Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
-Eric Hoffer
Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin does his thing on the new “study” (oh, did I just use scare quotes?) by Walter R. Schumm, concerning the outcome for children raised by gay parents…
Schumm’s paper, titled “Children of homosexuals more apt to be homosexuals: A reply to Morrison and to Cameron based on an examination of multiple sources of data,” essentially picks up where a very similar 2006 paper by Paul Cameron left off, which claimed that 33% to 47% of children of gay parents wound up being gay. Schumm’s paper claims that children of gay parents were 1.7 to 12.1 times as likely to become gay as children of straight parents…
And as Burroway points out, this isn’t simply an accusation that homosexuals breed by recruiting. It’s also a way of “proving” (gosh, I did it again) that homosexuality isn’t innate to ones biology, but rather is something caused by how a child is raised. Call it an anti-gay twofer.
Paul Cameron’s method is to cherry pick his data to get the results he wants. His evil genius is that he gets better and better with every new “study” (oh dear…) at doing this while making it seem like he isn’t. How can you question my results when I’ve pulled my data from only the most scientifically rigorous and impartial sources? Have you been reading lately about how mortgage repackagers and banks managed to foist millions upon millions of dollars worth of bad loans onto investors by bundling them with some good ones and hiding the details of everything in a torrent of questionable transactions? Yeah…it’s like that with Cameron. In his seminal pamphlet The Medical Consequences Of What Homosexuals Do, Cameron listed references to what the reader is lead to believe are articles in established peer reviewed journals, that turned out to be nothing more then letters to the editors. Like the junk mortgage repackagers, Cameron is counting on his readers not actually doing their own due diligence.
Schumm is a colleague of Cameron’s. So I go into this article by Jim Burroway expecting to see more of the same. And do I not leave disappointed!
But Schumm’s “meta-analysis” (and Cameron’s before him) doesn’t even have the benefit of being built off of random convenience samples. There were no convenience samples in any of the ten prior works that Schumm used for his meta-analysis. In fact, they weren’t even professional studies. They were popular books!
Dig it. Schumm takes Cameron’s three popular book data sources and adds to that an additional seven, as though piling on more junk data makes the data less junk. In gambling, this is what’s known as Doubling-Down. In academia, it’s called piling it higher and deeper.
That isn’t the end of the shady dealings in this “study” (I did it again didn’t I…) that Burroway uncovers for us. The advantage liars have is that, as Mark Twain said, a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. But in the age of the Internet, truth has some ability to catch up. So while this “study” (whoops…) of Schumm’s can make a few waves for a short while, it’s basic dishonesty will quickly catch up to it. Everywhere that is, except the kook pews. And there is where it will find a home, polished and shining next to Paul Cameron’s initial “study” (oh well…). Because it gives them something new to scream at the heathen. Because it tells them what they want to hear. Because it lets them look themselves in the bathroom mirror every morning and not see someone who just wants to put a knife in their neighbor’s heart so they never have to know how what love and happiness and joy could have been theirs too had they not taken the knife to their own. Because it lets them fool themselves.
