Draw Breath

There's more from Michael O'Driscoll in today's Irish Times letter's page. He has come back with the same irrelevant claims he made last time and the usual bizarre notion that a move from discrimination to equality is a zero-zum game. Still, fair dues to him for answering the claim that he hadn't provided evidence on his claims that homosexuality leads to greater levels of domestic violence and the like. He does answer it in this letter, though not in his own words. His research, it seems is based on a series of studies, misquoted with abandon all over the right-wing internet (including in this wonderful brief (pdf) from United Families International).

Of course I wouldn't for the life of me suggest that O'Driscoll is himself doing the misquoting. For instance, he says that

The homosexual authors of Men Who Beat The Men Who Love Them also claimed that domestic violence affected half of all gay couples.

Strange: I've looked and the book says absolutely nothing of the sort. It does engage in some surmising about domestic violence rates but not actual measurement. How can O'Driscoll be so confused? Maybe he hit on this site (a Canadian pro-life outfit by the looks of things) which lifts, with permission, a 2004 article that states that

According to the homosexual authors of Men Who Beat The Men Who Love Them, domestic violence affects half of all gay couples.

Interesting. Is this the first ever cogging of a misquote of a misrepresentation in the Irish Times? I don't know.

O'Driscoll goes on to say that

The leading US gay magazine The Advocate reported that 75 per cent of its readers admitted engaging in violent sex, with a further 20 per cent engaging in sadistic sex.

LifeSite has:

According to the leading US gay magazine The Advocate, 75% of its readers admit engaging in violent sex, 20% in sadistic sex and 55% are using painful objects.

Presumably the painful objects stuff wasn't deemed suitable for the Irish Times, nor was the idea that sex can be consensual and violent, weird etc. Sadly I can't find the study for our edification. Nor do I know who reads The Advocate and, as a result, who is available to respond to surveys of its readers.

Earlier on in the paragraph, LifeSite had made the very interesting point that:

A study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence examined conflict and violence in lesbian relationships. The researchers found that 90% of the lesbians surveyed had been recipients of one or more acts of verbal aggression from their intimate partners during the year prior to this study, with 31% reporting one or more incidents of physical abuse.

O'Driscoll says:

A study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence examining conflict in lesbian relationships discovered that a third of those surveyed had experienced one or more incidents of physical abuse 

All credit for making the work more concise. Sadly, the QUB server is down so I can't find the Journal of Interpersonal Violence article to confirm what it says but I certainly get a sense that veracity isn't the primary motivation here.

Update: the QUB site is still down (and I suspect that we don't subscribe to the journal) but here's an extended abstract. Strictly speaking the third-of-those-surveyed number is true, but those surveyed were 284 respondents at a women's music festival in 1989, so we're not talking hugely representative at the get-go. And there's an in-built bias here anyway: who do you think is more inclined to respond to questionnaires on domestic violence? People with experience of domestic violence perhaps? Moreover, the markers for physical violence are very wide: shoving, grabbing, basically any physical touch borne from aggression. I would hazard a guess that the numbers are the same for heterosexual relationships. Tragically high in both cases, but it's unlikely that gay relationships are special on this front (all real evidence suggests that violence rates are more or less the same).(/Update)

By the way, O'Driscoll isn't simply lifting from this or some related article. He also says that

studies such as 'Violence Between Intimates,' published by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics in November 1994, indicate that violence is two to three times more common among homosexual partners than among married couples.

The "violence among homosexual partners..." phrase is also used, with reference to page 2 of Violence Between Intimates (scroll down for the pdf) on this page on the American College of Pediatricians website. Don't be fazed by the high-falutin name: the ACP is a conservative advocacy group, not a professional association. Anyway, I can't for the life of me find any reference to homosexual violence in Violence Between Intimates at all. So this isn't even a misrepresentation that I can see - it's pure fiction.

Still, apart from his moral energy not extending to his passing the misleading claims of others in the conservative echo chamber as his own and apart from the fact that it's hard to believe he's primarily motivated by concern for the well-being of homosexuals, I regard O'Driscoll's letter as a good news story. He is obviously inadvertantly bullshitting us (since I assume he has sought out sites where it will be easy for him to believe that what they tell him is true) but he is also acknowledging that decisions about public policy ought to be made on the basis of evidence. What a pity that Irish civic society is just as amenable to clever-sounding misinformation as anywhere else