More from those wacky folks at the Center for Arizona Policy

I'm really trying to wrap my mind around this group. The things in their newsletters (link will be provided as soon as they put the current one on their website, but for now I'll post the contents of the newsletter as a comment to this post so people can read it in its entirety) are so outrageous that it would be hilarious if they didn't have some real political clout and the ear of people in Arizona who might believe what they say is true.

In a counter-response to Wingspan's response to their claims that homosexuals are more likely to be molesters, is the following:

The President of the Southern Arizona Center Against Sexual Assault said that "the vast majority of men and women who sexually abuse children self-identify as heterosexual, regardless of the genders of their victim." (emphasis added). Read that carefully - there is no attempt to say the study from Illinois is flawed.

Uh... nothing like taking a single quote out of context (with no link to the entire Wingspan response, I might add) and then making a conclusion that is directly refuted by other quotes omitted.

For clarification, here are some quotes that not only attempt to say the study from Illinois is flawed, but bluntly state outright that its author is a hack:

"Dr." Paul Cameron, the author of the study that Len Munsil cited, was kicked out of the American Psychological Association in the early 1980's for unreliable survey methodology and outright lying about data to further his own radical agenda.

Citing Cameron's breach of the APA code of ethics, the APA expelled Paul Cameron from its membership in December 1983. Cameron claimed that he had actually resigned before the APA expelled him, but APA bylaws prohibit members from resigning while they are under investigation.

In 1985, the American Sociological Association (ASA) asserted that Cameron "has consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented sociological research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism" and noted that "Dr. Paul Cameron has repeatedly campaigned for the abrogation of the civil rights of lesbians and gay men, substantiating his call on the basis of his distorted interpretation of this research." An ASA committee was formed to critically evaluate Cameron's work. The ASA voted to pass the following resolution: "The American Sociological Association officially and publicly states that Paul Cameron is not a sociologist, and condemns his consistent misrepresentation of sociological research."

I find it interesting that the CAP must give its supporters incomplete information in order to make their point. Fight your fight, yeah, but don't do it through misinformation. I guess that's why this group scares me. There are people who get e-mails from them who believe their lies (yes, I'm sorry, I'm not going to mince words here, CAP is lying to their supporters) without doing any checking. And this wasn't even the most outrageous assertion the newsletter made, just the easiest lie to expose. There's stuff in there about "homosexual activists...fail[ing] to repudiate organizations like the 'North American Man-Boy Love Association'" and more stuff to try and falsely connect GLBT rights to pedophilia. It's really malicious and I have a hard time accepting the statement in the next article at face value:

But we cannot allow our concern about policy to override our compassion for those individual people who are caught up in homosexual behavior.

I just can't see anything Christ-like or compassionate in the attacks they make.

For more information on this "study," see this previous entry or even better, these comments from a social scientist who did some digging into the (in)famous Illinois study and its author.