than straights to molest children, that gays are more likely to commit crimes as mundane as tax evasion or shoplifting, and so on. “We’re kind of the wellspring of most of the statistics about the gay lifestyle.” Cameron says.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, FRC researcher Robert Knight "drew liberally" on Cameron when he published papers claiming, among other things, that gay people view "pedophiles as the 'prophets' of a new sexual order." FRC also cited Cameron's bogus claim that children in gay households are at greater risk of sexual involvement with a parent. In a legal brief, it even warned that schools offering diversity education could be sued for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Knight now works for Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America, where he directs the Culture and Family Institute.
Cameron’s influence is also noted in a report on anti-gay politics published by The People For the American Way Foundation:
William Bennett, Chuck Colson, and others continue to repeat Cameron's conclusion that the life expectancy for gay men is 43 years, a statistic based on his reading of obituaries in gay newspapers. (Cameron's statistic was effectively demolished in online magazine Slate) Bennett's trumpeting of this statistic last year on ABC's This Week and in the Weekly Standard was picked up by National Review and continues to circulate as the kind of "truth" that the Religious Right wants to tell America.
Cameron is also famously promoted in a short video entitled The Gay Agenda, produced by Pentecostal pastor Ty Beeson and his wife. The video featured Cameron’s studies as presented by Stanley Monteith, a Christian Coalition and John Birch Society activist. Thousands of copies have been distributed; many tapes were sent in particular t
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