You can always tell when the radical social engineers are on thin ground in a debate when they ignore the evidence or seek to dismiss it. When facts, data and evidence are dismissed or brushed aside, instead of actually dealt with, then you know they do not have a leg to stand on.
Indeed, their favourite tactic is to shoot the messenger. They do not like the message so they desperately try to shoot the messenger, thinking that somehow the evidence will just go away if they attack the one bringing it. Dismissing the data and/or the source of the data is always so much easier than actually having to grapple with it.
Over the years I have been involved in plenty of debates, and this comes up time and time again. It has especially been a regular feature in recent debates I have been involved in concerning same-sex marriage. The homosexual activists have such a flimsy case to make, that all they can do is regularly seek to shoot the messenger and dismiss the message.
A debate I just had today on ABC radio is a good case in point. A leading homosexual activist employed this tactic continuously. As an example, I asserted the truth that for four decades now we have overwhelming social science data telling us quite unambiguously that children do best when raised by their own biological mother and father in a married household.
Indeed, we now have over 10,000 international studies confirming this message. So how did my sparring partner respond to these truths? Incredibly, this is all he could manage as a reply: ‘These 10,000 studies Bill mentions are not reliable or reputable and come from Christian universities’.
I just about fell out of my chair when I heard that one. How does one begin to respond to such patent nonsense? As I tried to say on the radio debate this morning, this is an astonishing claim to make. Perhaps 99 per cent of this research comes straight out of the secular social sciences.
These are universities, medical bodies, scientific organisations, sociological bodies, childhood development groups, and so on. And their studies are all reported in reputable peer-reviewed journals. I will list a tiny sampling of this below. To dismiss this entire body of social science research simply because it goes against one’s ideological agenda is irresponsible and foolhardy.
Of course as so often is the case, the so-called moderator for the ABC debate was not at all ‘moderate’, but instead sided with the activist. He chided me, ‘so who are all these groups if there are so many of them?’ I said they are of course not all on the tip of my tongue, but I can easily dig them up.
So as we were debating I opened up a few of my research papers which document all this, and started reading a few of the many secular sources being cited. I will list some of these below as well. I also called the activist’s bluff about “Christian” research somehow being discredited.
I said that the truth is, in the West, the majority of the population would happen to be Christian. Should they all just sit down and shut up because this guy is anti-religious? And are we to dismiss the truthfulness of the statement, ‘2+2=4’ simply if uttered by a religious person?
So what is one to make of this outrageous and disingenuous claim about all the research being a product of “Christian universities”? It seems there are only two possible explanations available to us: Either he was deliberately lying in public, in which case he is clearly discredited from making his case, or he is so woefully ignorant of the facts and he hasn’t a clue, in which case he is also disqualified from speaking about these matters.
But these activists seem to make a habit of stretching the truth, manipulating the evidence, ignoring the facts, and shooting the messenger. So what then is the social science data that we have on his issue? There is so much of it that entire books have been written, seeking just to summarise the massive mountain of data available.
I have also tried to summarise the data in various research papers, and hope to turn it all into a book-length research document sometime soon. A blog site like this is obviously not the place to provide properly referenced and footnoted research papers. But let me just mention a few of the sources on all this.
As to some of the research bodies, universities and academic organisations that have explored these sorts of questions at length, I offer the following (representing just a handful of what could be mentioned):
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
The Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development (UK)
Rutgers University
Canberra University’s National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling
The Harvard Medical School
Monash University’s Centre for Population and Urban Research
Princeton University
The University of Leiden (The Netherlands)
The Australian Institute of Criminology
New Zealand Education Development Foundation
U.S. Bureau of the Census
National Association of Elementary School Principals (US)
The University of South Australia School of Health
University of Canterbury (New Zealand)
The University of Maryland
U.S. Justice Department
Deakin University
The University of California, Los Angeles
Melbourne University
University of Illinois
I can go on for pages with this. And yet this activist would have us believe that all these academic institutions and organisations are “Christian universities”! As to the various journals, periodicals and research magazines where this data is published, here again is a tiny representative sampling:
The Lancet
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders
Psychology Today
Social Work
Child Development
American Journal of Community Psychology
Journal of Marriage and the Family
Science
The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology
Child Abuse and Neglect
Psychological Reports
Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Social Science and Medicine
Journal of the American Medical Association
American Sociological Review
Ethology and Sociobiology
Archives of General Psychiatry
International Journal of Law and the Family
American Journal of Sociology
Social Science Research
Yet this activist would seek to dismiss and discredit all this as somehow being “Christian” research! Why? Because it disagrees with his radical social engineering agenda, pure and simple. His tactic is to just ignore thousands of professional studies from around the world, and pretend they are not there. This is what he passes off as “debate” and “argument”.
As I say, these folk do not have a leg to stand on, so they come out with increasingly irrational, incoherent and ridiculous rebuttals, simply because they are more concerned about pushing radical agendas than dealing with truth, fact and evidence.
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