Paul Cameron, founder of the anti-gay Family Research Institute,
claims in a new report that gays live shorter lives than heterosexuals and alleges
homosexuality is a public health risk.
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DYANA BAGBY
Friday, June 17, 2005
ANTI-GAY GROUPS are already touting the conclusions of a soon-to-be published
study by the conservative Family Research Institute that claims being gay is as
dangerous as smoking or using illegal drugs, with a New York group calling for
a warning label on gays.
Paul Cameron, known for anti-gay research regularly quoted by conservatives
to denounce gay rights, asserts in a study that gay men die younger than heterosexual
men. Cameron based his conclusions on what he said was a review of 10,000 obituaries
published in the Washington Blade, and data from the federal Centers for Disease
Control & Prevention on the ages of people who die from AIDS.
“[The data] suggests there are all kinds of choices people can make.
You can choose to smoke, or to have fun with illegal intravenous drugs or engage
in homosexual activity,” Cameron said in an interview this week.
“Certainly the data shows that homosexuality and shooting drugs seem
to be among the most dangerous choices people can make. Homosexuality is a tremendous
public health risk,” he added.
Cameron said the study of the obituaries, which he compared to the CDC report
“AIDS Cases in Adolescents and Adults, by Age — United States, 1994-2000,”
supports his research and shows that gays die 20 years earlier than heterosexuals.
According to Cameron, the newspaper obituaries show the median age of death
for people with AIDS was 42 while CDC data concludes the average age of deaths
of gay men with AIDS was 43.
Cameron then takes the AIDS deaths reported in the Washington Blade and averages
them in with other deaths of gay men reported in the paper to come up with,
what he said, is an average age of death for all gay men at 60 while the average
age of death for adults is 80.
Cameron’s methodology is simply bad science, said Ronald Valdiserri, deputy
director of the CDC’s National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention.
“[The CDC] does not collect statistics on the lifespan of gay men,”
Valdiserri said. “While gay men continue to be severely impacted by HIV
and AIDS, AIDS-related death data cannot be used to indicate that homosexual
men live shorter lives than heterosexual men overall.”
Because there is no national database that gives a count of all gay men in
the U.S., “making assumptions about the group as a whole is difficult,”
Valdiserri added.
Titled “Gay obituaries closely track officially reported deaths from
AIDS,” Cameron’s report appears this month in the journal Psychological
Reports. The publication requires authors to pay $27.50 per page for their work
to appear.
Anti-gay groups regularly cite Cameron’s work to oppose gay rights. This
week, the New York Christian Coalition used the most recent Cameron report to
suggest gays should wear warning labels.
“We put warning labels on cigarette packs because we know that smoking
takes one to two years off the average life span, yet we ‘celebrate’
a lifestyle that we know spreads every kind of sexually transmitted disease
and takes at least 20 years off the average lifespan according to the 2005 issue
of the refereed scientific journal Psychological Reports,” said Rev. Bill
Banuchi, executive director of the New York Christian Coalition.
Banuchi issued the press release as part of a denouncement of the first Gay
Pride Day in the town of New Paltz, N.Y.
In the recent issue of Intelligence Report, the Southern Poverty Law Center
labeled the Family Research Institute as “extremist.” The SPLC said
Cameron was the “longtime house psychologist” of the anti-gay movement
and noted that Cameron said in 1985 that “extermination of homosexuals”
might be needed in the next three to four years.
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