I did have some time yesterday to go back to Gabriel Rotello's post at HuffPo. I found it absolutely infuriating.
In broad terms, there's a lot of the same sorts of assertions I reject from right-wing anti-gay activists -- a lot of "researchers believe," "studies indicate," and the like, with no direct quotes (and even those can't be trusted, as we've learned from the likes of James Dobson) and no citations. Granted, this is an opinion piece, but by the same token, it's nothing more than opinion, with an unverifiable basis.
It strikes me as nothing more than an attempt to enlist science in the service of ideology, something with which I have no patience whatsoever. I had started a detailed critique of the piece, but there is so much wrong here that I would have been faced with a huge amount of reserach (for which I simply don't have the time) to be oon absolutely firm ground on the science, I'm just going to say that I dispute his conclusions, largely because they seem pre-ordained. Since the whole argument relies on definitions of terms that are not defined and I'm not buying the conflation of sexual orientation with gender identity (which he admits is a political definition), I can't give it much credit as a serious statement.
2 comments:
Rotello has a long track record of distorting research--and cherry-picking not unlike that of Dick Cheney
I've known he was a left-wing hack, but hadn't realized how seriously so. I consider tripe like this a serious corruption of the public discourse.
And thanks for your comments. Nice to see you here.
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