How The Right Wing Fringe Operates
Recycling Old Discredited "Research"
The following is a recent example of how the right wing fringe groups operate in order to get their misinformation repeatedly recycled in the press.
On April 29.2002 an article titled "Pedophilia more common among 'gays'", by Jon Dougherty appeared at WorldNetDaily.com. The article appeared at the following URL:
Several Rainbow Alliance members followed this article closely. The following was written by one of the members.
If you don't know, World Nut Daily is an extreme right-wing "news" site that offers opinion as fact. Their most liberal columnist is Bill O'Reilley - you get the idea.
The article that appeared above contains the following quote:
"...wrote Steve Baldwin in, "Child Molestation and the Homosexual Movement," soon to be published by the Regent University Law Review after Stanford Law Review backed out." Note the italicized phrase.
Regent University is right wing fringe activist Pat Robertson's diploma mill. A Law Review is an academic journal published by law schools which discuss in an academic and very detailed way, approaches to the law. For example the latest issue of the Stanford Law Review (SLR) has a 56 page book review! Articles are extensively footnoted and can be a real slog to read. Law Reviews are run by senior, academically gifted law students under faculty guidance.
Since the Christian reich is notorious for twisting the truth and outright lying I decided to email the President of the SLR to see if they had "backed out" (note the implication - there is a clear innuendo that SLR had accepted the article and then backed out under some sort of political pressure).
Lo, and behold, not only had the SLR NOT "backed out", the article had never been submitted. Read The Editor's Response The italicised phrase, above, is a big fat lie, and the SLR President was not pleased. Within 24 hours the offending phrase was removed from the article.
I got into quite a tussle with a fundamentalist on an online forum over the lie and he emailed the author of the article. The author of the article said (after he had been threatened by Stanford's law school and removed the offending phrase) that there was a mistake and the article had been submitted to the Stanford Law & Policy Review (SL&PR). Naturally, I emailed the editor of that journal. He telephoned me and told me that the article at issue here had never been submitted to SL&PR either! Another lie. (Note that the individual who claimed to have received the e-mail from Steve Baldwin later deleted all of his own messages on the subject.)
Regent University Law Review has now published the article (requires Acrobat Reader):
The article is short (16 pages) for a law review article and contains the same old discredited religious reich lies, this time with footnotes pointed to Cameron, Reisman and other usual suspects. It contains nothing new. It simply recycles old material in the hope that the refutations have been forgotten. In other words, it's a rotting corpse tarted up in a brand new academic gown.
Another Rainbow Alliance member has this to say about the "study".
Firstly because there's nothing new in this 'new study'. In fact its just added a few out-of-context quotes to spice up a collection of warmed-up 'statistics' from a number of notoriously unreliable sources - Kinsey-hater Judith Reisman, Dr Nicolosi from NARTH and (though he isn't mentioned by name in WNR - perhaps because even they know by now his 'statistics' are a complete fraud) Dr Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute. It's mostly Cameron's statistics which underlie the article.
The 1985 paper linking gays to paedophilia in Psychological Reports (indidentally a virtually worthless journal according to academic rankings) seems to be the centrepiece of Baldwin's paper - yet it has been completely debunked. Cameron assumed every sexual abuse incident involving boys was carried out by homosexuals, despite the fact that most other studies show that 80% are in fact carried out by men whose adult sexual preferences are towards women. Paedophilia is about power, not homosexuality. Further, Cameron then took all the attacks on young boys, and divided them by the lowest possible estimate of the proportion of gay men in the total population (even though underreporting bias means some estimates of the number of gay men are known to be way below the mark). Obviously a statistic based on redefining homosexuality when it comes to child abusers - to get the largest possible number -but dividing it by the lowest available share of homosexuals in the total population is going to produce an indefensible figure.
This and various other even more outrageously idefensible and defamatory 'statistics' on homosexuality which Cameron was putting out have been shredded in the courts, condemned by the UK Press Complaints Commissions and resulted in Cameron's expulsion from and censure by various professional organizations.
So why is Baldwin trying to revive Cameron's stuff - and the equally discredited work of Judith Reisman - now ? Presumably because the subject is topical with the Roman Catholic Church's current fiasco.
The other interesting thing is that, to cover for the poor quality of the work and the fact that it clearly isn't up to the standards of any reputable journal (the only place he could publish, the Regent University Law Review is a virtually defunct publication, largely under the control of Pat Robertson), Baldwin has taken to lying openly about the journal. In particular, the WNR article said the prestigious Stanford Law Review had originally intended to publish, but then 'backed out'(the clear insinuation being that it was under political pressure - the usual whine of the Cameron/Reisman/Socarides/Nicolisi brigade whose work is the heart of Baldwin's article). In fact, the editor of the SLR hastily replied to me that THE BALDWIN ARTICLE WAS NEVER SUBMITTED TO THE SLR. You will now find that particular false claim, which libeled the integrity of a reputable journal, has been withdrawn from the WNR site, presumably under the threat of legal action.
However, Baldwin then compounded his mistake by switching the libel to another journal: he claimed it was a typo, and the journal which had backed out was in fact the Stanford Law and Policy Review. Again, an email from a friend to the editor brought a very rapid phone call confirming that Baldwin had never submitted his article to SL&PR either.
It's quite clear that Baldwin, a right-wing politico with links to the John Birch society, has taken to openly lying about his article, in order to try and get back onto the agenda some very sub-standard work which has long ago been dismissed by those who have carried out serious study in the field. For virtually all studies are agreed: homosexuality is a quite a separate thing from paedophilia (the fact that NAMBLA like to pretend they are a gay rights organization is irrelevant: every gay group denounces them continually). Several studies confirm that homosexuals are no more likely to abuse pre-pubescent children than heterosexuals (in fact, possibly rather less likely to - since much of this abuse is carried out by fathers on their own sons).
