In a new study based on Google News reports, controversial family values crusader Paul Cameron says he has found evidence that wherever social and political attitudes towards homosexuality are more positive, sex crimes against minors with a homosexual element are more numerous.
Cameron, who is head of the Family Research Institute based in Colorado Springs, released his findings in Rome last week, hoping to influence the Extraordinary Synod on the Family that has Catholic leaders from around the world in the Eternal City.
“The Catholic Church is doing something very important,” Cameron told LifeSiteNews. “We hope they will look at this information. I supposed I’d be considered an Evangelical Protestant but what happens in Christendom as a whole matters to me.”
Cameron’s research team analyzed 3,000 news reports taken from Google News about sexual molestations reported from countries such as China, Taiwan, Russia, Moldova, the United Kingdom, Italy, the European Union in toto, Canada and the U.S.
Cameron says the study revealed a clear and positive correlation between how acceptable homosexuality was across the range of countries and the proportion of sexual crimes that were homosexual.
Thus, only five percent of molestations were homosexual in reports from China, the country where homosexuality is least acceptable. But in next-door Taiwan, with a similar cultural history and ethnicity, but which is at the same time, according to Cameron, “a leading Asian proponent” of gay rights, “30 percent of the molested children were homosexually assaulted.”
Meanwhile, in Russia, another country hostile to homosexuality, 20 percent of the sexual assaults on children were homosexual in nature, while in gay-friendly liberal countries the proportion was higher: in United Kingdom, 59 percent of the child sexual assaults were homosexual in nature, in Italy, it was 60 percent, in Canada, 82 percent. In the more conservative United States, it was 51 percent.
Though gay activists groups have yet to react to the study, they have in the past maintained there is no correlation between homosexuality and sex crimes, and have dismissed Cameron’s research. Well they would, wouldn't they?
Despite the fact that most of the evidence comes straight from homosexuals themselves...
Dr. Vernon Quinsey, professor emeritus of psychology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, told LifeSiteNews via an email exchange that Cameron's reliance on news reports to gather data, since the process of assigning and writing news stories is subjective. “If people have negative attitudes towards homosexuality, they will be more likely to report homosexual crimes than heterosexual crimes even if the crimes are otherwise similar in nature,” he said.
[But if that were true, there would be a a smaller percentage of homosexual crimes reported in the US and Europe than in for example China. In fact the opposite pattern is found.]
Cameron has many supporters among organizations devoted to defending traditional family values, among them being Brian Clowes, a researcher with Human Life International.
“I would have to agree with Dr. Cameron,” he told LifeSiteNews.
Clowes made some of the same points in his 2005 study, Child Molestation by Homosexuals and Heterosexuals, (Homelitic and Pastoral Review, May, 2005). In it he and collaborator Brian Sonnier listed many academic studies showing the strong link between sexual abuse and homosexuality. One by the renowned Czech Canadian scholar of deviant sexuality, Karl Freund, itself cited 17 earlier studies showing that while male sex offenders commit twice as many “heterosexual” crimes (against underage female victims) as they do “homosexual” crimes against minor males, male heterosexuals in the general adult population outnumber homosexuals by 20:1. This means homosexuality is a disproportionately represented in sex crimes.
Clowes told LifeSiteNews that he did the study because “Catholic homophilic groups like Dignity USA were denying there was any scientific evidence linking homosexuality and sexual abuse. I found that wasn’t true at all.”
But what about the John Jay College study on the clergy abuse scandal? Commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the John Jay team studied the records of most American diocese and found 80 percent of victims abused by priests were male, but concluded that homosexuality was not the cause. Responded Clowes: “The data in their report shows the connection clearly. I can only imagine that they were intimidated into stating a different conclusion.”
Intimidation by the homosexual lobby is a big factor in academe, said Clowes, adding that no one knows this better than Dr. Cameron.
“He was smeared badly,” said Clowes. Among the smears: that his research is shoddy and does not appear in peer-researched journals; that he hates homosexuals; and that he has been “expelled” from the American Psychological Association for these offences. All of these claims are false, said Clowes.
What is true is that the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center has condemned Cameron’s Family Research Institute as bigoted, as it has many American non-profit group that defends traditional Christian and family values.
Clowes speculated that the connection between homosexuality and child sexual abuse is that they both stem from arrested sexual development.
Cameron says he doesn’t know why there is a connection, but says the link goes back to the classical Greeks. Cameron explains his findings—why countries more accepting of homosexually would see a larger component of homosexuality in their sex crime rates—in one word: “access.”
In the more gay-friendly countries of Western Europe and the British Commonwealth, homosexuals can now be school teachers, pastors, coaches, Boy Scout leaders adoptive and foster parents, he said, arguing that greater opportunity is leading to more criminal cases.
