Filthy Practices of the Religious Right

Why is the press so gentle with the so-called "Religious Right", the so-called "Conservative Christians"?   The best I can think is that editors and reporters are simply ignorant of what is actually being done by these fundamentalist-evangelicals, or "Christians", as they style themselves.

Conservative Christians are handled with kid gloves by the news media, yet when there is even the mildest criticism of them, they complain that they are victims of nazi-like persecution. This appeal to martyrdom is belied by the scurrilous propaganda that these "Christians" publish. Those who circulate the sort of distorted, hate-filled propaganda that emanates from conservative Christian souces are themselves more likely candidates for the "nazi" label than are those whom they accuse.

Consider the case of "filthy homosexual practices". It has now become the habit for conservative Christians, in their speech, letters, printed material, video tapes, and radio and television broadcasts, to accuse homosexuals of "filthy practices", such as "feces eating". When these Christians resort to numbers in an attempt to lend credence to their charges, their claim is that something like 92% of homosexuals derive sexual pleasure from "feces eating".

Compare this "feces eating" propaganda with some of Hitler's anti-Semitic propaganda, such as the film, "The Eternal Jew", which, among many other vile distortions, alternated a picture of an evil looking man with a large, hooked nose, with a picture of a scraggly rat crawling around. Compare and decide who is the nazi and who the victim of the nazi in America today: decide who deserves to be handled with kid gloves.

As Jews have been victims of the "blood libel" spread by certain Christians in certain periods of history, so gays and lesbians are now victims of the "feces libel" that is being spread today in America by conservative Christians who claim to "love their neighbors as themselves".

The "feces libel" originates from the work of the Josef Goebbels of the conservative Christians, Dr. Paul Cameron, a 54-year-old psychologist who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado. Cameron's original attempts to vilify homosexuals have been carried forward and developed by California physician Stanley Montieth in the video tape "The Gay Agenda", and in the fund-raising videos promoted by Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, D. James Kennedy, and other Christian propagandists.

Today conservative Christians widely circulate Cameron's many libels against gays and lesbians in a growing body of printed literature and video tape propaganda that attempts to influence voters to deny gays and lesbians protection from discrimination in housing and employment. It is reported that conservative Christians have raised millions of dollars marketing hatred.

Dr. Cameron started his campaign of anti-gay vilification in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he operated as ISIS, the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality. Among his activities while operating in Nebraska was the issuance of a series of anti-gay pamphlets, such as "Murder, Violence and Homosexuality". This typical Cameron pamphlet, with a 1984 ISIS copyright notice, shows on its cover a picture of a young girl cowering in a corner, a look of terror on her face, her arms raised to fend off an attack from a male arm holding a large hatchet above her.

Cameron was expelled from his professional organization, the American Psychological Association, in 1983. Anyone seeing his "Murder, Violence and Homosexuality" pamphlet, and realizing that it was published by a practicing psychologist, can readily understand why his colleagues no longer wanted him in their company. The American Sociological Association warned its membership against him and denounced his representation of himself as a sociologist. The Nebraska Psychological Association
dissociated itself from him and his activities.

Cameron moved from Nebraska to Washington, D.C., and moderated his propaganda, giving it a more academic cloak. Pamphlets similar to "Murder, Violence and Homosexuality" are still being
issued by Cameron's Washington, D.C. group, the Family Research Institute, but he has toned them down and changed some of the scurrilous pictures.

Cameron's connection with "feces eating" originates in a large survey he did of sexual practices in 1983. The study had a phenomenally high rejection rate of 52.5% and was so flawed in other respects that it has never been published in a reputable scientific journal. Cameron resorted to the pay-for-publication "vanity" journal, Psychological Reports, to publish his data in a number or articles, and he now gives his hate pamphlets a cloak of respectability by citing his own publications in Psychological Reports.

The main source of the conservative Christian statistics vilifying gays, and the origin of the data that developed into the "feces libel", is Cameron's 1989 Psychological Reports paper, "Effect of Homosexuality Upon Public Health and Social Order". It is of interest because it shows the process of
distortion that has been progressively been used by conservative Christians to arrive at "the filthy homosexual practice of feces eating".

One of the major flaws with Cameron's data is that he only had 41 survey respondents who identified themselves as homosexual men, and only 25 homosexual women. No reputable researcher would
attempt generalizations about an entire population from such a small number, but that is exactly what Cameron did. Indeed, Cameron added bisexuals into his "homosexual" group in some cases to make the numbers look worse.

The responses of heterosexuals to Cameron's survey questions showed that what conservative Christians have come to label "filthy practices" are not confined to homosexuals. To give
maximum force to his campaign to vilify gays and lesbians, Cameron could not publicize the numbers showing the large participation of heterosexuals in these activities, so he resorted to the trickery of showing percentages instead of actual figures. By using percentages he attempts to put his highly unreliable, very small homosexual sample on equal ground with his much larger sample of heterosexuals, results of which could claim a reasonable accuracy, had his survey not been
flawed in other ways.

In Cameron's pamphlets he often doesn't even show percentages, let alone the actual numbers of respondents easily derivable from his published paper, but only invidious comparisons, such
as that "homosexuals are 6 times more likely to engage in sex with animals". This approach allows him to avoid showing the percentages as well as the actual numbers of heterosexuals engaging in "filthy practices".

By not quantifying heterosexual participation at all, Cameron induces the impression that these "filthy practices" are overwhelmingly a homosexual phenomenon, which is in fact the exact opposite of the truth shown by his own numbers.

Conservative Christians start at the level of Cameron's pamphlets, with their invidious and distorted comparisons based on the misuse of highly unreliable data. Conservative Christians do not bother to check the validity of the figures they use in their propaganda. Worse still, they have resorted to progressively more demonizing terminology to accompany their faulty numbers as their propaganda has gone through new editions and stages of development.

For example, Cameron's original 1989 paper did not talk of "feces eating". The actual question Cameron asked in his survey was whether the respondent had ever engaged in "oral anal contact". In the hands of conservative Christians, "oral anal contact" has been twisted over the few years of evolution of their propaganda to "feces eating". And that perversion of Cameron's work typifies the way in which conservative Christian propaganda has evolved from the promotion of "family values" to
the highly successful money-raiser that the libel of "filthy homosexual practices" has become for them.

Cameron's own work shows that "feces eating" (oral anal contact) can in no way be fairly characterized as a "filthy homosexual practice". If anything, it is more accurately termed a "filthy heterosexual practice".

In Cameron's survey, as the 1989 Psychological Reports paper indicates, he found 51 male and female homosexuals who admitted to having engaged in oral anal contact. But he also found 1006 heterosexuals who admitted the same thing. That is, of 1057 survey respondents who said they had participated in what conservative Christians call "feces eating", 95% identified themselves as heterosexuals.

In other words, the conservative Christians' "feces eating" is actually a "filthy heterosexual practice"; for 95% of those who engage in it are heterosexuals.

Many similar examples of the distortion of statistics by conservative Christians could be cited. Conservative Christians are, in fact, conducting a campaign of vilification against gays that is becoming increasingly rabid, and that is indeed worthy of the best efforts of Dr. Goebbels and his Nazi propaganda machine.

The Bible warns us against those who constantly say "Lord, Lord", and advises us "By their fruits ye shall know them". Conservative Christians continually protest that they "love the sinner". But they make themselves truly known by the fruits of their work in originating or propagating this vile, malicious, libelous propaganda that is clearly intended to throw gasoline on the fire.

By their hateful actions, conservative Christians make themselves unworthy of "kid glove" treatment, and they certainly are not entitled to the cloak of the martyr.

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