(bolding mine)
WTF!!!
Godammit, no one tells me anything…next thing I suppose you’ll be tryin to tell me PETA is against eating meat. 
No! I had no idea… :eek: 
Robin
Despite your collective sarcasm, Conflict brought up a very valid point.
Is the data PETA cites on their articles denouncing research labs INCORRECT? Not necessarily. But it’s important to know that PETA’s agenda is to shut down all animal research labs before I read their articles. I need to realize that any data they came across that didn’t support their position, or even discredited their position, was tossed out the window and that they are only reporting the data that supports their position.
In other words, I need to know the difference between information and propaganda. What Otto cited was the latter and Conflict respectfully pointed that out.
Cite that PeTA manipulates and/or discards data that don’t support its claims? Reason why PeTA’s allegedly doing this has any bearing on NGLTF’s report? Shred of evidence that NGLTF’s report is in any manner incorrect or the methodology defective?
Didn’t think so.
Dismissing factual information as “propaganda” is fucking bizarre.
Otto, I’m a political scientist. I spent a year in college learning how spin doctors manipulate data to come up with “facts” that support their side.
Let me illustrate using your quote above:
“The analysis looked at website content of nine of the sponsoring organizations with search engines and found that documents containing the word “homosexual” far exceeded those discussing topics such as divorce, health insurance, domestic violence, child abuse or poverty. The web sites of nine of the co-sponsoring organizations have a total of 2,369 documents containing the word “homosexual,” but only 1,423 that contain the word “divorce”, 952 with “health care,” 832 with “poverty,” 207 with “health insurance,” 190 with “domestic violence,” and 85 with “child support.””
Sounds factual enough. But let’s read it again.
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“The analysis looked at the websites of nine of the sponsoring organizations.” Hmm. Red flag. According to a later quote, there are TWENTY NINE sponsoring organizations. Why did they not analyze all 29 sponsoring sites? Did they run out of money? Did they just do a random sampling and if so, why did they decide that 31% was a good sampling? Is it possible that they DID indeed have data for all 29 organizations but only included the 9 websites that best supported their position? That would be important to know, wouldn’t it? Because this COULD mean that 20 of the sponsoring organizations, or 69% of the sponsors, didn’t mention “homosexual” AT ALL in their documents. And that’s more an exoneration than an indictment.
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“The web sites of nine of the co-sponsoring organizations have a total of 2,369 documents containing the word “homosexual,” but only 1,423 that contain the word “divorce”, 952 with “health care,” 832 with “poverty,” 207 with “health insurance,” 190 with “domestic violence,” and 85 with “child support.””
This is just bad science. First of all, it presumes to draw a conclusion based on the appearance of a WORD. Absolutely no context is given. For all we know, one sponsoring site used the word “homosexual” 1500 times in an endorsement of homosexual adoption!
And, once again, there are those missing 20 sponsoring sites! Why weren’t they included? What if the keywords “divorce” and “child support” were mentioned 5 times more often than “homosexual” if you included all 29 sites? The analyst probably wouldn’t report that if that were true, would he? Because that changes the flavor of the conclusion quite significantly, doesn’t it? And his job is to persuade.
I’m not saying that every conclusion is flawed. I’m just saying we should ask questions when we read “facts.” The first question when reading any analysis is this: Who sponsored the research and what is their agenda? Because the agenda will always flavor the result. We just need to figure out how much.
Um, PunditLisa, the NGLTF’s report clearly states, in footnote 4, that only these 9 websites had search functions that allowed them to perform their tallies. They would have no other way of doing the research, short of downloading every document available on each of the other websites. In fact, it’s not even clear that all of the 29 organizations have websites at all (though I’d suspect that they do).
This isn’t “Traditional Marriage Week,” it’s “Marriage Protection Week.” The implication is that is gays get to marry, it’ll ruin it for everybody else. There goes the neighborhood!
It’s not news to anybody that this is just an anti-gay event, but getting some data out there to back that up is a good thing.
… Likewise with the ideqa that marriage has to be protected from homosexuals in the “Defense of Marriage” Act.
So if it’s hard to get the relevant data, it should just be left out?
Well, if your choice is between collecting only the data you can get without spending an inordinate amount of time and money doing so, and not collecting any data, I guess I’ll take the former.
And actually, getting data only from the websites that have a “search” function might very well produce a reasonable random sample. After all, the NGLTF didn’t decide which sites would have a “search” function. When they set out to check up on the sponsors, I assume they didn’t know in advance which ones would be searchable and which ones wouldn’t. And I don’t think there’s any reason to think that anyone would have manipulated the sample (“Well, we don’t want them looking at our documents, so let’s remove our ‘search’ function!”)
