Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Hijacking Penn State

As if the tragedy at Penn State wasn't bad enough in and of itself, people with unrelated axes to grind are now using it to get attention.

1.  A spokesman for an anti-gay hate group blames gay men and homosexuality for the alleged sexual assault(s) at Penn State.  By repeating the old lie about how pedophilia is linked to homosexuality they managed to suck up a considerable amount of media attention.  Actually, this myth doesn't need to be debunked, as such, because there has never been any real scientific research to support the claim.  Some might disagree with me, but I've come to believe that any kind of social science analysis or theory offered by religious groups is completely worthless.

2.  Some climate change denialists who have been engaged in long term harassment of Penn State researcher Michael Mann have linked the sex scandal to Mann's research.  I'm not even sure I understand the logic here, but it seems to be something like...because Penn State had governance problems as seen in the alleged sexual abuse scandal, therefore the prevailing climate change science must be wrong.  Oh, that hurt my brain.

Because in the fractured minds of these people the victims don't really matter.  They are only props, used to further narrow misguided ideological crusades.


Off topic, but speaking of religion and social science I found this article about Michael Pearl, a Christian dominionist author who advocates beating children as young  as a few months old. The article is written by Frank Schaeffer who knows his way around these circles.  I was reading about this before on a few christian mommy blogs. It's really kind of scary.








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