As Raw Story's Stephen Webster noted, on the heels of a recent study which found that "people who have negative feelings toward homosexuality often have secret attractions to the same sex — and are more likely to have grown up in households that forbid homosexual feelings," we have Thom Hartmann asking about that very topic during this interview with the leader of an anti-gay organization which the SPLC has designated as a hate group.

Hartmann confronts anti-gay leader: Do closeted gays run your movement?:

On Russia Today TV’s The Big Picture Thursday, progressive radio host Thom Hartmann confronted Family Research Institute chairman Dr. Paul Cameron and asked him an unusually pointed question: “Does it concern you that many of your colleagues in the anti-gay movement may actually be closeted gays?”

“Um, no,” Cameron replied. “Very few of them are homosexually interested. First of all, um… Most people are not interested in homosexuality. There’s not at all. A few homosexuals like to say — and they’ve been saying this now for at least the last seven years — almost everybody is bisexual, maybe some homosexual…”

“I’ve never heard anybody say that,” Hartmann replied.

Cameron went on to claim that biologist Alfred Kinsey, whose groundbreaking research pioneered the study of human sexuality, “was gay” and “pushed that idea,” making his scientific findings somehow less valid. “Most of the homosexual leadership… have pushed that idea,” he added. “But it’s not true!”

Cameron didn’t provide any source or research to support his claim, so interested viewers may just have to take his word for it. Read on...

Here's more from the Southern Poverty Law Center on Cameron:

Date of Birth: 1939
Location: Colorado Springs, CO
Ideology: Anti-Gay

Paul Cameron is an infamous anti-gay propagandist whose one-man statistical chop shop, the Family Research Institute, churns out hate literature masquerading as legitimate science. Cameron dresses up his "studies" with copious footnotes, graphs and charts, and then pays to publish them in certain journals. Cameron's work has been rejected by both the American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association, yet his ludicrous statistics are frequently referenced in sermons, news broadcasts, politicians' speeches and even court decisions.

In His Own Words

"Homosexuality is an infectious appetite with personal and social consequences. It is like the dog that gets a taste for blood after killing its first victim and desires to get more victims thereafter with a ravenous hunger."
— 1988 newspaper column

"Marital sex tends toward the boring end. Generally, it doesn't deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does. If you isolate sexuality as something solely for one's own personal amusement, if all you want is the most satisfying orgasm you can get, then homosexuality seems too powerful to resist."
— Interview with Rolling Stone, 1999

"Most people who engage in homosexuality are of the lower strata; these are people who are waiters and busboys and bums and hobos and jailbirds and so forth."
— 1994 religious right conference panel discussion on homosexuality

Background

Paul Cameron grew up in Florida. He claims that when he was 4 years old, a pedophile forced him to perform oral sex in an apple orchard. "I must have been a beautiful and charming little boy. But I didn't like it very much," he said. "I remember that he was kind of dirty, and this bothered me."

After receiving a doctorate in psychology from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1966, Cameron became one of the first researchers in the country to examine the adverse health effects of secondhand smoke. It wasn't until 12 years later, in 1978, that he made his initial foray into anti-gay activism with the publication of Sexual Gradualism, a book in which he suggested that parents allow their children to experiment with heterosexual sex, short of intercourse, as a means of preventing homosexuality. "While no parent wants his child starting the process 'too young,' better too young than homosexual," he wrote.

In 1982, Cameron became chairman of the Committee to Oppose Special Rights for Homosexuals, a pressure group that formed to oppose a proposed gay rights ordinance in Lincoln, Neb. Campaigning against the ordinance, Cameron told a church congregation that a local 4-year-old boy had recently been dragged into a public bathroom and castrated by a gay man. The story was totally false, but Cameron's claim was hyped in the local media, and the ordinance was voted down by a four-to-one margin.

One year later, Cameron announced himself as the head of a new organization, the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality. He began to disseminate anti-gay propaganda in pay-to-publish journals with legitimate-sounding names, such as Psychological Reports, a Montana-based vanity publication that bills itself as "The Scientific Manifestation of Free Speech" and that charges $27.50 a page.

In 1986, as the AIDS crisis escalated, Cameron co-authored the book Special Report: AIDS, which advocated establishing concentration camps for "sexually active homosexuals." The following year, Cameron moved to Washington, D.C., and changed the name of his organization to Family Research Institute.

Cameron relocated to Colorado Springs, Colo., in 1992 after supporters of a constitutional amendment barring gay civil rights legislation in that state distributed 100,000 copies of his study, "What Do Homosexuals Do?" Among other things, the study claimed that 17% of LGBT people enjoy consuming human feces.

Most of Cameron's subsequent studies have linked homosexuality to pedophilia and reduced life spans. In 2003, his research was cited by dissenting justices on the Massachusetts Supreme Court in a case that led to legalizing same-sex marriage in that state. In 2004, a majority decision by the Florida Supreme Court upholding a law prohibiting adoption by gay and lesbian couples specifically quoted Cameron's research as supporting the notion that "children raised by homosexuals disproportionately experience emotional disturbance and sexual victimization." In fact, studies by real scientists have found that that is clearly untrue.

In 2007, Cameron testified in a Colorado Senate hearing concerning a proposed bill to allow same-sex couples to adopt children. He citied his own studies, which he said proved that gays and lesbians are more likely to be criminals and child molesters, and are more likely to drive drunk than heterosexuals. The Rocky Mountain News, reporting on these events, limited its description of Cameron to a mere "advocate of traditional family rights."