Earlier this year, Bush cautiously entered the fray on the issue of adoption by same-sex couples, saying, “Studies have shown that the ideal is where a child is raised in a married family with a man and a woman.” This struck a number of people as very odd for a number of reasons.
First, Bush doesn’t read studies. Second, his staff couldn’t point to any studies to back up his claim. Third, if Bush really cared about objective research on the issue, he’d know that the American Academy of Pediatrics, the leading experts in this field, has found no meaningful difference in the impact on children between same-sex couples and heterosexual couples.
Putting reality aside, however, the right doesn’t need objective, reliable research to bolster their misguided opinions. As the Boston Globe reported in a fascinating article over the weekend, conservatives have their own outlets to lend credence to the ideas they already accept as fact anyway.
Bush’s statement was celebrated at a tiny think tank called the Family Research Institute, where the founder, Dr. Paul Cameron, believes Bush was referring to studies he has published in academic journals that are critical of gays and lesbians as parents. Cameron has published numerous studies with titles such as ”Gay Foster Parents More Apt to Molest” — a conclusion disputed by many other researchers.
The president’s statement was also welcomed at a small organization with an august-sounding name, the American College of Pediatricians. The college, which has a small membership, says on its website that it would be ”dangerously irresponsible” to allow same-sex couples to adopt children. The college was formed just three years ago, after the 75-year-old American Academy of Pediatrics issued its paper.
That pediatric study asserted a ”considerable body of professional evidence” that there is no difference between children of same-sex and heterosexual parents.
The Family Research Institute and the American College of Pediatrics are part of a rapidly growing trend in which small think tanks, researchers, and publicists who are open about their personal beliefs are providing what they portray as medical information on some of the most controversial issues of the day.
It’s quite a scheme these guys have cooked up.
Right-wing activists have created reasonable-sounding mini-think tanks with impressive sounding names. They conduct “studies” and write “reports” that are then picked up by the conservative movement and incorporated into talking points on issues such as gay rights, abortion, birth control, abstinence education, etc.
Where is this “scholarship” published? It’s a funny story, actually.
Cameron’s adoption study, and at least 10 more of his works, appeared in Psychological Reports, a small journal based in Montana, which says its studies are peer-reviewed, although editor Doug Ammons said: ”No reviewer has a veto right.” The journal, which typically charges $27.50 per page to print an article, is portrayed by Ammons as a ”scientific manifestation of free speech.”
In real journals, an article is rejected if a peer reviewer raises objects to methodology. Indeed, real journals have actual professionals doing the peer reviewing. And perhaps most importantly, many real journals do not charge for publication.
We’ve entered a fascinating time in which there’s a bizarro world for America’s right wing that resembles reality, but doesn’t include substance, evidence, or concern for accuracy. We now have real science and right-wing science, real scholarship and right-wing scholarship, real academic journals and right-wing journals, real research and right-wing research.
Almost a year ago, Run Suskind published his seminal NYT article that gave birth to the phrase “reality-based community.” In the article, in fact in the same paragraph, a senior advisor to the president said:
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The more I watch today’s conservatives, the more that quote takes on added meaning.