Confirming Cameron's deceit

The Eastern Psychological Association has basically confirmed that antigay fundamentalist Paul Cameron lied. They confirm the very things this blog contended had happened.

Dr. Phil Hineline, the president of the EPA, said that Cameron is circulating a manuscript “that purports... to be the account of a presentation at the March 2007 meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association.”

What Cameron gave was not a formal paper but a presentation given in what is called a “poster presentation”. And the EPA says that what Cameron is now distributing “was not present in the title nor was it in the supporting materials that were submitted by the Camerons for a poster presentation at EPA.” They also note that the emphasis Cameron is now giving to the alleged “early deaths” of gays “was not present in the materials submitted to EPA.”

Regardless of that they note: “Whatever its content, even the format of the manuscript to which the EPA identification has been affixed -- a manuscript of more than 7000 words plus three tables and six graphs, would have been completely inappropriate as a poster presentation which was the venue in which Dr. Cameron proposed to participate in the meeting.”

Cameron presented them with his conclusions that the number of gay people in the general population is overstated and nothing else. And that material “was accepted as a poster, not as a paper or address” but there “was nothing in the materials submitted by the author for review by EPA that indicated that the work could, or would, be informative with respect to the longevity of homosexuals.”

And what is a poster presentation. Here is one description: “Well, it’s just what it sounds like: a chance for participants to summarize their research findings on a poster displayed in a hall or conference room. People can enter, walk around, look at all the posters — there were sixty-six of them in this eighty minute session — ask a few questions, and move on to the next poster. That’s it.”

Now you see why a 7,000 word manuscript would not qualify. His poster presentation DID NOT include the material he is disseminating to the public. He gave the EPA information on one topic and then writes a paper allegedly based on that but which includes a vast amount of material not related to what he posted at the EPA meeting. He then uses the EPA to give credibility to the paper allowing gullible and ignorant fundamentalists to believe that the paper he is distributing is an address he gave to this organization.

What he is distributing is a false representation of the poster presentation. Cameron is now lying to the public by claiming to have presented something he did not present. He is attempting to use the EPA to give credibility to his bigoted lies. He is dishonest. It is clear why two professional organizations have thrown him out for falsifying data and unethical behavior.

In my original discussion I said that Cameron was using two groups that were not standardized in any way. He compared married gays in Denmark at the time of their death to the average of death for married heterosexuals. He neglected that the average age of married gays in Denmark was quite low at that time and that marriage for gays had only been legal for 10 years. I asserted that most gays who married would have been young.

So the gay group started out with a very young average age. Some will die in any such group. If their average age is in their 30s when they marry then 10 years later the average age of those who have died should be in their 40s if they died equally. In fact they didn’t die equally. The average age at death was in their 50s implying that it those who were much older who died.

This analysis of Cameron actually looked at the records for Denmark and confirms what I was saying. Fully two-thirds of all married gays in Denmark were under 40 years old because “there was no rush of older gays and lesbians to register their partnerships when the law was first enacted.” As this chart shows the average age of gays in legal partnerships was considerable younger than the average age of married straights.



Paul Cameron is deceitful and dishonest. So why do people believe him? Because they want to believe him. It confirms the bigotry they already possess and gives the veneer of an intellectual foundation to it.

Magic math and murder.

Paul Cameron can be the source of almost endless amusement with his contradictory dishonesty. He writes that gay men are 116 times more likely to be murdered. As you shall see this means that the number of gay men murdered every year exceeds the total number of murders per year. That also would mean that no heterosexuals are murdered in the US. His claims are even more outlandish than that.

TThe average murder rate for males is around 7.6 murders per 100,000 population. Cameron’s rate for gay men would be in the range 879 murders per 100,000 population. That would mean, according to Cameron, that, every twenty years something like one-sixth of all gay men had been murdered.

Take his absurd life span for gay of 51 (his newest estimate). He claims that just under one percent of all gay men are murdered every year (if they are 118 time more likely to be killed this would be the case). So over the life span of 51 years that would come to 44.8% of all gay men are murdered! And no one has noticed. I would think gay men would notice and say something about it!

One day the Religious Right says that gays as victims of violence are overestimated and exaggerated as part of a political strategy for the “gay agenda”. Yet, no one I’ve read has a victim rate anywhere near as high as Cameron. The very idea that almost 1% of gay men are murdered every year is shocking. And it becomes more absurd when you realize that over the lifetime of these men (using Cameron’s own stats) this would mean almost half are murdered.

