Tiny Queer Footballs

Peter LaBarbera’s Wasted Adulthood on just “1.4%” of the Population…

(I’ve crosslisted this with my blog) 

Today at the AFTAH, Peter LaBarbera is reporting that ‘Canadian Research Suggests Only 1.4% of Adults Homosexual.’  As usual for his hate-site, he just cuts and pastes (who knew it would be so easy to have a non-profit???), but he does give a little comment before his pasting:

Readers should know that the same homosexual activist movement that now dismisses the Camerons’ research had, for decades, intentionally spread the myth — derived from homosexual sex researcher Alfred Kinsey’s fraudulent data — that “10 percent” of society was “gay.” – Peter LaBarbera

I had two immediate thoughts on this: 

1)  So Peter LaBarbera thinks that only 1.4% of the population is homosexual?  If so, how sad to think that he has spent 100% of his adult life trying to take away the rights and to spread fear for such a small number of people.

2)  My second though is that Paul Cameron and Kirk Cameron has been shown to have lied before, or shown to be taking his ’scientific research’ out of newspapers, and sure enough, this ’study’ of his is worth less than the paper it was once printed on.

Some of the problems with this ‘research’ (and you can read the paper here):

1.  In his bibliography he does not give page numbers to what he is referring to.  I would fail my undergraduate students if they ever tried to write a research essay without proper footnotes.  What this tells me is that Cameron is probably writing off the top of his head and that he probably never read what he is referring to.  A good example is he states that “Kinsey’s 1948 claim that “37% of all men” had a homosexual orgasm…”  His reference gives the Kinsey book, but no page number.  Which means it is impossible to look up his source and this is exactly what he hopes for.  He does this even for his first footnote.  This is not proper research. 

2. Once again he has gone through newspapers and acts as if this is scientific research.  Included in this ‘research’ are obituaries.  He stresses that he went through all of them from 1988, 1989, 1999, and 2002 and took a ’systematic sample’ of them.  He also went through obits. from 1993-2005 from the Washington Post and the Washington Blade.  And you automatically have to question his ’systematic sample.’  This sounds like he chose the ones that fitted what he wanted to hear.

Anyone with an even remotely scientific thought will see that you cannot get scientific data from obituaries.  For example, if two openly gay men had their obituaries in the Washington Blade, and if they died of AIDS at 45, then there is a good chance that the obit. would mention this.  But what about the countless other gay men who were closeted and this was not mentioned in their obituaries, nor were they printed in the Washington Blade.  You can see the problem here, but yet he was allowed to discuss this research at a so-called scientific conference (the Eastern Psychological Association).

3. If you look at the EPA’s website, they claim that ‘luminaries from all areas of psychology give master lectures about the current state and future directions of their particular area of expertise…”  If the EPA thinks that that shoddy ‘research’ was a master lecture, then the EPA can have no credibility.   That said, I looked at their calendar and most of the talks looked pretty sensible.  So I wonder how Cameron and Cameron got in?  ***I just noticed that Cameron and Cameron had a poster, and did not give a lecture. I also see that these two did not give a lecture or present a poster in 2005 or 2006.  I wonder why they did not give a lecture and instead opted for a poster session?

Anyway, this is just another junk ’scientific’ paper from the Cameron’s.  Maybe Peter LaBarbera should actually listen to this ‘research’ from his beloved Cameron’s and stop spending his life attacking just 1.4% of the population!

RSS 27. March 2007 (21:39)
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