In the New York Post, Naomi Schaefer Riley writes about a study used by gay activists to bully those who disagree with their agenda.
She writes:
The headlines were unsparing and unambiguous. “Anti-gay Stigma Shortens Lives,” wrote US News & World Report.
“Anti-Gay Communities Linked to Shorter Lives,” said Reuters. “LGB Individuals Living in Anti-Gay Communities Die Early,” according to Science Daily.
Two years ago, these stories were hard to ignore when Columbia professor Mark Hatzenbuehler found that gays and lesbians who faced prejudice in their communities had a life expectancy 12 years shorter than those who lived in more accepting areas. Just so we’re clear, that’s bigger than the lifespan gap between regular smokers and nonsmokers.
We always knew prejudice was bad, but an Ivy League researcher had found that there were significant effects on the physical health of those experiencing it.
But where, one might wonder, were the headlines when another researcher tried to replicate Hatzenbuehler’s effects and came up empty?
Last month, Mark Regnerus, a professor at UT Austin, published an article in the journal Social Science and Medicine that concluded that “ten different approaches to multiple imputation of missing data yielded none in which the effect of structural stigma on the mortality of sexual minorities was statistically significant.”
In other words, Regnerus tried seven — er, 10 — ways from Sunday to try to get the same results as Hatzenbuehler using the exact same data, but failed. Which means, he concluded, that “the original study’s . . . variable (and hence its key result) is so sensitive to subjective measurement decisions as to be rendered unreliable.”
This isn’t the first time that a study authored by a gay activist has run into evidential problems.
That story was reported in the far-left Politico.
They say:
One of the authors of a recent study that claimed that short conversations with gay people could change minds on same-sex marriage has retracted it.
Columbia University political science professor Donald Green’s retraction this week of a popular article published in the December issue of the academic journal Science follows revelations that his co-author allegedly faked data for the study, “When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support of gay marriage.”
[…]The study received widespread coverage from The New York Times, Vox, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and others when it was released in December.
The equally leftist Washington Post is even more forceful – calling the data a complete fake.
Excerpt:
[…]…[W]hat really happened was that the data were faked by first author LaCour. Co-author Green (my colleague at Columbia) had taken his collaborator’s data on faith; once he found out, he firmly retracted the article.
Ironically, LaCour benefited (in the short term) by his strategy of completely faking it. If he’d done the usual strategy of taking real data and stretching out the interpretation, I and others would’ve been all over him for overinterpreting his results, garden of forking paths, etc. But, by doing the Big Lie, he bypassed all those statistical concerns.
But the real issue is whether the negative health (and mental health) outcomes of homosexuality can be attributed to the lifestyle itself. The gay activists want you to believe that disagreement with their choices causes the negative effects. But the science shows the opposite: even in countries where there is no “stigma” against homosexuality, the unhealthy physical and mental outcomes persist.
Life Site News reports.
Excerpt: (links removed)
While many assume that family rejection is the leading cause of depression among LBGTI individuals, a new study has found that in fact the problem appears to stem predominantly from the higher incidence of relationship problems among homosexuals.
Dr. Delaney Skerrett led a team of researchers from the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention (AISRAP) in studying suicides in Queensland. He found that a leading cause of suicide among “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex” (LGBTI) people is stress from their romantic partners.
“We tend to assume that the psychological distress LGBTI people are often going through is due to family rejection. But it seems that’s not so much the case. The conflict seems to be largely related to relationship problems, with partners,” Dr. Skerrett said.
[…][T]he study, which was published on April 2 in Asia Pacific Psychiatry, found that “LGBT individuals experienced relationship problems more often” than heterosexuals, “with relationship conflict also being more frequent than in non‐LGBT cases.”
That confirms previous studies finding that homosexuals also face higher rates of intimate partner violence than heterosexuals. A 2007 study in the Journal of Urban Health, which is published by the New York Academy of Medicine, found that 32 percent of homosexuals have been abused by at least one partner during their lifetime.
The researchers with AISRAP also found that a higher percentage of homosexuals took their lives [out] of despondency, rather than other psychological illnesses. While one-eighth of all Queensland suicide victims had been diagnosed with a psychosis that impaired their judgment, Skerrett reports “there were no such diagnoses among LGBT individuals.” The conclusion adds to the consensus that depression disproportionately besets active homosexuals.
Maybe the problem is with the person who is making the bad decisions, and not with the people who disagree with the bad decisions?
WINTERY KNIGHT 