Another Moronic, Bigoted Article from…
Jonathan Rowe on Jan 28th 2006
You guest it, WorldNutDaily. Written by David N. Bass, “a 20-year-old Christian homeschool graduate,” the article reads like a textbook at how certain “pro-family” groups use false, unreliable, or misleading statistics to bash gays under the rubric of “science” and “health.”
I don’t have the interest in picking the entire thing a part (I’m sure other bloggers like Ed Brayton or Exgaywatch will), so I’m simply going to focus on his statistic point number 5, in which he writes:
Life span — A 1997 study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology found that even under “the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban center are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871.” The same study estimated that homosexual behavior reduces the lifespan of males by eight to 20 years. Comparatively, the CDC has found that male and female smokers lose an average of 13.2 to 14.5 years of life, respectively.
Now, these same folks used to cite Paul Cameron’s phony “43″ figure until they got too much egg on their face, and realized they had to look somewhere else. So now they cite the IJE “8-20″ figure. The problem with the IJE study is that while the researchers (unlike Cameron) may have been credible and while the number may have had some kind of original validity, it is no longer valid and citing as if it were is akin to lying.
The IJE figure was derived from one study, never replicated, taken from one Canadian urban enclave (so it probably never had a representative sample of gays, but rather disproportionately drew from sub-culture oriented urban gays). More importantly, the study was done during the worst of the AIDS crisis, just before the newer, groundbreaking meds were introduced. And those meds greatly impacted and reduced mortality rates within the gay community. In 2006, whatever validity the statistic originally may have had, it has not been valid for many years and the authors of the study attest to this. They wrote in 2001:
In our paper, we demonstrated that in a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 21 years less than for all men. If the same pattern of mortality continued, we estimated that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged 20 years would not reach their 65th birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre were experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by men in Canada in the year 1871. In contrast, if we were to repeat this analysis today the life expectancy of gay and bisexual men would be greatly improved. Deaths from HIV infection have declined dramatically in this population since 1996. As we have previously reported there has been a threefold decrease in mortality in Vancouver as well as in other parts of British Columbia.4
Folks like Mr. Bass claim that they don’t hate homosexuals, they are just following their religion, etc. etc. and certainly I’m willing to give their devout religious convictions the benefit of the doubt. However, when they willfully lie or manipulate statistics to bash gays, I have a hard time believing that these people aren’t professional haters.
Filed in The Belfry, The Biosphere, The Boudoir
This morning i was made aware of a battery of implicit attitude survey tests available online. They are linked to a very large pool of research data conducted at four universities across the US. I have only take the first three, and not yet down to the Gender one. They really do open up one’s conscious awareness of the subtleties of how we perceive the world around us. I suspect that young Mr. Bass might be a bit surprised by his capacity to comprehend the world around him; or lack thereof.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/selectatest.jsp
Funny you should mention that, Spyder. I returned literally 15 minutes ago from listening to a symposium on the Implicit Association Test (I’m at a social psychology conference in Palm Springs). All three scientists responsible for promoting the web-based version of the IAT above (Greenwald, Nosek, and Banaji) were present in the audience. All three talks in the symposium cast serious doubt on how the IAT should be interpreted.
For example, consider that Tice and colleagues have found that when black and white faces are replaced with black and white furniture, the magnitude of the “racism” effect actually doubles (!). This “furniturism” effect was positively correlated with “racism” as measured by IAT, suggesting that what appears to be evidence of a racism effect is really evidence of something else. Another talk pointed out that the IAT metric is arbitrary, so we have no idea what constitutes a lot vs. a little racism (or an other -ism) in this metric. The jury is still out on this measure. Fascinating stuff.
2. Risky behaviors – Campaigns to foster so-called “safe sex” among homosexuals have done nothing to reduce risky behavior. A 1997 CDC report found that among homosexuals who had unprotected anal intercourse and multiple sexual partners, 68 percent were entirely unaware of the HIV status of their partners.
It’s interesting that the campaigns have done nothing to reduce risky behavior, yet Mr. Bass provides no statistics to back that up. What is the percentage who engaged in risky behavior? Has it changed over time, ostensibly in response to safe sex campaigns? If so, has it increased, decreased, or stayed the same? Instead, he offers a “damning” statistic among the unidentified percentage who don’t practice safe sex.
Intellectual dishonesty knows no bounds, apparently. Maybe we should conduct a study and misrepresent the findings.
Gay bashing, Christian Homeschooler Style
And we have another entrant in the Pro Home Education Hall of Shame. Our newest entrant is young David Bass,…
the ‘8 to 20%’ range is because they calculated the life-expectancy loss on they relative values of gay men in the general Vancouver population of 9% to 3% respectively. The University of Chicago sexuality survey showed that major metropolitan centers have 9% gay men of the total men (’get thee to the big city’ being the operative mantra of the gay male). Since it is VERY unlikely that Vancouver has a mere 3% gay male population the 20% (actually 21.3%) extreme. Even at the probably low value of 6% the life expectancy loss is 12.7 years…
So if you took all gay men and put them in a blender their life expectancy loss is probably more comparable to or less than the ‘they smoked’ range.
Just another bit of hysteria brought to you by the ‘We Bear False Witness’ crowd.
(actual original paper available here http://www.ccv.org/images/Intl_Journal_of_Epidemiology.pdf )
Thanks BobVB. Didn’t know the entire paper was available.
Yeah, been dealing with these kind of ‘truth-twisters’ for years - They always distort paper findings unless they are Paul Cameron in origin and then they arrive twisted. :)
Have to find the original papers and then tear them a new one with what they actually say.
(Oh and I meant 20 years and 21.3 years not %)
[...] As Jonathan Rowe over at Positive Liberty notes the article reads like a textbook example of how certain “pro-family” groups use false, unreliable, or misleading statistics to bash gays… [...]
‘Homosexuals’ still make up 67% of the U.S. HIV infection, and while they may not be dropping off because of it as early because of medication (in fact thanks to medication deliberate or careless infection has been on the rise among gays, and HIV respectively), it would be silly to think HIV has no effect on their health, and combine that with all the other diseases they get, health problems, etc.