The Dobson Gang Gets Called Out

By a Christian sociologist:

The real question is not whether evangelicals can clean up their statistical act. The deeper question is whether American evangelicals can learn to live without the alarmism that is so comfortably familiar to them. Evangelicals, by my observation, thrive on fear of impending catastrophe, accelerating decay, apocalyptic crises that demand immediate action (and maybe money). All of that can be energizing and mobilizing. The problem is, it also often distorts, misrepresents, or falsifies what actually happens to be true about reality. And to sacrifice what is actually true for the sake of immediate attention and action is plain wrong.

I think, given the history of this sort of thing, that he is bending over backward to give the Dobson Gang the benefit of the doubt. These errors have been pointed out again and again, and the spiel hasn't changed -- they still trot out isolated statistics that indicate nothing, specious conclusions by Stanley Kurtz and Paul Cameron based on cherrypicking other people's research, misrepresentations of legitimate research, and complete fabrications.

I think, when you know something's not true and you say it anyway, that's known technically as "lying."