The San Francisco Chronicle wrote this article Monday on a recent effort to encourage gay and lesbian couples in San Francisco to foster children. The problem?
They uncritically cited Paul Cameron and his bogus research which is just self-published bigotry and hatred, with no scientific validity.
But there are signs of hope...
Here's the contribution from Paul Cameron, bigot and fraud, to the article:
The campaign, which will include a billboard in the Castro featuring two dads with their teen daughter, is perhaps the first of its kind and sure to be controversial. It comes just two weeks after the evangelical Christian group Focus on the Family began its drive to recruit more Christians as adoptive parents, partly -- the group said -- to keep foster children out of homosexual hands.
Focus on the Family's objection to same-sex parents is grounded in interpretation of biblical scripture and research by Paul Cameron, director of the Family Research Institute in Colorado. Cameron says gays and lesbians are unfit parents, are more likely to molest children of their same sex, switch partners frequently, have shorter life expectancies and cause their children embarrassment and social difficulties.
"Any child that can be adopted into a married-mother-and-father family, that's the gold standard," Cameron said. "An orphanage would be the second choice, and then a single woman."
Focus on the Family's drive follows the March release of a study by the Urban Institute think tank and the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law concluding gays and lesbians are a great untapped parenting resource, considering that 500,000 children are in foster care nationwide and an estimated 2 million gay, lesbian and bisexual people are interested in adopting.
This uncritical quotation of a bigot, who has been drummed out of professional societies, who has no legitimacy as a source of factual information (for a full idea of his misdeeds see Ed Brayton's extensive coverage of Cameron ) is a mistake of the highest order for a journalist seeking to inform an audience about anything. Coverage of the opening of a Jewish community center shouldn't require talking to holocaust denialists for balance. Studies on HIV shouldn't need input from Peter Duesberg. Similarly, coverage of science suggesting gays and lesbians as an untapped resource for foster care should not rely on information provided uncritically from bigots such as Paul Cameron.
Denialists have no business being consulted for articles on anything factual. This was a terrible mistake. To the Chronicle's credit, the article is now accompanied by this disclaimer:
CLARIFICATION: In an article about San Francisco's campaign to get more gays and lesbians to adopt foster children - as well as an opposing evangelical campaign to get more Christian families to adopt -- the Chronicle quoted Paul Cameron, director of the Family Research Institute. The article should have noted that Cameron, who believes gays make unfit parents and self-published dozens of articles he said were based on his research, was expelled from the American Psychological Association in 1983 when he refused to subject his work to peer review. The article also should have reported that his Family Research Institute was named a hate group in 2006 by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Hopefully in the future they will bypass consulting hate groups altogether, and just report the facts.
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Don't you mean "_shouldn't_ rely on information..."?
Quite right.
Aside from the bigotry against gays, I find it astonishing that Paul Cameron would believe that a child is better off in an orphanage rather than being adopted by a single woman.
What a dick! I'll bet he's closeted. The only people who really care about this stuff are gay themselves. Or curious. :)
Funny you say that Chris. His writing is often bizarre, involving personal experiences with molestation by men and women, and how seductive gay sex is even to straight men. I think he personally feels he's being "recruited" because he has homosexual tendencies, and since he isn't gay (ha ha) he therefor he infers that this must be the way more gays are made, through recruitment. He's a real headcase, lot's of pathology going on there.
Actually, the bigotry is even stupider, considering Penn and Teller covered this very subject *and* found that the statistics from adoption agencies tended to show that gay/lesbians where:
a) more commited than straight parents to raising the kids.
b) less likely to have unstable relationships and violence.
and several other factors in their favor. The joke being that, if it is accurate, it would suggest people would be better off putting kids into gay homes, rather than that of their own parents. lol Well, maybe not, but it doesn't say anything like what the Liars for Jesus want the facts to say.
Allowing fundie couples to adopt children and then imprint them with their historically inaccurate, socially intolerant religious ideology is a form of intellectual molestation.
@Ex-d, that's why it's fun to needle the fundies by referring to their children with ultra-PC labels: "children of religious parents." Ha!
I don't know. This whole premise that a paragraph such as this:
...requires CLARIFICATION in a San Francisco paper seems somewhat of a parody. The giveaway phrase?
Oooh! Straight parents don't. Well, that's a relief.
I can't see that the writers could have been writing those few paragraphs with a straight face.
It's like a few years ago Jon Stewart released America: The Textbook, and the year later, he released America, The Teacher's Edition to explain humor that people didn't get. It's embarrassing to get the TE, because you can freely infer that people think you're too dumb to get Daily Show. Ouch!
I feel like a PR manager:
http://www.familyresearchinst.org/APA_Resignation-letter.html
When it comes to science, it's something that homosexuals are invincibly ignorant about. Science is about open debate and questioning, not a narrow-minded groupthink.
and the funny thing is they claim to have it on their side. They realized they wouldn't get anywhere trying to change religion from within, so they hijacked the mental health organizations first, and eventually the CDC.
Whoopsie! Looks like short-bus school is out for summer.
Or did some fundie site link to this post?
Hard to tell the difference.
Yeah, they're here defending the indefensible - Paul Cameron based on some weird conspiracy belief that gays control psychiatry, public health etc.
It's fashion they control, get your stereotypes right.
Oh, please, it's obvious they do. The CDC says unequivocally that "homophobia" is dangerous, and yet there is no direct empirical evidence that suggests "homophobia" causes the many health problems among 'gays', which causes a median age of death lower than the general populace (see Hogg, et. al. in The Co$t of Homophobia: [In Canada])