The total number of murders in the US was 16,900 in 2005. The most reasonable estimate of gay men in the US is 5% of the population. The male population is approximately 150 million in total. so the gay male population would be around 7,500,000. If gay men are 119 times more likely to be killed we have the rate of 879 murders per 100,000 gay men. Over a population of 7,500,000 gay men that is about 65,900 gay men murdered per year! The one big problem with Cameron’s statistic is that it is about 4 times the total number of murders in the United States of all people. This would mean gay men make up 400% of all murder victims every year. And you just can’t go over 100%.

Let us accept for argument’s sake Cameron’s claim that the number of gay men are vastly exaggerated and use that instead. He says the number is closer to 2% of the population. So that means 3 million gay men. And that would mean that about 26,370 are murdered every year. So even with Cameron’s own statistics you end up with the number of gays being murdered exceeding the total number of murders by 10,000.

Of course that is impossible. If 16,900 people in total were murdered in 2005 you can’t have 26,370 gay men murdered as a subset. The subset can’t be larger than the total.

And if you take all the claims that Cameron makes you end up with gays dying at rates that are so astronomical that even his life span estimate is overly optimistic. He says gay men are 24 times more likely to commit suicide. That would mean a suicide rate of 512 per 100,000 gay men per year. He says gay men are 18 times more likely to die in a car accident, that would be 402 per 100,000 gay men. So without thinking about issues like AIDS, cancer, heart disease, etc the death rate among gay men, according to Cameron, for these three causes alone, is around 1,800 per 100,000 or 1.8% per year!

Over a 50 year period, he is claiming that about 92% of all gay men die from homicide, suicide or a car accident. Well, he does say that 9% die of old age. The really amazing thing is that no gay men would be left to die from any other cause. No gay men would die from AIDS, cancer, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, or any other illness you can mention. More amazing is that all the murders, and virtually all victims of suicide or traffic accidents are gay! Heterosexuals are apparently immune from murder, suicide and accidents!

You tell me how Cameron can draw these conclusions honestly!

UPDATE: One of our readers has pointed out some common errors I made which I appreciate. In the process he still shows that Cmaeron is absolutely wrong with his analysis. So I urge everyone to read the comments section for that. I am right about Cameron but my stats are not all correct. So I got the general conclusion correct but got some specifics wrong. Read it.

Taxes, Cameron, gerbils and dead gay men.

As much as the far Right loves to quote Paul Cameron the reality is that his organization is not much of an organization. What money they do raise goes almost entirely to the Cameron family as salary.

I looked at his tax records. Here is what I can tell you. First he lists a PO Box in Colorado Springs as his location, and his phone number is 303-681-3113. Total income (this was the return filed in 2006) was $78,684. This is called “direct public support” but no indication is given as to who is behind the money. Of this they spent $7,732 on fund-raising. And they say they ran a deficit of $37,279 for the year. They started the year with assets worth $55,317 and ended the year with assets totaling $18,038.

The lion’s share of the money went to Cameron, his wife and his son. If you add in compensation to them as officers, salaries and employee benefits the Cameron family took in almost $65,000. Another $5,200 is spent on “occupancy”. I would suspect they operate out of Cameron’s home and that this occupancy puts income to the family at over $70,000. If you read the smaller print on their income tax form they are asked if the organization “either directly or indirectly, engaged” in the “leasing of property” with any “substantial contributors, trustees, directors, officers, creators, key employers or members of their families.” They answer that they did. I think this supports the idea that the $5,200 is additional payment to Cameron.

Just over $12,500 is spent on travel which I would assume is for Cameron himself. There is also another expense list of over $15,000 for consulting. It does not say who did the consulting and received the money.

Paul Cameron takes in $25,836 as salary plus another $4,206 in other forms of compensation. His wife is paid just over $20,000 in salary and compensation and his son Kirk (not the former child actor turned evangelist) is paid $13,000.

According to their tax filing they don’t attempt to “influence national, state, or local legislation” in any way. From what I’ve see that is one of their main purposes.

It appears that Cameron’s income is the lowest it has been in recent years. Who is funding him remains unknown. They spent almost the entire budget on their own salaries and traveling expenses. If the consulting fees went to anyone in the family than family members received more in compensation from their organization than what was donated during the fiscal year.

One expense not itemized is how much Cameron paid to have his “studies” published in a journal. Most professional journals don’t charge the author to publish an article and submissions go through a strict peer review process where a reviewer can scuttle an article by questioning its methodology. Cameron uses a publication called Psychological Report which has a very limited readership. Authors pay the “journal” $27.50 per page to publish their articles. And while the journal says the articles are peer reviewed the reviewer’s comments don’t stop publication. It is highly suspicious when the author pays the journal to publish his material.

