Okay…I’m riffing on the title of Jim Burroway’s latest expose of Paul Cameron’s latest anti-gay propaganda missive.  Read that as either I’m calling Cameron a devil or that I’m calling him a jackass.  Or that I’m calling his audience devil worshipers, or jackass kissers…

Another “homosexual lifespan" study has hit the news. According to a flurry of press releases making rounds, married gays in Scandinavia die 24 years younger than everyone else:

Once more, Burroway completely destroys Cameron’s propaganda (even calling it junk science ennobles it, really) by way of the simple trick of actually looking at the data.  This is Cameron’s essential technique…one he has perfected over the decades he’s been generating bogus statistics on homosexuality for the religious right: first gerrymander the data, then analyze it as though you hadn’t.  His classic study which is still being used today as proof that the lifespan of gay people is significantly shorter then that of heterosexuals, was conducted on data Cameron pulled from the obituary pages of two gay newspapers.  At the height of the first wave of AIDS deaths.  He averaged the age of death in those obituaries and compared it with that of the average lifespan of the population as a whole.  His supporters have argued since that you can compare the average age at death in mainstream news papers and even in small ethnic ones and get a figure that is comparable to the average lifespan figures of the population as a whole.  But this still makes the same essential mistake of assuming that the social and cultural context gay community papers exist in isn’t different enough that it would skew the data you’re pulling out of the obituary notices.  In fact it is.  Staringly obviously so.

The local gay paper was then, and is now, a fairly new phenomena in a nation that only until the latter part of the twentieth century was even disposed to admit that homosexuals existed, much less allow them to print their own newspapers.  In fact, until the hated Warren Court decided that homosexuals could in fact, distribute their own magazines and newspapers through the mail in 1958 in One v Olesen, it was pretty much impossible.  So you have the fact that local gay papers are a recent phenomena.  You have the fact that older gay people grew up in a climate of repression that marked most of them for life.  You have the fact that even by the time Cameron started collecting gay obituaries the out and proud part of the gay community was decidedly skewed toward younger generations.  You have the fact that obituaries are generally not placed in newspapers by the person who died but by their families, many of whom even today are reluctant to acknowledge the homosexuality of a dead relative (a number of obituaries in the mainstream press back then were written so as to conceal the fact that the deceased had succumbed to an AIDS related illness).  They would be unlikely then to even consider placing an obit in a gay paper.  You have the fact that the readership of gay papers then, as now, played to a largely urban and younger and more sexually active slice of the community as a whole.   And on top of that you have the fact that Cameron was collecting his data while the death toll from AIDS was just coming off its peak.  This is what Cameron was comparing to the average lifespan in the nation as a whole.

That’s his trademark: not so much falsifying the data, although he won’t shrink from doing that either whenever he thinks he can get away with it…but skewing the initial dataset, so right from the get-go any conclusions drawn from it will break in the direction he wants them to.

And his latest artwork may be his masterpiece:

Statistics Denmark and Statistics Norway publish official population cross-tabulations of marital status by age for each sex in their annual statistical yearbooks. Since 1994 in Denmark and 1995 in Norway, these tables have included separate categories for homosexual-partnered individuals…

Cameron is comparing the ages at death of married heterosexuals with same sex couples in registered partnerships.  At first glance it seems shocking that the average age at death is so much lower for the same sex couples.  But in reality it’s nothing more then a brilliant slight-of-hand…maybe his best yet.  The problem, as Burroway notes, is that the statistics for married couples have been gathering for an entire century, but for the same sex couples, only for as long as there had been domestic partnerships in Denmark…just since 1989.  There was no rush of older gay couples to register.  So as Burroway put’s it…

Why is this important? The heterosexual sample has been accumulating under-forties for an entire century.(In 2005, the average age of the groom was 37.4 years; for the bride, 34.7 years) But registered same-sex partnerships have only been available in Denmark since 1989, which means the gay sample got a late start. And if the typical age of someone entering into a same-sex partnership is around forty, then it stands to reason that the typical age at death of someone who has died so far would be similarly young.

If I have a flock of mostly young sheep, and in one year five are eaten by wolves and two more die of disease I can’t look at that and say what the average lifespan of a sheep is.  The age of my flock is skewed young to start with.  I’d need to keep collecting lifespan data on my flock for a period of many years before I could assume I was getting a handle on the average lifespan of my sheep.  What Cameron does is use data that only amounts to snapshots, and he is very careful to get just the right snapshots he wants, to end up with the results he wants:

Cameron’s Danish and Norwegian statistics show an average age at death in the fifties for registered partners simply because there aren’t many older partners in those samples to begin with. And the reason they aren’t in that sample is because for whatever reason, they haven’t registered their partnerships.

Now what might the reason for that be?  Once again, you have the generational differences between those of us who grew up before Stonewall, and those of us who grew up after…

Cameron dismisses the idea that homophobia is a major factor in Scandinavia because “Canada, Norway, and Denmark are far more accepting of homosexual practitioners than the United States (where homosexuals are still barred from the military and ‘gay rights’ laws do not exist in most states).” But saying that homophobia is lower in Scandinavia isn’t the same as saying it doesn’t exist. For example, it is still illegal in Denmark for gay couples to adopt children except for the children of their registered partners. And homosexuality is still not acceptable among many Danes and Norwegians, particularly among those living in rural areas and among the older generations — precisely the populations that haven’t availed themselves of registered partnerships.

This generational difference in the willingness of people to be open about their homosexuality, or that of their family members, is something every honest scientific investigation of the gay community must acknowledge and deal with somehow.  But for Paul Cameron its a handy way to filter out the old people, when he wants to prove that there aren’t any.  Cameron’s trademark is to pull from pools of data that are intrinsically skewed strongly towards a young, urban, and sexually active slice of the gay community and then analyze that data as if it were a random sample that was representative of the whole.  Wherever possible, he finds snapshots of those data pools…timeframes…that he knows will skew the results even further in the direction he wants them skewed.

We software engineers have long had a saying for it: Garbage In – Garbage Out.   Give the man his due…Paul Cameron is a master at selecting just the right garbage to put in, to get the garbage he wants back out.  And he’s getting better at it.  In this latest propaganda missive of his he displays an impressively deft hand.  Thank goodness for people like Jim Barroway.

Go read the rest of his report: Paul Cameron’s Footprint.  And if you haven’t already, go read some of his other magnificent takedowns of this man’s propaganda.  If you are someone who is gay, or knows someone who is, you will likely have some of Paul Cameron’s claptrap waved in your face at one time or another.  He is, as he likes to call himself, the wellspring of all the anti-gay statistics religious right groups use to demonize homosexual people.  He gets away with it because so few people bother to actually look closely at his work and see where he’s pulling his numbers from.  Do the one thing they’re counting on you not to do: look behind the curtain.