Today’s topic: homosexuality. Specifically, everyone’s favorite bullshit parenting study, Mark Regnerus’s incredibly bogus piece. A relative cited it on facebook as “the best study available on gay parenting”. Right, and it’s automatically better than the dozens of others done by other psychologists… why? No answer on that. I then proceeded to show him, among other things:
…His response? “Pure BS. You’re in denial.” And then he went into a long rant on how the APA was hijacked by homosexuals in the 70s. I shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s still a pain in the ass when someone is that stupid.
So here’s to you, unnamed uncle. You are a stupid, bigoted cunt. That alone is bad enough, but when you are presented with pretty much the most slam-dunk evidence that a paper is flawed that you can possibly get, you don’t respond by claiming that the person with all the evidence is in denial. As Yahtzee put it so nicely: This post is dedicated to you, because you’re a cunt. What are you? You’re a cunt, yes you are. You live in a cunty cottage and you drive a cunty car.
It is actually a very common tactic by followers of pseudoscience and deniers, since the most important science organizations are claiming that “A” is the case, the minority who claim it is “X” will tell others that the organizations claiming “A” were taken over by people who are conspiring against the way of life of the ones supporting the minority position.
You have to admit the man’s got some impressive evidence. His opening line alone - “In 1970, the APA held their convention in San Francisco, probably an ill-advised choice of location” - was enough to convince me. After all, everyone knows you can catch the gay by breathing the same air a homosexual has breathed.
See, here’s the thing. You have it backwards. Your uncle didn’t have the opinion he had because of the study. Your uncle had the opinion, and then found a study that supported the opinion.
So arguing the facts with him, or global warming denialists, or people who don’t believe in evolution, or that the Holocaust happened or whatever is a pointless endeavor. You can’t use facts to argue somebody out of a position they didn’t use facts to get into.
There is a clear correlation between the US’s acceptance of homosexuality and the impacts of global climate change. I’m pretty sure this is proof that God dislikes the gays.
That would be quite an expensive and challenging enterprise. To “take over” an academic, scientific or professional discipline would require 1) finding hundreds of ideologically loyal young recruits who are also both talented and interested in the field in question, and 2) putting them all through the relevant grad schools, and 3) pushing their careers along after that, 4) all without the whole thing coming out at some point.
