Paul Drummond Cameron (born November 9, 1939) is an American psychologist. While employed at various institutions, including the University of Nebraska, 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.
Biography
Early life and career
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 California State University in 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.
During this period, Cameron conducted research on a variety of topics, including the effects of passive smoking and the relation 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 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 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.
Family Research Institute
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.