Founded in 1987 by Paul Cameron, the Family Research Institute (FRI) claims to produce "cutting-edge research" on "family policy" issues. In truth, Cameron is the longtime house psychologist of the anti-gay movement — and one of the most thoroughly discredited researchers in America.

After losing his job teaching psychology at the University of Nebraska in 1980, Cameron began to crank out "scientific" studies that bolstered the claims of Anita Bryant, Jerry Falwell and other early anti-gay crusaders that gay people were "diseased perverts" with a program to molest children and demolish America.

Cameron's first organization, the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality, distributed hysterical pamphlets falsely alleging that gay people were much more likely than others to be serial murderers, child molesters and intentional disease-spreaders.

Years later, Cameron's FRI Web site was still singing the same tune: "The typical sexual practices of homosexuals are a medical horror story — imagine exchanging saliva, feces, semen and/or blood with dozens of different men each year. Imagine drinking urine, ingesting feces and experiencing rectal trauma on a regular basis."

That's only the beginning. In a 1981 debate, Cameron claimed a 4-year-old boy had been sexually mutilated in a Lincoln, Neb., mall rest room as part of a "homosexual act" — but police in Lincoln said no such crime had occurred.

He told the 1985 Conservative Political Action Committee conference that "extermination of homosexuals" might be needed in the next three to four years. He has advocated tattooing AIDS patients in the face, and banishment to a former leper colony for any patient who resisted. He has called for gay bars to be closed and gays to be registered with the government.

Cameron even has called AIDS a "godsend," and it was for him: Though he was kicked out of the American Psychological Association for ethical violations in 1983 (he was alleged to have used unsound methods and misrepresented the work of others) — and then, after pawning himself off as a sociologist, declared "not a sociologist" by the American Sociological Association — his studies alleging that homosexuals were intentionally spreading AIDS have been frequently cited by anti-gay groups and commentators like Pat Buchanan.

In the late '90s, Education Secretary William Bennett was badly embarrassed after going on national television and citing Cameron's unscientific study finding that gay men live only 43 years on average. (Cameron had based the finding on a sample of obituaries in gay newspapers.) Since then, anti-gay groups have continued to make frequent use of Cameron's findings — almost always without mentioning the source.

Incredibly, serving on Cameron's board are former U.S. Rep. Robert Dornan (R-Calif.) and former U.S. Sen. Robert Smith (R-Calif.)

Focus on the Family
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.
www.family.org

No one has spread the anti-gay gospel as widely, or with as much political impact, as James Dobson, the former child development professor and spanking enthusiast who founded Focus on the Family (FOF) in 1977.

On Focus' 47-acre campus in Colorado Springs, some 1,300 employees battle against gay rights, sex education and women's rights with an enormous annual budget of $130 million. Dobson's radio show, dispensing homespun parenting advice along with jabs at "the militant homosexual agenda," is heard daily on more than 9,000 radio stations worldwide, giving him an estimated listening audience of more than 200 million.

Focus' president from 2003 to early 2005, Don Hodel, formerly served as U.S. Secretary of the Interior and head of the Christian Coalition, and now chairs the Council for National Policy, a secretive group of America's most powerful right-wing leaders that Dobson formerly chaired.

As early as 1989, Dobson came under attack from a fellow conservative evangelical, U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who accused him of "reprehensible" and "homophobic" use of false information about how AIDS is transmitted. But Focus began to really flex its anti-gay political muscles in 1992, when Dobson used his radio show to turn Colorado's anti-gay Amendment 2 (see Holy War) into a fundamentalist cause célèbre.

Among the scores of anti-gay commentaries, stories and products on FOF's Web site is a Dobson essay that strikes a typical note: "Moms and Dads, are you listening? This movement is the greatest threat to your children. It is of particular danger to your wide-eyed boys, who have no idea what demoralization is planned for them." Another article claims that "the homosexual agenda is a beast. It wants our kids."

According to a 1997 book by former FOF staffer Gil Alexander-Moegerle, Dobson once said, "Communities do not let prostitutes, pedophiles, voyeurs, adulterers and those who sexually prefer animals to publicly celebrate their lifestyle, so why should homosexuals get such privileges?" He has also recommended parents withdraw from Parent-Teacher Associations because they allegedly have a liberal social agenda.

