Why is it that Right-wingers always seem to use statistics with great conviction when they are in their favour and rubbish the stats used by the opposition in debate?
I take as my case in point a debate this morning on BBC between a Lib Dem MP and some right-wing woman of unknown credentials (sorry, I was making my coffee at the point it started, so I have no idea who or what she was!). They were ‘discussing’ whether IVF should be more widely available to ‘one parent families’ and gay couples.
The right-wing woman decalred that ‘many, many’ areas of research in to family situation had discovered that families without ‘two parents’ (her words) meant disadvantaged kids. In this sweeping statement she had seemingly forgotten that many one parent families would be in a disadvantaged state anyway (financially, and so forth) and, as the MP pointed out, that being ‘abandond’ by a father - or mother - may also assist this disadvantage to a child. Furthermore, she had apparently decided that lesbian or gay couples did not count as ‘two parents’ because there was no traditional ‘male’ or ‘female’ counterpart parent figure.
When the MP quoted a particular research paper she claimed that it was, basically, faked, by using ‘peer assessment’ which was bogus as the peers had been ’selected from adverts in the gay press’. Funny, she only had ‘average’ - a bizarre word at the best of times - and then when faced with actual research countering her opinion she rubbished it even though it was a printed, peer reviewed paper.
Mind you, having read a good few journal articles in my time, maybe I should not be so quick to defend printed work…
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