Earlier Thursday, Equality Matters reported that the National Organization for Marriage’s (NOM) Ruth Institute was endorsing a book that claimed, among other things, that gay parents are more likely to molest their own children than heterosexual parents.
Now, NOM appears to be doubling down on that claim – and this time on its main blog.
In a December 8 blog post, NOM promoted an essay posted on the “Bad Catholic” blog titled “Two Lesbians Raised a Baby and This Is What They Got…” The essay – written by blogger Marc Barnes – is a response to a video of an Iowa man speaking eloquently in defense of his two moms, which recently went viral.
Referring to the video as “false advertising,” Barnes attempts to lay out the case for why gays and lesbians aren’t fit to raise children:
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- Gay couples are less likely to stay together
- Gay couples don’t want to get married
- Gay relationships are more likely to be violent/abusive
Near the end of his essay, Barnes makes an argument which is apparently becoming NOM-dogma – gay parents molest their children at higher rates than heterosexual parents:
Similarly, the children of homosexual parents are much more likely to be sexually abused. The journal Adolescence reports that a “disproportionate percentage—29 percent—of the adult children of homosexual parents had been specifically subjected to sexual molestation by that homosexual parent, compared to only 0.6 percent of adult children of heterosexual parents having reported sexual relations with their parent…. Having a homosexual parent(s) appears to increase the risk of incest with a parent by a factor of about 50″ (P. Cameron and K. Cameron, “Homosexual Parents,” Adolescence 31 (1996): 772.).
To support his position, Barnes relies on the widely discredited work of Paul Cameron, a psychologist who has been disavowed by a number of major medical organizations – including the American Psychological Association – for misrepresenting sociological research on homosexuality.
This is exactly the same kind of propaganda that got groups like the Family Research Council and the American Family Association listed as anti-gay hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Advancing the claim that gay people are more inclined to molest their own children is a serious error in judgment. Advancing it twice in one week – and on two separate websites – is evidence that NOM is more than willing to use hate speech in its never-ending campaign to demonize gays and lesbians.
UPDATE: NOM president Brian Brown promoted the blog post in a tweet on Thursday:
Reprinted by permission.