But none of this cut into Dobson's effectiveness as he successfully spearheaded the national campaign against gay marriage in 2003 and 2004 (see Holy War).

Summit Ministries
MANITOU SPRINGS, Colo.
www.summit.org

David Noebel, once an evangelist with the late Billy Joe Hargis' scandal-plagued Anti-Communist Christian Crusade, founded Summit Ministries in 1962, holding camp-style conferences for Christian college students.

Now an unaccredited college of its own, boasting additional campuses in Ohio and Tennessee and the hearty endorsement of Focus on the Family's James Dobson, Summit graduates more than 1,300 students a year — all of them steeped in both Christian "dominionism" (generally, the idea that Christianity should dominate society and politics) and anti-gay politics.

In 1977, while still a member of the conspiracy-minded John Birch Society, Noebel was one of the first to recognize that anti-gay activism could surpass anti-communism as a winning issue for fundamentalists. The U.S. was "rotting within," Noebel warned, and "homosexuality is only an issue when a nation is rotting morally." Noebel wrote a book called The Homosexual Revolution and gave anti-gay lectures peppered with slurs like "fruits" and "fairies."

In 1986, he teamed up with Paul Cameron (see Family Research Institute) and then-Summit instructor Wayne Lutton, currently a leader in the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, to write Special Report: AIDS, which became one of the most controversial anti-gay tracts ever published.

Pat Buchanan's blurb on the back cover sums up the spirit of this Special Report: "In a healthy society," Buchanan writes, homosexuality is "contained, segregated, controlled and stigmatized."

Bolstered by Cameron's studies alleging that gay people were intentionally spreading the AIDS virus, Special Report proposes a number of means to "suppress" the outbreak, concluding that it might become necessary to "exile" all "active homosexuals" from America.

Summit continues to preach anti-gay propaganda to the next generation of fundamentalist activists, with Mike Haley, an "ex-gay" campaigner who is Focus on the Family's "youth and gender specialist" and author of a book called Straight Answers: Exposing the Myths and Facts about Homosexuality, currently on the faculty.

Traditional Values Coalition
ANAHEIM, Calif.
www.traditionalvalues.org

Nobody has warned Americans about the "gay threat" longer, or louder, than former Presbyterian minister and Pat Robertson protégé Lou Sheldon, already a veteran anti-gay crusader when he founded the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) in 1981.

Sheldon, who deems homosexuality a "deathstyle," sends a steady stream of sensationalistic fundraising appeals to TVC members (he claims 43,000 churches are part of his coalition). Most center around the idea that child-molesting is the real "homosexual agenda."

"They want our preschool children. ... They want our kindergarten children. ... They want our middle school and high school children," read a recent direct-mail appeal.

In 1992, Sheldon reportedly told columnist Jimmy Breslin, "Homosexuals are dangerous. They proselytize. They come to the door, and if your son answers and nobody is there to stop it, they grab the son and run off with him. They steal him. They take him away and turn him into a homosexual."

TVC reports echo that theory: "As homosexuals continue to make inroads to the public schools, more children will be molested and indoctrinated into the world of homosexuality." Gay-Straight Alliances on high school campuses are also part of a plot to "target children for recruitment" to gay sex, cross-dressing and sex-change operations, TVC says.

Yet another TVC report claims "the deviant homosexual subculture has fueled efforts to normalize adult/child sex."

In 1985, Sheldon personally suggested putting AIDS victims into "cities of refuge." When a hate crimes bill was signed in the early 1990s in California, Sheldon told a reporter that it would "protect sex with animals and the rape of children as forms of political expression."

Sheldon and his daughter, Andrea Lafferty, are active lobbyists in Washington. In 1995, Sheldon managed to engineer a congressional hearing on gay activists' supposed infiltration of public schools in a bid to whip up support for Sen. Jesse Helms' bill to cut federal funds for schools "encouraging or supporting homosexuality."

But the hearing turned into a fiasco; the star witness was Claire Connolly, a lesbian who falsely accused gay male activists of using federal AIDS funds to hold orgies.

Still, Sheldon's hard edge has never faded. Commenting on "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," Sheldon suggested the Bravo television network "consider airing a series called AIDS Hospice ... [that would] far more accurately portray the end results of homosexual sodomy."