Cameron is notorious for being one of the main sources of the urban myth that gay men insert gerbils into their rectums for kicks. Cameron cites a Cecil Adams as his source verifying the use of gerbils. The only problem is that Adams says that while this urban legend has been spread around “every attempt to track down an actual case has come to naught. The whole business sounds completely nuts, and implausible to boot.” Adams says, “no such case has ever found its way into the formal literature of medicine. Having investigated the matter in some depth, I am inclined to write the whole thing off as an urban legend.”

This illustrates how deceptively Cameron operates. He tells his antigay audience--and that is who uses him material--that gays use gerbils for sex! He adds a citation indicating a source for this claim thus giving the illusion that his accusation is supported by documentation. But the actual source he cites calls it an urban legend without a shred of evidence to support it. He attributes to the source a position that is the complete opposite of the one actually taken.

Conservative politician Bill Bennett once quoted Cameron as a reliable source that gays die young. And when he read the rebuttals to the claim he admitted he was duped. He publicly said: “Given what I now know, I believe there are flaws with Paul Cameron’s study. One cannot extrapolate from his methodology and say that the average male homosexual life span is 43 years.”

I sat down and made a list of gay men I’ve known for 10 years or more . I listed whether they are alive or dead and what their age is today or at the time of their death. According to Cameron virtually all of them ought to be dead. I only include people I know fairly well and people whose current status I can verify. This actually skews things in Cameron’s favor since you tend to hear about when someone dies but don’t get people calling you up saying: “Did you hear so and so is still alive?” I have a list of 40 men I’ve known over the years as friends who are gay. Of those five died. One died in an accident, he was the youngest at 25. If we remove him then the average age of death on the people who died is just over 50 years of age. And two friends I lost track of have probably died since they were both in their late 60s years ago when I knew them. If they died, which is likely, they substantially raised the average age of death. If they are still alive they would raise the average age of my living friends, either way it's bad news for Cameron's theory.

If I calculate the number of heterosexual friends I know who have died the average age for them came out to be around the same. But remember when you do a survey like this you are only counting the people who are dead. And unless you yourself happen to be very old most people you have known over the years would still be alive. Of the gay men I know today six are either in their late 60s or 70s. Another four are in their 60s, 15 are in their 50s, 9 are in their 40s and one in his 30s. This means that among the gay men I know the average current age is around 56 years old. So 90% of my gay friends have already lived longer than Cameron says is the statistical average. If his claims applied to the gay men I knew I think this would mean that they would all have to be dead but they aren't.

Clowns, bigots and the Libertarian Party

What if I were to tell you that being a libertarian cuts your life short significantly? Crazy? I know it sounds insane. What if I said that a Left-wing web site had the statistics, to back it up, gathered by a man who had been chucked out of two professional associations for falsifying facts in previous reports. Are you even more skeptical now?

Let me prove it using some of the methods used by these individuals. A survey is done of the population and it determines that a certain percentage, on average, is libertarian. Let’s say 15% of the population are people who philosophically appear libertarian.

I notice that among young people the number is 20% while among those 60 years to 70 years old the number is 5%. So where did all the libertarians go? I conclude that 75% of them die before they reach the age of 60. Libertarianism kills. And statistics don’t lie.

Of course this is obviously false. There are lots of reasons that this conclusion is false. Old people tend to be more conservative and the young tend to be more “radical” in every generation. Views change. It may also be that in 40 years time we will find that 20% of the old are libertarian. You can only see over time.

Now I bring this up because I am both embarrassed and horrified that an alleged libertarian would pull this sort of double-talk to smear gay people.

There is a stereotype that libertarians are intelligent and tolerant people (the two often go together). I would have to say this case seems to prove otherwise. And it appears from a cursory glance the reason is because of religious extremism once again. Just as fundamentalists have ruined the Republican Party if they are allowed to infiltrate the Libertarian Party they will have the same effect.

The libertarian in question in Kenn Gividen, who not only smears gays, but mounts a defense of creationsim as well. And then for good measure he tries argue that Thomas Jefferson was some great fan of religion, a very dubious claim indeed. He is also anti-immigration and also claims that "gay-banning states" are more prosperous presuming a link between being anti-gay and economic prosperity. The problem with the fundie is that he puts his religion above everything else. And eventually he demand that everything else be made subservient to his religion. And that will include the Libertarian Party if they get into leadership positions. (Yes, there are some exceptions but this general rule is true.)

Now I confess that I ought to be endorsing Libertarians for office on this blog. That I haven’t done so has raised questions among some people. This is a perfect example of why I haven’t.

