Anti-gay Propagandist Heads to Moldova to Speak Against Rights Bill

Paul Cameron, a virulently anti-gay and roundly discredited psychologist whose membership in the American Psychological Association (APA) was revoked in the early 1980s amid an investigation that he violated professional ethics, is on his way to Moldova next week to speak against proposed anti-discrimination legislation that would protect LGBT people.

The legislation will be voted on at the end of this month. It's the third time in the past three years that Cameron will visit the country. Angela Frolov, head of GenderDoc-M, Moldova's main LGBT rights group, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that Cameron addressed university students on his first two visits, in 2008 and 2009.

Cameron was invited this time by an organization called the Alliance to Save the Family in Moldova, which refers to him as a "U.S. sociologist." Cameron did try to be a sociologist after the APA banned him, but the American Sociological Association formally disassociated from him in 1986 in a resolution stating that he is not a sociologist and that the association "condemns his consistent misrepresentation of sociological research." The Nebraska Psychological Association and the Canadian Psychological Association also adopted resolutions that disassociate themselves from Cameron's research and his claims about LGBT people and sexuality.

Nevertheless, the Moldovan organization that has invited him says he "will share the U.S. experience in implementing anti-discrimination legislation" and there will be a roundtable discussion with representatives from various parliamentary committees, ministries and "other institutions of the state."

The anti-discrimination law was proposed in February of this year, as part of Moldova's efforts to get an association agreement from the European Union. The country, one of the poorest in Europe, is mired in foreign debt and high unemployment. In spite of that, or perhaps because of it, Moldova is proving fertile ground for American anti-gay activists.

Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, head of Abiding Truth Ministries, traveled there earlier this year to work against the anti-discrimination bill. According to Lively, anti-discrimination legislation is "the seed that contains the entire tree of the homosexual agenda, with all its poisonous fruit." Lively also traveled to Uganda in 2009 to speak to members of parliament there and hold seminars about the evils of homosexuality. After his visit, the so-called "kill the gays bill" was proposed, in which people could be executed for homosexuality under certain conditions.

Cameron, who founded the Family Research Institute in Colorado Springs, has been peddling dubious research and falsehoods about homosexuality for the last three decades. He has called for the criminalization of homosexuality, called AIDS a "godsend" and repeatedly linked homosexuality to pedophilia. He has also claimed that LGBT people don't live as long as straight people and that children raised by homosexuals experience sexual violence and emotional disturbances, all claims that continue to percolate throughout the anti-gay right in this country and now, apparently, are finding new audiences elsewhere.