Manipulating Opinions in the Name of Science

Leftists celebrate and Conservatives warn against the increase in politically correct activism, especially when it infringes on personal freedoms. We read how "surveys show", but how accurate are they, really? Questions are often loaded, and the questions that are asked (as well as the people selected to participate in surveys) are frequently neglected during reporting. We should know that there are sidewinders who will selectively cite and manipulate data, but it seems that many people simply take "reporting" as unbiased and factual. Not hardly!

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There are surveys and research results for many purposes, including "evidence" for evolution that conveniently leaves out pertinent data, and more. Ask your friends how many people they think are of the homosexual persuasion. Some think it's about half of the population, when the actual figure in the United States is closer to five percent or less! The inflated number perception is mainly due to activism and media presentation.

Scientists are supposed to do science stuff. Unfortunately, there are people in science professions who use their work as means of not only activism, but to manipulate public opinion. They also capitalize on the way many people think: with their emotions, and without logic.

Politically correct persuasion is at your doorstep, masquerading as a scientific survey.

Last year, Science Magazine was shamed into retracting a paper written by a LGBT activist. The activist, Michael Lacour, a doctoral candidate at UCLA, leveraged the name recognition of Donald Green, a Columbia University political scientist, as co-author. When he heard about “irregularities” in Lacour’s survey data, Green later admitted he had not adequately supervised Lacour’s work (Nature). The retraction not only put egg on the face of the AAAS (publisher of Science), but also on all the politically-correct reporters who had celebrated Lacour’s “findings.”

Lacour had hired some of his gay friends to canvass houses in a conservative area, seeing if they could persuade them to change their views about gay marriage (12/17/14). As we pointed out at the time, it wasn’t a bad paper simply because of bad record-keeping, but because the whole design of the survey was overtly biased. Lacour was on a campaign to change public attitudes about gay marriage. A neutral scientific paper should have studied the effect of surveys on both views—i.e., seeing if supporters of gay marriage could be persuaded to change their views in favor of traditional marriage. Additionally, survey takers were all hired from Lacour’s gay activist group. A scientific survey should have sought to employ helpers from both positions, or better yet, used survey takers without a strong position. Everything else about the “experiment” was flawed, too, including the lack of adequate control, the lack of objectivity. It was an exercise in advocacy, pure and simple. Science was caught with its pants down, and repented—temporarily. Nature said that the incident created “a stigma that has haunted political science”; it was a “painful episode” one would think would shame researchers from doing it again.

Now, however, the Lacour defenders are back with a vengeance, touting new “survey” methods that allegedly prove that people can be “persuaded” to moderate their positions on LGBT “rights.” Once again, the survey takers are tainted with advocacy; success is being measured by the ability to change people’s attitudes toward leftist positions, not equally toward either position on this highly controversial subject facing society. You see it right in Nature’s coverage: “Door-to-door canvassing reduces transphobia.” No conservative or supporter of traditional gender roles would use that word. Supporters of traditional sex roles are not “phobic” toward LGBT people; in many cases, they love them as individuals and support their rights just as they would for any citizen. They have strongly-held convictions, however, about sex and gender, particularly when it comes to whether men should be allowed to use women’s bathrooms if they declare themselves to feel feminine (whether sincerely or not); must the privacy of girls be sacrificed to the whims of political correctness?

To read the rest and be forewarned, click on "Scientific Brainwashing Is Back".