I have voted Libertarian in the past. Not in the last election and I suspect never again. It’s not that I’ll rush out and vote Republican (never again) or Democrat (unlikely) either. But honestly speaking, given a choice between a Libertarian like Gividen, a Democrat and a Republican, and if a gun were put to my head I’d vote Democrat. And it pains me considerably to say that.

The problem with the LP is that it is so desperate for “activists” that it will allow almost anyone to run. Consider the clown in Montana who ended up dying himself blue because of some bizarre, irrational belief he holds about nutrition. (That he turned blue as a result of it is evidence that it is bizarre and irrational.) Then to make matters worse he got up in a public debate and rambled off this extremist Right-wing tirade about a conspiracy to take over the world. I was waiting for him to haul out a copy of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion or something equally ludicrous like None Dare Call it Conspiracy or whatever tract from the Birchers is now making the rounds in far Right circles.

The blue moron was a candidate for US Senate. And he wasn’t the worst of the Libertarian lot either. Gividen ran for Governor of Indiana. These are top offices and if the LP can’t pick better candidates for these offices then I say it ought to die a fast death and free the wasted resources for something that might do some good. The LP is not it, not with these kind of representatives.

I originally gave Gividen the shadow of the doubt that he wasn’t a bigot. But I think he is and I assume it comes out of his religious extremism. He has a post asking “What happened to the AIDS epidemic?” He wants to know why the millions of people who were supposed to be dying aren’t.

And he says: “The noise died down once the gay strategists realized their racket was scaring away recruits and attacking a ‘leprosy stigma” on gays in general.” What sort of moron talks about gay “recruits”? I know. So do you. And for this post he links to a fundamentalist group dedicated to changing gay people straight through faith.

Let’s answer his question. First, gay groups continue to talk about HIV and AIDS a lot, they aren’t hiding the issue to “recruit” more people. They are still publicizing the issue of HIV in all communities.

What happened is that researchers overstated the danger from HIV in the US. Researchers always overstate the dire consequences of whatever they research. That is what global warming alarmists are doing. The more shrill the researcher the more likely he will get funds. Most the “activists” simply take their cues from researchers. (It was true with the AIDS activists then and with warming activists now).

Second, people also changed high risk activities which brought infection rates down considerably. And where are the deaths? New treatments are allowing individuals infected to live much longer than before. So there are lots of reasons that the great death rates never materialized. But the idea that AIDS was a “racket” run by “gay strategists” tells me that this man is a dyed in the wool moron, which doesn’t preclude bigotry, the two usually go together like hand and glove.

The main article that I found so absurd, not that all his articles are not absurd, is the one where he claims that gay marriage is deadlier than smoking. He bases this on the claims of the fraudulent Paul Cameron, a man who was chucked out of the American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association for what were consider unethical behaviour and his distortion of research material. Cameron’s colleagues said he took their material and distorted what they had said in order to further his own hatred of homosexuals. Mr. Gividen responds to this fact by claiming that both professional groups are in the clutches of the homosexual conspiracy.

Cameron is also a fundamentalist Christian and says some of the most vile things possible about gay people (including things I would not print in my blog.) Cameron has been running antigay campaigns for 25 years. In his first he held a press conference publicly announcing that a group of homosexuals had gang-raped a four year old boy in a public toilet. This caused a major uproar but no such incident took place. It appears Cameron invented it. This is the man on whom Gividen is relying.

And Cameron has been peddling the lie that gay people are dying decades earlier than other people for some time now. He has been using the most inventive, manipulative, dishonest, tactics to do so. He took obituaries from gay publications and averaged the age of the person there. Then he took mainstream newspaper obituaries and averaged the age there. Presto: gays died earlier.

What made him assume that everyone in mainstream newspapers was heterosexual? (They aren’t, in fact most gay people who die have their obituaries in these papers and no in gay papers.)Why did he assume that urban activist newspapers reflected the general gay community? (They don’t.)

Libertarian writer Walter Olson dismantled Cameron’s phony numbers.

“Suppose he assumes--wildly pessimistically, given current incidence data--that half the gay male population is destined to catch the AIDS virus and die of it. The actual average age of AIDS patients at death has been about 40... For the number 43 to be the true average death age for the entire population of gay males, HIV-negative gay men would, on average, have to keel into their graves at 46. Looked at another way, if even half the gay male population stays HIV-negative and lives to an average age of 75, an average overall life span of 43 implies that gay males with AIDS die at an implausibly early average age (11, actually).”

You can read Olson’s article yourself so I won’t continue quoting it.

