Lying to stop Same Sex Marriage

So it so happened that Ten News was on the T.V. at our place tonight (this is in Melbourne, Australia). Nothing remarkable until a story about 150 doctors issuing a warning that same-sex marriage poses “health risks”. The group behind this is called Doctors For The Family, which calls itself a “medical organisation to highlight the health aspects of marriage”. Ten just described them as “a conservative medical group”, a term that to me seems nonsensical. But I immediately thought “I bet it’s a Christian fundamentalist front”.

The Doctors For The Family web site is remarkably coy about who is behind it. But the group is run by the chap in the Ten story, who lists himself as the founder on his LinkedIn profile: Dr Lachlan Dunjey. From this and some other pages we learn some facts about Dr Dunjey that seem relevant:

• “He was the Senate candidate for the Christian Democratic Party at the 2004 federal election”
• Before scaring, sorry, educating us about the health risks of same-sex marriage he was campaigning for “freedom of conscience in health care”, a euphemism for permitting Christian medical professionals to refuse to perform abortions even when medically indicated.
• He says “we need to change people’s hearts and minds by bringing them into the Kingdom of God”
• He’s really upset about the depraved state of contemporary society, including such debauchery as alcohol being served at Christian wedding receptions.

Now, before I get accused of an ad hominem fallacy, it must be noted that none of this shows that Dr Dunjey’s claims are false. However, I do believe it gives us good reason to be very skeptical of his group’s claims, especially as to whether the term “medical” is merited.

The so-called medical evidence presented by Doctors For The Family seems very dodgy. Credible medical organisations generally don’t make claims about whether same-sex relationships are better or worse for children than hetero ones, simply because there’s no definitive evidence either way. Most studies seem to back the (to me, rather common sense) notion that when considering all the factors that effect child development, the sexual orientation of the parents doesn’t really register as significant.

Doctors For The Family is essentially another deceitful pseudo-scientific attempt to make fringe religious views appear scientific. Just like the Intelligent Design crowd, they start with a pre-determined conclusion and scour the globe looking for any scrap of data that supports that conclusion. In other words, they follow the scientific method, only exactly backwards. Just because this group is supported by some people with “Doctor” on their business cards doesn’t mean it deserves to be called “medical”.

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Creationism and climate change denial

I’ve noticed this more and more: people lumping “climate change denial” and “evolution denial” (creationism) into the same category. The argument is that both of these are the result of the same religious conservative “anti-science” movement. In a very narrow sense, this is true; creationists generally do not seem to believe in anthropogenic global warming (AGW), for the same bogus reasons they don’t believe in evolution. But the reverse is not true: many (most I would say) AGW skeptics are not creationists. Lumping these two things together allows the environmentalists to dismiss any criticism of the established climate change narrative as the ravings of anti-scientific religious nuts. But there are some very significant scientific and economic arguments around climate change that are most definitely not in the same class as creationist arguments. Time for some de-lumping.

One major difference between climate change and evolution is how the evidence is understood and presented. It is now a familiar experience to see someone on TV telling us we need to immediately reduce emissions to avoid climatic catastrophe. In the rare event that such a person is asked to provide evidence of a human cause, the most common answer I’ve observed is along the lines of “ice caps and glaciers are melting, and the scientific consensus is that human CO₂ emissions are to blame.” Now, when was the last time you heard someone asked for evidence supporting evolution to respond with “life forms adapt to their environment and the scientific consensus is that Darwinian evolution is the cause.” This is not a small point. The fact that “consensus” is so regularly rolled out to support AGW, but is never used to support evolution shows that the levels of scientific understanding and debate are completely different.

No one talks about the “scientific consensus” for evolution because there’s no need to: evolution has a mountain of cold hard facts on its side, all confirmed by independent observation countless times. Climate research is very tough by comparison: our observational capabilities generally aren’t good enough to falsify competing theories. Instead, we have the IPCC saying that since we can’t establish the facts by direct observation, we’ll establish them by consensus. You can’t take the IPCC publications, repeat the experiments and confirm their results, because at the end of the day it’s just opinion.

My point here is not to show that the IPCC is wrong, but simply to show that the scientific process that it follows is fundamentally and necessarily different to that of evolutionary biology, or any other hard science for that matter. Questioning the consensus-derived “facts” of climate research is not the same thing as questioning the empirically verified facts of evolution.

Another difference I think is worth pointing out is how politics is so commonly mixed with climate science, in contrast to evolution science. Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar: well credentialed scientist goes on TV and says “my research shows that climate change is likely to significantly damage coral reefs…” and barely pausing for breath continues “so it’s clear we must act to cut CO₂ emissions.” This casual connection of minor scientific research to sweeping reorganization of the world’s energy production is now so common place that people don’t find it remarkable. And if you accept the climate change problem but doubt the solution you’ll likely still receive the “denier” pejorative. Evolutionary biology simply isn’t political in this way.

Skepticism regarding climate change is not comparable to the denial of the established facts of evolution. Climate research has a long, long way to go before it achieves the level of confidence we have in evolution. It is very wrong to think that all opposition to the climate change narrative is driven by Biblical literalism.

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