I have just completed a search of this thread. Here are my results:
19 instances of the word homosexual
7 instances of the word divorce
4 instances of the phrase health care
6 instances of the word poverty
6 instances of the phrase health insurance
6 instances of the phrase domestic violence
5 instances of the phrase child support
Conclusion: the straight dope message board has an agenda against homosexuals.
There are very few things that could ever make me be ashamed of my country.
This is one of them.
Shrub’s blatantly anti-gay agenda goes against everything this nation stands for. His profound and illimitless hypocrisy are probably the only thing that permits him to sleep peacefully at night.
I can only hope that Robertson’s call to nuke the state department woke up a portion of our population to just how dangerous these fundamentalist zealots are.
I am disgusted.
If and when i get married, I hereby invite all gay people to come to the ceremony and threaten the marriage. We’ll have pizza and beer, and a pinata with the head of George the Younger.
Early Out, really good points. Doesn’t really change the fact that 69% of the sponsoring sites were NOT included in the study.
(See how easy it is to spin data to support a position? Actually 31%, if truly a random sampling, is an excellent number.)
Of course, even though the sampling was good, I think you’d have to concede that the mere counting of keywords is a piss poor method of gleaning good information. Or that the website of a group’s political adversary is a bad place to get unbiased information.
Well, PunditLisa, it would seem to me that the effectiveness of counting words depends on context. If we operate on the premise that one of Marriage Protection Week’s major goals was to “protect the sanctity of marriage”, then the inference that instances of the word homosexual would be at least neutral to homosexuality, if not hostile, is valid.
I don’t think that any groups friendly to homosexual marriage would sponsor an event so obviously targeting gay marriage. Also, there’s the fun coincidence that Marriage Protection Week was announced not long after Canada legalized gay marriage.
Link to the previous article mentioned, on sour dough, with romano cheese:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/10/20031003-12.html
…to begin on the date of the anniversary of Matt Shepard’s death.
Wow, that’s sinister. Can’t believe I missed that one. I don’t think that was on purpose, but it’s just a bit distasteful to begin what’s essentially a “Gays Aren’t Welcome” week on the anniversary of a brutal hate crime against the very same group.
And if this thread was a purported sponsor of “Marriage Protection Week,” that might mean something!
Like it’s such a stretch to suggest that “Marriage Protection Week” is really “Stop Gay Marriage Week.” As if nobody knew that, and it’s a bizarre thing to even imply. I mean, who in their right minds would ever accuse the religious right of being biased against homosexuals?
I’m sure if we go and search these sites ourselves, we’ll find that it’s all been a big misunderstanding. The “Marriage Protection Week” sponsors have been writing and posting tons of documents about their support for gay marriage, gay rights, and so forth. The fact that they devote way more space to talking about homosexuality than to all kinds of threats and problems in marriages has no other meaning, and we’re wrong to assume these people might have any kind of agenda beyond the stated one. Silly us!
…Of course, if you actually just read the report, they quote a number of statements that are absolutely bigoted. Look at page six. The leader of the Traditional Values Coalition makes a comment that I think is almost comically honest: “We are not tolerant of behaviors that destroy individuals, families, and our culture. Individuals may be free to pursue such behaviors as sodomy, but we cannot and will not tolerate these behaviors. … In short, we believe in intolerance to those things that are evil; and we believe that we should discriminate against those behaviors which are dangerous to individuals and to society.”
Or Concerned Women for America, who refers to a legally married Candian couple who tried to enter America (perhaps you remember that story) as “terrorists.” The first document I found on the CWFA site lists, among its reasons that marriage should only be between heterosexuals, that
"*As society rewards homosexual behavior, more young people will be encouraged to experiment and more will be discouraged from overcoming homosexual desires.
*Popular understanding of what marriage is and what it requires will undergo change. Homosexual relationships, which usually lack both permanence and fidelity, are unlikely to change to fit the traditional model of lifelong, faithful marriage. Instead, society’s expectations of marriage will change in response to the homosexual model, thus leading to a further weakening of the institution of marriage. Some homosexual activists have acknowledged that they intend to use marriage mainly as a way to radically shift society’s entire conception of sexual morality."
Call it a flawed methodology if you want, but I’d be more concerned about the methodology if it wasn’t telling us something we already knew.
Have y’all heard about this Howard F. Ahmanson Jr fella and his deep pockets?