Kudos to the Wall Street Journal for killing this nonsense (they also link to this excellent display of outrage from Jon Stewart):
Last week, the Texas House of Representatives passed a child-services bill with an amendment that would make Texas the first state in the nation to prevent same-sex couples from becoming foster parents. The state Senate passed a conflicting bill without that measure, and the two bodies are debating how to proceed.
The proposed ban attracted national media attention, and several “pro-family” groups seeking to drum up support for the bill have been circulating some troubling stats about gay parents. Among the most striking, stated during a CNN program: children in foster homes with same-sex parents are 11 times as likely to be sexually abused as those with heterosexual parents.
To get on CNN, that number snaked through a twisting path, from a little-noticed Illinois study published by an antigay scientist/activist in a psychological journal, to several conservative Web sites, to, finally, the attention of a Texas activist who presented her misinterpretation of the study on national television, essentially unchallenged. It’s a textbook example of how flawed numbers can gain national attention if advocates work hard enough — especially when there aren’t widely-known conflicting estimates.
And guess who was behind this? If you said the Colorado Springs God Squad crew, the ones who ‘just want their voices heard,’ go get a cookie:
Ms. Adams told me that her source for the claim was an article she had read on the conservative site WorldNetDaily, about a study published in February by Paul Cameron, chairman of the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based Family Research Institute, a group that says homosexuality is a major public-health threat.
When pressed on his ‘findings,’ Cameron responded:
When I told Dr. Cameron about these criticisms, he responded, “All scientists have bias,” and, “There is no perfect study.” He does contend that those who commit same-sex child abuse are gay, regardless of whether they identify themselves as homosexuals. And while Dr. Cameron said Ms. Adams’s conclusion about his research might be wrong, depending on the proportion of gays among Illinois foster parents, he stood by the conclusion drawn by Ms. Adams: “Those who come into [family-services agencies] waving the homosexual banner should be excluded, because they are a much greater risk to children,” Dr. Cameron said.
These guys are all in bed together to tell you who you should be in bed with.
Oh, and btw- both Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council extensively use the ‘research’ of Paul Cameron and cite him as an ‘authority.’ You have heard of them, right? They are the poor, oppressed Christians whose religious freedoms are being threatened who ‘just want to be heard.’
(Via Tom Maguire)
Jim Henley
Something tells me that pretty much all of the people committing opposite-sex child abuse are HETEROSEXUAL. Best prohibit heterosexual adoption to stay on the safe side.
JG
Where are the cookies? :(
ppgaz
Cameron — not exactly surprisingly — displays total ignorance of what science is and what it means.
Of course scientists have bias … all humans have bias. But “scientists” are not science. Science is science, and at its core is the process of gathering reliable information. It’s about information, not about the people collecting it.
The reliability of the information is governed by the scientific process. The process is the thing . Well done science handles the variables so that the truth can be parsed out … those variables include the bias of the scientist, and its effects on the data.
Given enough bad interpretation, breathing can be taken to be a public health threat. Every breath draws in bad air, chemicals, particulates, toxins ….
All sexual activity is a public health threat. All human activity is a public health threat, to some degree or another.
I don’t know of any data which point to a reasonable conclusion that homosexuals are more likely to commit acts of sexual child abuse than are heterosexuals. I don’t know of any data on child sexual abuse which would lead to a conclusion that gays are more likely to commit such abuse than are straight parents.
In fact, bottom line, I don’t know of much out there in the way of definitive and comprehensive data about child sexual abuse from which any conclusions can be drawn about the relevant risk of various types of households.
Last and not least, why do we allow the Nutrights to play “scientist” when it suits them, and then trash science when it doesn’t? If they are in favor of science as a guide, then they must be opposed to the teaching of the moronic “Intelligent Design” solution to speciation? Intelligent Design is about as far from science as you can go without being called “insane.”