Burnt Orange Report

Anti-Gay Foster Care Argument Debunked by WSJ

By Byron LaMasters

I was out of town for the weekend, so I'm first catching up from some things I didn't catch last week.

Last week the Lesbian, Gay Rights Lobby of Texas faced off against a woman from the Texas Eagle Forum on CNN regarding the Talton amendment that would ban gays and lesbians from serving as foster care parents. As you may remember, CNN refused to call out the Eagle Forum lady on her bullshit, but Jon Stewart did (see Gaywatch).

Now, LGRL points out that the study that the Eagle Forum used was a Paul Cameron study. That study claimed that gay and lesbian foster care parents were 11 times more likely to sexually abuse children.

Rushing to take on the claim was none other than a column in the liberal Wall Street Journal which pointed out that the study was "a textbook example of how flawed numbers can gain national attention if advocates work hard enough". In fact, another study linked less than 1% of sexual abuse of children to gays and lesbians:

The best available study I could find on this subject, led over a decade ago by Brown University pediatrics professor Carole Jenny at a Denver hospital, found that only two of 269 cases of sexual abuse over a year's time could be traced to a perpetrator who was identifiably gay. (Incidentally, Dr. Jenny told me she was prompted to conduct the study after reading an article that cited Dr. Cameron's research about gay sexual abuse, which didn't square with her clinical experience.) But her study itself is hampered by several factors, including its age and limited geographical scope, and that the overall proportion of same-sex households in Denver wasn't known.

As Dr. Jenny and her co-authors wrote, a better study would track a randomly selected, large group of either children or of adults and measure incidence of sexual abuse. I asked her if she thought it would be worth conducting such a study. She replied, "Would a big, expensive research project convince folks that gay people are not an unusual threat to children? I don't know, but research hasn't done much to inform the debate on evolution."

Paul Cameron's work also came up when the University Democrats debated the Young Conservatives of Texas on the issue of gay marriage equality last year. One of YCT's arguments was that homosexuality was an unhealthy lifestyle, and they cited a 1980s study by Paul Cameron. After a little bit of research, we discovered that the Omega study to which YCT referred was debunked not only by mainstream scientific organizations, but also by the oh-so-liberal Centers for Disease Control and the American Enterprise Institution.