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? read the rest of this post »

I had a mentor who said to me once that the fact that straw men exist is no reason to waste time on them. Wise words indeed when it comes to academic writing. With blogging on the other hand, it can be fun. So it goes with this profoundly daft letter to today's Irish Times. One Michael O'Driscoll of Cork manages to be wrong on all the facts and illogical by his own mistaken premises. What an achievement. At the risk of being accused of liberal intolerance (still, to the best of my knowledge, liberals only need to be happy to suffer fools, not to indulge them) I think this merits some sort of response. read the rest of this post »