Joe. My. God. notes Paul Cameron’s bewilderment that the obvious flaw in Evelyn Hooker’s 1957 study of male homosexuals isn’t really noticed much…
Anti-Gay Whackjob Paul Cameron Repeats “Gays Are Inherently Diseased” Claim
“If you look across the data sets you see that homosexuals have a host of mental problems, disproportionate physical problems, they don’t live as long, and they are disproportionately involved in drug abuse and criminality. That would seem to indicate that that is a lifestyle that may reasonably be considered mentally disturbed – [a] disorder. Yet, it isn’t. It is surprising that such a wildly defective study, and one that actually proved the exact opposite of what it claimed to have proved has survived so long.” – Discredited psychologist Paul Cameron, speaking to the Christian Post.
Oh…it’s even better then that Joe. You really gotta love how slippery this guy is. If you go to the Christian (sic) Post article and read it, you see that Cameron’s proof that Hooker’s study is defective is…
“The Hooker study stands as the major reason for why they (homosexuals) are okay. We wanted to look at that very carefully, and we discovered that not only is it riddled with holes, but it is being covered for – not only by the American Psychological Association. Many other people either can’t read, or their mind glazes over, when they are told that this is an important study,” Dr. Cameron told CP.
He explained: “Hooker was a professor – she had friends who were homosexual and they implored her to do a study on them to prove that they were normal. What they were supposed to do was talk about pictures, talk about ink blots, without showing that they were homosexual. It appears that every single one of them was unable to talk for about two hours without revealing their homosexuality.”
Dr. Cameron noted that Hooker had even started with a sample of 70 gay men but narrowed it down to 30 “to get the very best,” but even then the representatives had trouble focusing solely on the tests without revealing their sexual preference.
“I’ve been able to talk with child molesters for hours without them bringing up the molestation – homosexuals seem to be different. They almost seem compelled to advertise,” Cameron continued.
Before Hooker, all the science that had been done on homosexuality had been done using subjects who were already in therapy or in mental institutions or prison for sex crimes. The elegant beauty of Hooker’s study was that she devised a double-blind test of two groups of sexually active men, homosexual and heterosexual, neither of which had never been in therapy or convicted of sex crimes. She removed any overt indication of the sexual orientation of the subjects, and then asked her peers in the profession to identify the homosexuals solely on the basis of how they tested in the standard battery of psychological tests of that day. The result was that nobody could tell gay from straight and that result surprised everyone.
What Cameron is saying here is that Hooker’s study was flawed, because it was double blind, and (you gotta love this) that when a homosexual declines to hide their sexual orientation that is self evident proof of mental illness. Never mind that both groups of men tested the same in Hooker’s study…her study was rife with proof that homosexuals are mentally ill, because they kept revealing their homosexuality to the testers.
Well of course the heterosexuals would have too in various ways. Heterosexuals advertise their sexual orientation to the world constantly in this way and that and given that sex is a driving force in nature, older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates, let alone humans…that’s not really all that surprising. That dating and mating thing is a pretty big part of our lives. The problem for so long was that we gay folk had to hide to survive, and now that we’re not anymore you hear complaints from the kook pews constantly about how we’re always flaunting it. Flaunting…flaunting…flaunting… Well we don’t. Not any more then heterosexuals do every friggin’ day.
So…you sit a human male for hours under an intense battery of psychological tests you need to expect that he’s going to be out with it one way or another. Hooker didn’t just hide the overt declarations of the gay men, but also the heterosexual ones too, so her peers would have to figure it out on the basis of the test results alone. And if the prevailing understandings of homosexuality had been true after all, they would have been able to. But they couldn’t. And that opened a lot of eyes.
But not everyone’s…
If you look across the data sets you see that homosexuals have a host of mental problems…
No you don’t. Not unless you restrict your your “data sets” to only those homosexuals who have mental problems to start with. Which is what was done before Hooker. And where does Paul Cameron get these “data sets” that show otherwise, and just who is this scientific group that, according to the Christian (sic) Post is challenging the Hooker study…?
The Family Research Institute (FRI), an organization driving research into questions relating to the traditional family unit, has challenged a widely approved and circulated study accepted in many psychological circles that claims to prove that homosexuality is not a mental disorder.
This organization “driving research into questions relating to the traditional family unit”… is the family unit of Paul Cameron and his son Kirk. Bet you didn’t see that coming.
I’m telling you, it’s amazing the difference in intelligent conversations or comment threads when dealing with this subject.
Even Matt Moore’s site, which has attracted gays who have ‘walked away from that sinful lifestyle’, don’t know how to deal with the minutae or more complex details.
You can tell a determined anti gay person whether they are gay themselves or not, that paraphila and pathology are NON exclusive to sexual orientation and gender.
You can remind them of how living in bigoted and discriminatory environments are a detriment to suspect minorities (blacks under Jim Crow, Jews in the Soviet Union, women and anorexia) and the studies done on how prejudice harms certain people: and you STILL get the dumbest and most remarkably illogical retorts.
And the usual studies cited by the likes of Cameron, or Camenker, get a great deal of credit.
But Hooker’s research is considered suspect.
In fact, is there ANYTHING that doesn’t have results opposite to the beliefs of the anti gay that isn’t?
In fact, it’s the Bible that’s the gold standard de fault position, when all other opinions are exhausted.
Here we are, in the 21st century, and people like Cameron who spend the LEAST amount of time with actual gay people, whose entire experience is essentially on paper, get credited with and demand to be the most trusted about gay people.
I can ask point blank: when a person wants to know about Jews, living as such, being Jewish and the history of Jewish life, who would be more credible?
A non Jewish anti Semite, or a Jewish person who is close to and lives as a Jew?
When Gunnar Myrdal did his study on the persistent threat and enforcement of Jim Crow, he didn’t just ask white people OR black people about.
He asked both.
But he knew the most honest answer of the harms of Jim Crow would come from black people. The are the ones against which Jim Crow was invented.
There is a quality of intellectual, spiritual and physical cowardice that goes with anti gay bigotry. The anti gay wouldn’t naturally BE that way. No one is born THIS paranoid, hostile suspicious and averse to homosexual people.
It IS an entirely taught feeling and expression. It’s exaggerated and of all the kinds of people to be suspicious of, it’s because gay people don’t have an easy mark to be recognized with that such teaching gets to this point of lies and exaggeration.
It’s one feature of human attributes that’s treated worse than a crime and gay people treated worse than criminals.
Which in itself is insane, because it’s obvious that homosexuality isn’t ANTI SOCIAL.
And anti social behavior is also something that’s orientation and gender neutral.
The opportunity to really know gay people better and more accurately is always there.
I think we’re at a time that research and studies are no longer necessary. The more important aspects of knowing ARE known.
And the genie can’t go back in the bottle, no matter how much Cameron tries to put it back in.
Experience is a great teacher and knowledge is power.
Eventually, the smartest and less fearful people will and should be rightfully insulted that the likes of Cameron treated THEM as if unintelligent and easily led.
Which is exactly what’s happening.