Christian news source Agape Press asks us to “please think of the children” as it celebrates an amendment in Texas that bans child-fostering by homosexuals:
According to Cathie Adams of the Texas Eagle Forum, a study done in Illinois provided good reasons for that amendment.
While opponents of the bill might try to question the relevance of the out-of-state study, its findings are clearly pertinent since the research indicates that children “are eleven times more likely to be sexually abused if they are in homosexual foster-parent homes,” Adams says. “So we’re talking about the same situation here — apples and apples. Homosexual homes in Texas we don’t think are probably very different.”
This is typical Agape Press journalism: never question anything your conservative source gives you, and never look for an opposing view (hence the impression the site gives that evolutionists have all been struck dumb by the brilliance of Ken Ham).
So, what is this study? No details are given, but it must be the same one that was noted by WorldNetDaily last month (hyperlink added):
An article in the March issue of the peer-reviewed publication Psychological Reports presented data analyzed by Dr. Paul Cameron, chairman of the Colorado-based Family Research Institute.
…The study found 966 foster parents violated their charges. Of those who engaged in both physical and sexual abuse, eight of the 15 abused children of their own sex.
Is that it? Unfortunately, the report itself does not appear to be available on-line, although the “peer-reviewed” Psychological Reports has published plenty of other stuff by Cameron. The journal has a curious way of conducting its business, according to its “Publication Arrangement” page:
…There are three publication arrangements.
(1) Regular articles. These are articles which require from 2 through 20 printed pages. Charges are $27.50 per page in multiples of four pages, plus special fees for composition (e.g., tables, figures).
…(2) One-page articles and notes…The author submits a one-page summary of a study accompanied by the full report for filing with the Archive for Psychological Data. Charge is $27.50.
…(3) Monograph supplements…Charges are $27.50 per page in multiples of four pages, plus special fees for composition (e.g., tables, figures).
An academic journal that charges for publication? Is this a joke? However, there does appear to be some real academics on the list of associate editors.
But I’m hardly breaking new ground here. Various gay rights groups and other concerned individuals have been tracking Cameron for some time. Critiques can be found here and here, and there’s this piece from Andrew Sullivan.
UPDATE: Was I wrong to mock the journal’s author charges? See today.
UPDATE 2: The Wall Street Journal, of all places, has an article on the topic by Carl Bialik. Salient paragraphs:
Besides his lack of data about same-sex couples in Illinois, researchers pointed out Dr. Cameron’s flawed assumption that the gender of pedophiles’ victims correlates to adult sexual attraction; that he applied nationwide data on homosexuality to a predominantly Chicago-based population of foster homes; and that he cited many of his own studies, including two previous ones that attempted to calculate the proportion of sexual abuse that is same-sex based on small sample sizes of six and 25 cases of abuse, respectively.
…I also interviewed Douglas Ammons, co-editor of Psychological Reports, the Missoula, Mont.-based journal that published Dr. Cameron. He said that the journal uses more reviewers than usual for Dr. Cameron’s submissions — from four up to as many as 21 — but ultimately, “We don’t put limits on people’s creativity on how they may or may not interpret stuff.” Dr. Ammons added, “We try to come down on the side of one of the basic tenets of science — free speech for the author.” He said the importance of the issue and lack of competing data merited publication. “When you are in a difficult situation without much data, it’s OK to use data that’s…not as exact or exacting as we would like it to be,” he said. Dr. Ammons invited Cameron critics to submit rebuttals to the journal and said he has published rebuttals of Dr. Cameron’s prior work.
…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…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.”
(WSJ tipped from World O’Crap)
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