One indication of how absurd Cameron is (and Gividen by implication) is that he claims that only 2 percent of gay people live to old age. I know around 50 gay people, around the world, fairly well. In libertarian circles I’ve known around 100 gay people socially in total. Many of these are people I’ve known for 20 years. I know of three who have died. The people I met in libertarian circles in the late 70s, who were gay, are all pretty much still alive 30 years later. Most would be in their late 40s to 70s now. According to Cameron almost all of them should be dead. Gividen makes a similar claim, based on Cameron of course. But they aren’t.

Gividen claims that surveys of people who had gay marriages showed that the average age of death for them was 51 while that of straight married men was 74.

Let us assume that this number is correct. Something that is risky to do when Paul Cameron is involved. We have some experience in different countries when gay marriage is legalized. First, the majority of couples who marry are younger couples. I’ve seen on line discussions among gay people about whether they would marry or not. Many of the older couples argued that they had been together for so many years already they just weren’t inclined to marry now. They are settled and used to the way they have their life structured.

They didn’t see the point to marry now. Younger couples, sometimes making a political statement (which I think is stupid to do), were more often than not the ones who tied the knot. I would say that the majority of couples married were under the age of 50. Most gay couples over the age of 50, who had the option, didn’t marry.

Ten years go by and Cameron looks at the average age of death. He puts the average age of death for the straight married men in their mid 70s and for the average gay married man in his early 50s. Now what does this mean. For one thing it means that 10 years earlier those people were of very different ages. The straight man would have been in his mid 60s then while the gay man would have been in his early 40s. In other words the two groups were not of similar ages when the survey began. Ten years later this would remain true no matter what you compared.

In 1990 in Denmark the average age of heterosexual couples was significantly higher than the average age of gay couples who married. And the main reason is that many of those straight couples had married decades earlier. Only if older gay couples rushed out and married in very high numbers would the average age between the two groups be similar at the start of the survey. And that didn’t happen.

Now in any population a certain percentage of people die. Group A might have an average age of 40 and Group B might have an average age of 65. Ten years down the road you look only at those people who died. The average age of death in Group A, ten years on, has to be lower than the average in Group B. Even if everyone in Group B died the day the survey started, and everyone in Group A lived for another 10 years their average ages would not be the same.

Comparison groups must start the survey period with the same average age in order to have a meaningful comparison. Cameron didn’t do because he doesn’t want a meaningful comparison he wants one that supports his theology. So does Gividen.

The second problem that plagues all of Cameron’s “surveys” is that they often include very small population numbers. For instance he concludes, and Gividen quotes, that the average straight married woman in Norway dies at the age of 81 while the average age for partnered lesbians is 56. That latter number is based on the deaths of 6 women in the entire country. You don’t get a meaningful statistic from a number that this small. The number must be sufficiently large and sufficient random in order to have meaning. Cameron uses small samples and groups that are by no means random, and when he compares groups he loads the dice in favor of one group over the other. That is just dishonest manipulation of statistics. It is precisely what I would expect bigots to do.

And don’t make a mistake. Gividen is a bigot. He writes: “The gay agenda is dangerous” and that young people exploring their sexual orientation is “an invitation to an early grave.” He claims that the antigay programs of fundamentalists ought to be seen “as important life-saving efforts.”

So, if you wonder why I don't vote Libertarian take a look at the kind of candidates they nominate for high office. At one time they had people with libertarian principles like Ed Clark, Bruce Green, Jim Lewis now they run candidates like the blue conspiracy monger and fundamentalist bigots. They don’t deserve my vote. You will have to make up your own mind but you know where I stand.

UPDATE: I see that Warren Throckmorton, who is a fundamentalist involved with the "gay change" movement that Gividen supports, writes that: "One should be very cautious in believing any reports coming from this team (meaning the Camerons)."

I wondered how Cameron was claiming to have some sort of approval of the Eastern Psychological Association for his paper. I checked their website. To present a paper at their conference you merely have to be a paid member and send an abstract of the paper (not the paper itself). So how did the Cameron's get in with their paper? By distorting what it was about. No mention is made in their abstract about supposedly proving that gay marriage kills. Their abstract merely says that the six of the gay population is exaggerated. There is no discussion of what they clearly saw as their main theme -- since that is the issue they emphasized in the press release they sent out about the paper. In other words they lied to the EPA about what their paper would be about in order to get a slot, used the slot for other purposes, and are now using the EPA to give some credence to their sloppy work. This is very dishonest but par for the course for Cameron. Here is an interesting press report on Cameron's deceptive practices.