Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Perverting Science

Mark Franck at First Things tells an interesting tale of two social scientists who conducted research on a similar topic: Gay marriage.

The first researcher found that children of parents in gay unions do less well than children in traditional families on every measure tested. The second researcher found that when people talk in person to a gay man who describes to them how he would like to marry but is prohibited by law from doing so, the attitudes of the people frequently undergo lasting change in favor of gay marriage.

The first researcher has been put through the wringer because his results do not conform to the liberal narrative about gay marriage. The second researcher was roundly praised and feted by the media for his work.

The first researcher's work has been validated by everyone who has examined it, many of whom themselves favor gay marriage, but eventually other researchers whose mission it was to discredit the findings inexplicably threw out some of his data in order to get their results to conform to their preconceived conclusions. The second researcher, meanwhile, was found to have totally fabricated his research and his data.

The media is treating both cases as though they were somehow equivalently fraudulent. Science in America is taking on the aspect of science in the old Soviet Union. Unless the scientist's conclusions conform to the correct ideological line, they have no merit. The correct line in the liberal media is that gay unions are no different than traditional heterosexual unions, and if research finds that not to be the case then the research is ipso facto flawed.

Read Franck's fairly brief explanation of this absurd affair at the link.