Archive for the ‘Questionable Educational and Research Institutes’ Category

They sound a lot more reasonable than they actually are, considering that it is a group made up of doctors. This is an anti-abortion extremist organization that, at least based on their web site, seems to oppose most forms of contraception as well. Their site still includes the debunked link between breast cancer and abortions, they still promote the firmly debunked idea that emergency contraception is a form of abortion, and they believe that life begins at fertilization despite the generally held scientific view that it does not begin until implantation. They wrote a brief in the Hobby Lobby case making the false claim before the Supreme Court that emergency contraception is abortion, despite a wealth of scientific evidence that shows otherwise. A member of their board of directors, Doctor Byron Calhoun, was recently caught up in controversy for lying to the West Virginia Attorney General about the frequency of abortion complications experienced at the hospital where he works. He claimed weekly problems, when an examination of the records of the hospital revealed just 3 incidents in an entire year.

Narth. No, its not what Pinky of Pinky and the Brain used to say. NARTH stands for The National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, and it has now hit a new milestone. It is, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, now the main source of anti-gay junk science. As SPLC points out in their report, anti-gay groups decided that they could no longer rely on mainstream science with its pro-reality agenda. As notorious homophobe and pseudo-scientific crank Paul Cameron of the anti-gay organization the Family Research Institute said, “We can no longer rely on – almost all pro-family organizations do today – on gleaning scientific ‘bits’ from those in liberal academia. We must subvert the academy by doing original, honest research ourselves.” Honest research means reporting anything, regardless of the facts, that puts homosexuality in a negative light. NARTH promotes the idea that homosexuality can be cured, an idea opposed by every legitimate medical and psychiatric organization. Their founders see homosexuality as a mental illness. As reported in the SPLC Intelligence Report: “In 1995, for example, NARTH featured Scott Lively, co-author of The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, at its annual conference. Lively’s book argues that the Nazi Party recruited gay men because of their inherent savagery and that gay men largely orchestrated the Holocaust — a claim roundly rejected by all reputable historians. NARTH has also promoted the work of Paul Cameron, who remains director of the Family Research Institute despite being ejected from the American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association (ASA). The ASA declared, “Dr. Cameron has consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented sociological research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism.” An excellent example is the NARTH claim that the work of Seton Hall professor Theodora Sirota showed that children raised by gay parents had worse outcomes than those raised by heterosexual parents. The problem with this claim is that the research did not look at children raised by gay parents- it looked at outcomes in families where there was a gay husband married to a heterosexual wife. As Dr. Sirota wrote: “[N]o conclusions about gay or lesbian fitness to adopt children or quality of active gay parenting can be drawn from the findings of my research. No conclusions about the well-being of children who are or were actively raised by gay or lesbian parents can be drawn from the findings of my research.”

Many pseudo-scientific organizations or organizations with a purely religious agenda give themselves names to make them sound mainstream and legitimate. One of those is the American College of Pediatricians. It sounds like a purely medical based organization,  but in fact, it is a socially conservative and religiously driven group. Like NARTH, they are also in the business of creating fake research and statistics to demonize gays. ACP head Dr. Joseph Zanga, described his group this way: “essentially a Judeo-Christian, traditional-values organization … open to membership for pediatric medical professionals of all religions who hold our core beliefs … that life begins at conception and that the traditional family unit, headed by an opposite-sex couple, poses far fewer risk factors.” You’d never get their agenda from the name of the organization, though, so when they put out statistics or research, they seem to have a lot of credibility when in fact they do not. They distort the findings of other researchers, according to the very researchers whose research they cite. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, stated: “It is disturbing to me to see special interest groups distort my scientific observations to make a point against homosexuality. The information they present is misleading and incorrect.”

AIDS Healthcare Foundation. The name sound legitimate. At one time, it probably was. But now, they have been taken over by leadership with a bizarre agenda- enforcing the use of condoms in the adult industry at any cost. They made alliances with anti-porn advocates. They successfully got a mandatory requirement into city law that all non-studio porn shoots in Los Angeles use condoms even for oral sex. This requirement has done little more than force non-studio shoots to move outside of the city of Los Angeles, because there is no market for that type of porn anywhere in the world. No one wants to see oral sex scenes with all the sex organs covered up. They belittle the use of testing that has been so successful that not a single incidence of AIDS has occurred since 2004, and even before that it was rare.  AHF put the main testing facility used by the adult industry out of business. They lie about statistics, they distort the facts, and they have long since ceased being a reliable source of information. Their agenda borders on the fanatical. They believe in condoms and abstinence only. They even oppose a drug Truvada that may help in preventing transmission of the AIDS virus.  In a press release, AHF stated: “AHF has long been critical that PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) will not work on a large-scale basis because, consistent with poor medication adherence rates for most diseases, people will not be able to take Truvada as directed. Because of this, there will be little or no preventative effect, and drug resistance and drug resistant strains of HIV will develop. In addition, people who falsely believe they are fully protected against HIV very likely may engage in riskier behavior, thereby increasing their risk of HIV infection.” Finding a way that people can prevent transmission has been a huge goal of AIDS researchers, but AHF seems to believe they should not even try. Condoms are good enough. Forget testing. Forget research. We are going to put condoms on everyone whether they like it or not. The next thing I suspect they’ll try to enact is a law that forces married people to wear condoms, insisting on safe impregnation through artificial means. Gay fanatics trying to dictate to straight people what they should do does not seem to be any better than celibate religious fanatics trying to dictate the sexual practices of heterosexuals.

This organization promotes the now thoroughly debunked reparative therapy to supposedly cure homosexuality.  NARTH was founded in 1992. In opposition to the mainstream scientific consensus and a mountain of scientific research, they believe that homosexuality is a disorder that can be cured.

While presented as a secular organization, they in fact tend to partner with conservative anti-gay religious organizations such as Focus on the Family. Their website also points to theological arguments against homosexuality, which somewhat puts the lie to their actually holding a secular viewpoint on the issue.

They give out an annual Sigmund Freud award top researchers, which I assume is for questionable sex obsessed research.  One of the winners and a former advisor to the group was George Reekers, the anti-gay promoter who is now better known for his use of the Rent Boy escort web site.

NARTH research has often been criticized by the scientific community.  They also recieved criticism from the Southern Poverty Law Center for Gerald Schoenewolf’s essay, Gay Rights and Political Correctness: A Brief History. Schoenwolf is a member of their science advisory committee, and he wrote that “Africa at the time of slavery was still primarily a jungle… Life there was savage … and those brought to America, and other countries, were in many ways better off.” The same article also called the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and the gay rights movement “irrational” and “destructive.”

While representing themselves as a scientific organization, in reality, they appear to have an anti-gay religious agenda that they support with questionable research.

This organization is run by Dr. Paul Cameron, and all of its research seems to be done by him. It is a primary source of statistics for anti-gay groups. See the entry on Cameron in the Researchers section for a more detailed account.

An extremist anti-abortion, anti-sterilization, anti-birth control, anti-family planning, and anti-sex education organization which had very strong ties to the second Bush administration. See our article on Steven W. Mosher in the Questionable Researchers section for more information about him and what this group has done under his leadership.