« Is It Getting Mean to Keep Making Fun of Cheney? | Blog Index

Advertisement

recent entries Night Three: Biden Doesn't Wow, But the Convention (Finally) Gains Momentum Bill Clinton: Still the One—and a Potential Game-changer for Obama John Kerry on the Attack: Adding Anger to Hope Evan Bayh Attacks McCain With a Double-Edged Sword MoJo Video: Meet Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com at the DNC How Obama Could Capture Hillary Voters: Answer the Obvious Biden at Work Hillary Clinton Releases Her Delegates Brian Schweitzer, Everyone's New Favorite

Scientists Say Enough to Right-Wing Manipulation of Their Work

The religious right generates defends its intolerance towards gays and lesbians by generating misleading statistics about them. For example, groups like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council claim that gay men are more likely to be pedophiles than straight men simply by calling men who abuse boys "gay," rather than pedophiles. A greater proportion of child molesters choose victims of the same sex than consenting adults choose partners of the same sex, so there you have it: Gay men molest boys. (Confused? You should be.)

They also claim again and again that children do best with a mother and a father. That's not what the research says. Research says that kids do better with two parents than one, but parents' gender and orientation have no effect. (Slate's William Saletan exhaustively debunked of the right's response to Mary Cheney's pregnancy if you want more details.) Just as their bogus studies (with such qualified authors as born again actor Kirk Cameron) make a mockery of science, so does their success getting their views reported by media outlets trying to be balanced make a mockery of that basic journalistic tenet.

Well, at long last, the scientists whose professional studies are being cherry-picked and distorted to bolster the religious right's claims have created a website to refute the misuse of their work. The site, RespectMyResearch.org, lists the studies that have been distorted and explains how. It also has a portal researchers can use to report misuse of their findings.

If only mainstream media outlets will check it before they publish bogus claims fed to them by right-wing think tanks, maybe some intelligent public dialogue about GLBT issues will follow.

Posted by Mother Jones on 02/27/07 at 2:21 PM | E-mail | Print | Digg | de.licio.us | Reddit | Newsvine | Yahoo! MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Netscape | Google |