I wish Paul Cameron would just come out already.

I was on postdoc at [undisclosed location] when I first heard Simon LeVay present his work on biological bases of sexual orientation. LeVay acknowledged the limitations of this early work, but it was nonetheless very exciting and thought-provoking. Only later did I hear of Paul Cameron, who, in contrast, is a second-rate academic and second-rate psychologist with a pathological fear of sex. He has made it his mission to discredit the idea that homosexuality is not a choice, and he champions draconian sodomy laws.

Through Box Turtle Bulletin via Andrew Sullivan, I stumbled on Cameron's screed "Can Gay Rights Be Stopped?" It ranks right up there with First Samuel and The Turner Diaries: a hateful, violent, un-Christian manifesto wrapped up in "Christian" morals and virtues.

Kevin of Kevin's Space already took this pile of shit apart. But let me call your attention to a few paragraphs. Here's the first one:

...[H]omosexuals targeted ‘science.’ They correctly figured it would be tough sledding if they tried to change Christianity from within. But by capturing the professions and thereby science, the gay movement could trump Christianity. They knew that religious professionals — intimidated by the complexity of science and awed by its influence and accomplishments -— would eventually go along with them.

What can I say. He figured it out: Science has been driven by the gay agenda since Apollo 11. I bow to my homosexual overlords.

But here's the funniest bit, an attempt to bolster the credibility of his "research" institute and the "researchers" therein:

Because science is both elitist and highly competitive, it has garnered the admiration — and even awe — of non-scientists, while at the same time often befuddling them in its complexity. What many conservatives do not realize is how very difficult it is to be a top-notch scientist. While there are hundreds of thousands of professionals across the world engaged in science of one form or another, the ‘cream of the scientific crop’ rises to the top through the process of publishing in the scientific literature. Consider these facts: only 1% of Ph.D.s and M.D.s ever publish in a scientific journal; only 2% of those who publish ever place articles in one of the top handful of premier science journals; and only 10% of this last group is ever chosen to serve as ‘peer reviewers’ for those top journals, with the task of judging the quality of other scientists’ work. Nevertheless, one of the scientists at the Family Research Institute has been selected to do just that: be a peer-reviewer for the British Medical Journal, one of most well-respected scientific journals in the world.

Oh, really? Let's play with these numbers a bit. Suppose that in my own science there are 50,000 Ph.D.s alive today. (This is over-generous by about two orders of magnitude.) By Cameron's reckoning, therefore, only 500 (1%) of us are publishing in scientific journals. That means that only 10 (2%) of us are publishing in the "premier" journals. That leaves only one of us (10%) to review everyone else's papers for publication.

Snort.

I am an editor, and I am so desperate for reviewers that I am not ashamed to ask (good responsible) graduate students to serve as referees. The "elite" almost never agree to review; only the junior researchers fighting for visibility will volunteer. If I have a reasonably intelligent discussion with almost any credentialed person on a particular topic, then I will file that person's name away in my "potential reviewer" rolodex. Most of the journals in which I publish advertise shamelessly for reviewers in that blank space between the end of one paper and the beginning of the next.

One of Cameron's "scientists" was once asked to review something for the not-top-ranked British Medical Journal. Did this reviewer also publish something there? It is a fact that if a researcher submits a paper for publication in a specific journal, his/her name will be added to the list of potential reviewers for that journal even if the paper they submitted was a crackpotty piece of trash that was summarily rejected. There is no way for an editor to know this unless she herself reviewed and rejected the piece of trash in question. I try not to select reviewers whose work I recall rejecting, but sometimes it's unavoidable.

Cameron uses faked-up numbers and a mischaracterization of the peer-review process to convince his followers that his "science" is just as (or more) respectable that the science churned out by the godless researchers controlled by the Homosexual Cabal (TINHC). I know most of my readers can call bullshit on his arguments without any help from me, but I couldn't let this pass without another heaping helping of scorn and ridicule.

I will assume it was just coincidence that while I was typing this up, my Pandora stream selected Queen's Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy.