Paul Drummond Cameron (born November 9, 1939) is an American psychologist. While employed at various institutions, including the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, he conducted research on passive smoking, but he is best known today for his claims about homosexuality. After a successful 1982 campaign against a gay rights proposal in Lincoln, Nebraska, he established the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (ISIS), now known as the Family Research Institute (FRI). As FRI's chairman, Cameron has written contentious papers asserting unproven associations between homosexuality and the perpetration of child sexual abuse and reduced life expectancy. These have been heavily criticized and frequently discredited by others in the field.
In 1983, the American Psychological Association expelled Cameron for non-cooperation with an ethics investigation. Position statements issued by the American Sociological Association, Canadian Psychological Association, and the Nebraska Psychological Association accuse Cameron of misrepresenting social science research. Cameron has been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-gay extremist.
Cameron was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S., on November 9, 1939. His family moved shortly afterwards to Florida. He received a BA from Los Angeles Pacific College in 1961, an MA from Los Angeles State College (now California State University, Los Angeles) the following year and a PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1966. He held posts as an assistant psychology professor at University of Wisconsin–Stout (1966–67) and Wayne State University (1967–68), before becoming an associate professor at the University of Louisville (1970–73) and the Fuller Graduate School of Psychology (part of the Fuller Theological Seminary) (1976–79). In 1979, he became an associate professor of Marriage and Family Therapy at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
During this period, Cameron conducted research on a variety of topics, including the effects of passive smoking and the relationship between pet ownership and happiness. In his 1978 book, Sexual Gradualism, he supported a middle ground between liberal and conservative Christian attitudes to sexuality, arguing that teenagers should avoid intercourse while experimenting with lower "levels" of sexual intimacy.
In 1980, Cameron left the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and took up private practice as a psychologist in Lincoln, Nebraska. In 1982, when the Lincoln city council asked residents to vote on a proposal to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, Cameron led the opposition as chairman of the committee to Oppose Special Rights for Homosexuals. Despite his earlier moderate position on teenage relationships, Cameron had come to take a hard-line stance on the topic of homosexuality. He has stated that his approach, emphasizing the harms he believed to be caused by homosexual behavior and its acceptance, was influenced by his work on the "lethal" behavior of smokers.
During the campaign in Lincoln, Cameron delivered a speech at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Lutheran chapel. This drew much attention after he stated that a four-year-old boy had suffered a brutal homosexual assault in a local mall. Police were unable to confirm the incident, and Cameron acknowledged that he had heard the story only as a rumor. On May 11, Lincoln voters rejected the proposed measure by a 4–1 margin.
In 1982, Cameron co-founded the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality in Lincoln. Believing that earlier sex surveys, including those conducted by Playboy magazine, had overestimated the prevalence of homosexuality, Cameron set out in 1983 to conduct what he described as "a fair sexuality poll, not one based on volunteers." His expectation was that the results would support his case for a ban on homosexual acts throughout the United States. Funding, according to Cameron, was provided by businessmen including several Nebraska chief executives. The 1983 ISIS Survey, an "extensive self-administered questionnaire", was offered to 9,129 adults in five U.S. cities, and 4,340 responses were received. In 1984, these were supplemented with data from 824 adults from Dallas. Under the banner of ISIS, Cameron produced a number of "lurid pamphlets about the supposed social ills associated with homosexuality", containing numerous false or unverifiable claims.
ISIS was shortly afterwards renamed the Family Research Institute (FRI) and moved to Washington, D.C. In 1995, FRI changed location again, this time to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where it remains based. In his capacity as FRI's chairman, Cameron has authored pamphlets and scientific articles on the topic of homosexuality. The cover photograph for Cameron's pamphlet Child Molestation and Homosexuality depicted "a young boy being pulled into a men's bathroom," while Murder, Violence and Homosexuality showed "a little girl cowering beneath an arm wielding an ax." Many of Cameron's scientific articles have been based on the 1983–1984 ISIS survey, including a 1996 paper that concluded based on participants' answers concerning their teachers that homosexual teachers could influence their students to become homosexual.
Another of Cameron's conclusions, based partly on his studies of obituaries in gay newspapers, is that homosexuals as a group have a median age of death about 20 years lower than that of heterosexuals. After analyzing official data from Denmark, which allowed same-sex unions in 1989, and Norway, which allowed same-sex marriage in 2009, Cameron reported in 2007 that "married lesbians lived to age 56 and married gay men to age 52." Cameron states that many victims of child sexual abuse are the same sex as their abusers – one FRI study on sexual abuse by foster parents in Illinois reported that 34% of perpetrators were guilty of same-sex abuse – and concludes that "there is a strong, disproportionate association between child molestation and homosexuality."
Cameron has asserted that 75 percent of gay men regularly ingest feces and that 70 to 78 percent have had a sexually transmitted disease, that all are promiscuous, and that homosexuals commit proportionately more homicides than non-homosexuals.
He has been quoted in Rolling Stone as saying that homosexual sex was more pleasurable than most heterosexual sex, and as a result, if homosexuality were tolerated then it would become predominant within a few generations.
Cameron's publications have been cited as support by some groups who oppose same-sex marriage and allowing homosexuals to become foster or adoptive parents, including the Traditional Values Coalition. Cameron testified in the case Baker v. Wade (1985). In 1992, Gale Norton, then the Attorney General of Colorado, employed Cameron as a consultant when defending a law preventing the extension of civil rights legislation to homosexuals. Cameron's testimony went unused, and the law was struck down by the Supreme Court. Cameron campaigned against a gay-rights initiative in Maine in 2000, testified in favor of the failed Virginia Anti-Gay Adoption Bill in 2005, and opposed a 2007 Colorado bill intended to allow cohabiting couples to adopt. He was tricked into appearing in Sacha Baron Cohen's 2009 mockumentary film Brüno.
Southern Poverty Law Center has classed the Family Research Institute as a hate group.
Cameron is married and has three children. His son, Kirk (not to be confused with the actor of the same name), has been involved with the Family Research Institute since 1983.
From professional organizations
The American Psychological Association (APA) launched an investigation into Cameron after receiving complaints about his work from members. The APA President Max Seigel sent Cameron a letter on December 2, 1983, stating that the Board of Directors had decided to drop him from membership for failure to cooperate with their investigation. FRI has contended that Cameron had already resigned from the organization in November 1982, citing correspondence from before his formal expulsion. In a letter published in the March 1983 edition of the APA Monitor, Cameron stated that his reasons for leaving included his opinion that the organization was becoming more of a "liberal PAC" than a professional society. The APA, however, does not allow the resignation of a member who is the subject of an ethics investigation. An APA spokesperson told The Boston Globe in 2005, "We are concerned about Dr. Cameron because we do believe that his methodology is weak."