By that last comment, I don’t mean methodology is irrelevant if you agree with the conclusion. I mean that I’m not very worried about the methodology because the conclusion is one on the order of “rain is wet” as far as I’m concerned.
The argument isn’t “the sites are biased against gays because they mention them a lot.” It’s “the fact that they talk about gays more than things that would actually strengthen marriages might indicate that Marriage Protection Week is less about strengthening and protecting existing marriages than it is about preventing certain people from getting married.”
**Marley23 **, if this thread was about many peoples’ intolerance towards gays, I’d agree. Many people are intolerant towards gays.
If this thread was about how many in the Religious Right have an almost vendetta against gay people for some bizzare reason, I’d agree.
Hell, if this thread was about the discovery that the word homosexual is used more often than other words in conjunction with marriage, I’d agree.
That’s not what this thread is about. The title is “‘Marriage Protection Week’ sponsors’ lies exposed” and the rant is about a study which, based upon the two quotes Otto provided, proves absolutely nothing whatsoever. No lies have been exposed. No proof has been ferretted out.
There are a number of people in this thread who are crying “how can you argue with facts?” We’re not. Look at PunditLisa’s post again. If those are the fact, those are the facts. We’re merely asking what those facts mean. On a board designed to fight ignorance, I would sincerely hope that people could differentiate between the facts themselves and the conclusions that can be drawn from them.
What post should I be responding to? You have four of them in this thread.
I guess I’ll assume it to be your first one as you’re responding to PunditLisa and I mentioned her in my entry.
If you were to bet me that the majority of the sponsors of the Marriage Protection Week do not support or condone homosexual marriages, I would not take that bet.
If you were to ask me whether I believed the sponsors’ websites have a neutral or negative view of homosexual marriages, I would say I believed they did.
I don’t mind admitting this because I never made any claim otherwise. If you guys want to rant about how bad these groups are, be my guest. As someone else said in this thread, it would be like proving rain is wet, but hey, more power to you for telling the world about it.
What I object to is the touting of this study as conclusive proof of, well, anything. It’s a really stupid study. When it shows that nine out of the 29 websites have 2,369 documents with the word “homosexual” in it, the ONLY thing that fact proves is that nine out of the 29 websites have 2,369 documents with the word “homosexual” in it. When you choose to interpret that fact, it ceases to become a fact and instead becomes an interpretation.
I’m not suggesting that your interpretation is wrong. I’m saying that your interpretation could be wrong. I’m saying that, in the end, all you really have are the preconceived notions you had coming into this thread: those groups supporting Marriage Protection Week are bad.
No offense to anyone in particular, but I really cannot believe this point needs to be explained, much less by several different posters multiple times in the thread.
I had pretty much the same thoughts. The sample is actually pretty large (hell, polling organizations routinely try to tell us what “the nation” is thinking based on the responses of a few hundred or thousand people, out of a population of tens of millions), but what the results tell us is murky, at best.
I’d be hesitant to go beyond concluding that the results might provide an indication that the sponsors’ real concerns aren’t well-expressed by their organizations’ names or briefly-stated objectives, and that one should examine their published arguments and materials more closely.
Well if she’s making an argument that a source most people are regarding as reliable isn’t so reliable, it seems reasonable to ask what her standards of reliable are, and an example of such would help us understand.
It seems to me (and PunditLisa, please tell me if I’m putting words in your mouth) that she’s just saying the methods used by the NGLTF to gather data don’t really prove a whole lot, one way or the other. And, of course, she’s repeated the scientist’s maxim about examining the source of raw data, much less conclusions based on the data. That’s relevant whether you’re talking about a bias against homosexuality or the process of cold fusion.
What it reminds me of is someone saying that, if they Google for “George Bush liar” and get 200,000 hits, but Google for “George Bush honest” and get only 120,000 hits, that somehow proves that George Bush is a liar, or that more people think that he’s a liar than think he’s honest. The data are accurate, but they don’t really tell you much.
Early, if they were sampling 200,000 random websites I’d agree with you, but I think the criteria is sound because this was an extremely narrow, focused search on pertinent websites. Want to know if a group is focusing on homosexuality in the context of “protecting” the family? I don’t think doing a comparison between instances of the word “homosexality” and instances of other relevant words (“divorce,” “abortion”, “adultery,” etc.) is a very far stretch. Sure, since there were only a few websites it would have made more sense to take things in context (and evidently they do further in the report, as noted by Marley23), and it’s a little kooky to do things that way, but I think it’s a fair question to ask and get the answer to.
Again, even if we can say they did or didn’t do anything that was wholly “scientific,” are the results flawed? Do they paint an innaccurate picture of what’s going on? I say no, they do not.
Esprix, I thought Marley’s post (aside from his initial sarcasm) was very well done. (I’m assuming he’s a stand up guy who doesn’t make up quotes.)
“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.”
Seems pretty damning to me. He went directly to the websites of the sponsoring sites (not to their opponents) and researched what their position was on homosexuality. He gave page numbers and the name of the website for verification. He found actual quotes that are not ambiguous. Yes, they are out of context, but they are CLEARLY anti-gay. I found his post to be a much more convincing indictment against the “Marriage Protection Week” folks’ “hidden” agenda than the study done by the NGLTF.
I mean, it’s not a huge leap to conclude that anti-gay = anti-gay marriage. It IS a huge leap to say that mentioning the word “homosexual” = anti-gay marriage.
PunditLisa, again, read the rest of the report. After doing a cursory search of keywords like “homosexuality,” “divorce,” etc., they did delve deeper into the websites, including quoting them directly, and went on to compare their stated purposes to the “goals” (amorphous as they are) of Marriage Protection Week. They didn’t just say, “Hey, lots of homo talk - guess they hate us!” they did a decent analysis.
In response to this “Marriage Protection Week”, I’d like to make an open-ended offer to everyone at the SDMB:
As an licensed and ordained (though irreverent) minister, I will perform a free marriage ceremony for any Dopers of any combination of sexes, who feel like getting hitched (or just having a ceremony) and are in the Tokyo area. You choose the location.
As I read it what the NGLT are trying to prove with the word-counting thing is not that those organisations have a homophobic agenda, but that they are more concerned with homosexuality than other marriage-related subjects.
The direction of their concern is another issue, the point is that it is their concern, much more so than other factors which you might think are problems for the institution of marriage (I have to say that I don’t quite get why health care\insurance should be expected to be a major issue, but hey).
It seems a fairly reasonable conclusion to me. Whether it’s a big deal or not I don’t know, because as a Brit I’m not being presented with the same images of those organisations.
It seems like people have been arguing over the first part and ignoring the most damning section: the recommended content posted by the sponsoring organizations to promote “Marriage Protection Week”. It is easily verifiable, and ultimately the only important part. Screw the organizations behind the event… what are they promoting as activities to do during this Week? Workshops on how to work through issues in a marriage? How to build healthy relationships? Or a series of anti-gay sermons, petitions, and documents?
A nice Focus on the Family piece about the Gay Agenda[sup]TM[/suo].
First sentence: the President of CWFA"‘Gay’ marriage is not the wave of the future but the end of society as we know it."
As Esprix and others have noted, the point of the study is not that the sites are anti-gay because they use the word “homosexuals” a lot. It’s that these sites, which are sponsoring Marriage Protection Week, are primarily concerned with blocking gays from marrying. That’s not the stated purpose of the event, but it’s clear that’s the real purpose, and this is just their way of backing that up.