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.
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.
[5] During this period, Cameron conducted research on a variety of topics, including the effects of passive smoking[2] and the relation between pet ownership and happiness.
[5] 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.
[10] 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.
[10] Another of Cameron's conclusions, based partly on his studies of obituaries in gay newspapers, is that homosexuals as a group have a median age of death about 20 years lower than that of heterosexuals.
[19] Cameron's publications have been cited as support by some groups who oppose same-sex marriage and allowing homosexuals to become foster or adoptive parents, including the Traditional Values Coalition.
[20] In 1992, Gale Norton, then the Attorney General of Colorado, employed Cameron as a consultant when defending a law preventing the extension of civil rights legislation to homosexuals.
[6][7] The APA President Max Seigel sent Cameron a letter on December 2, 1983, stating that the Board of Directors had decided to drop him from membership for failure to cooperate with their investigation.
[26] In a letter published in the March 1983 edition of the APA Monitor, Cameron stated that his reasons for leaving included his opinion that the organization was becoming more of a "liberal PAC" than a professional society.
"[7] In 1984 the Nebraska Psychological Association issued a statement disassociating itself "from the representations and interpretations of scientific literature offered by Dr. Paul Cameron.
"[29] This was based on a report from the ASA's Committee on the Status of Homosexuals in Sociology, which summarised Cameron's inflammatory statements and commented, "It does not take great analytical abilities to suspect from even a cursory review of Cameron's writings that his claims have almost nothing to do with social science and that social science is used only to cover over another agenda.
After Cameron submitted affidavits to the U. S. District Court of Dallas in Baker v. Wade (1985), Judge Buchmeyer wrote in his opinion that Cameron had engaged in "fraud" and "misrepresentations to this Court"[20] noting that, "His sworn statement that 'homosexuals are approximately 43 times more apt to commit crimes than is the general population' is a total distortion of the Kinsey data upon which he relies – which, as is obvious to anyone who reads the report, concerns data from a non-representative sample of delinquent homosexuals (and Dr. Cameron compares this group to college and non-college heterosexuals).
[35] Similarly, critics have argued that obituaries in gay-themed newspapers, which Cameron used to estimate homosexual mortality, do not provide a representative sample of deaths and ignore surviving members of the same generation.
[39] Herek noted that most of the Cameron group's academic publications in the past 15 years have been based on a survey study conducted in 1983 and 1984.
According to Herek, a critical review of the Cameron group's sampling techniques, survey methodology, and interpretation of results reveals at least six serious errors in their study.
"[41] In a widely publicized interview with Midweek Politics with David Pakman, Cameron compared homosexuality to drug use,[42] a comparison that drew criticism from several gay rights blogs, websites, and The Huffington Post.
[46][47][48] Scientific, medical and psychiatric bodies across the world do not consider homosexuality to be a disease or a particular risk factor for physically or sexually abusive behavior, and advocate acceptance of LGBT citizens.
Usage of homosexuality/homosexuals in context of pedophilia to refer to homosexual pedophiles (which has nothing to do with adult sexual orientation) is widely prevalent in scientific literature.
[48][46][44][45] Nicholas Groth wrote a letter to Nebraska Board of Examiners of psychologists on August 21, 1984, and accused him of misrepresentation of his own work and disgracing his profession.
[50][46][51] Cameron's work on this topic have not influenced scientific consensus on absence of harms possessed by homosexuals to children and society.