You can’t keep a good myth down
By: Ann Coulter / 10/1/2014 05:23 PM
We’re interrupting our Republican Senate 2014 Marathon this week for a brief note on the media. (But contribute to Scott Brown immediately, and please don’t vote for the third-party, tea party candidate in Louisiana, right-wingers! Remember: Obamacare cannot be repealed without 66 votes in the Senate.)
I’ve barely been paying attention to the news, except to check Senate polls every night, because, as some of you may have noticed, I’ve been in the bat-cave under Swiss Guard protection, writing my next book. But based on only about an hour of media consumption a week, I’ve recently noticed mainstream “news” outlets telling huge whoppers, long ago disproved and forgotten.
First, this past Sunday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof repeated the canard about guns being dangerous to their owners. A “study in the journal Injury Prevention,” he wrote, “found that the purchase of a handgun was associated with 2.4 times the risk of being murdered and 6.8 times the risk of suicide.”
No kidding. As a lifelong subscriber to Injury Prevention, I could have told Kristof that people who live in crime-ridden neighborhoods or who have friends or professions that increase their likelihood of being killed — or who plan to commit suicide — are astronomically more likely to buy handguns than people whose lifestyles do not put them at such risks.
My own study, soon to be published in Injury Prevention — and which I expect will similarly amaze Nick Kristof! — establishes that people in hospitals are twice as likely to die within five years as people not in hospitals. To paraphrase Kristof: People think hospitals can save their lives. Nonsense!
And don’t even get me started on my study on people in ambulances.
Second, once the MSM figured out how to blame a white guy for a black athlete punching his fiancee, and the only news was about Ray Rice and — the true villain — NFL Commissioner Roger Goddell, MSNBC’s Toure repeated the old chestnut about emergency room admissions for domestic violence spiking on Super Bowl Sundays.
As I have noted at least a half-dozen times, this was a nonsense statistic invented by feminists and then cited as fact by a slew of major news outlets, culminating in a public service announcement during the 1993 Super Bowl that reminded viewers: “Domestic violence is a crime!” Finally, Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle, realizing that he was, in fact, a reporter, asked, Where’d you get that figure?
He called all the experts who had been cited as sources for the statistic. All of them told him it wasn’t true.
“That’s not what we found at all,” said Janet Katz, professor of sociology and criminal justice and an author of one oft-cited study allegedly establishing the Super Bowl-wife-beating nexus. She said football games bore no relationship to emergency room admissions for domestic violence.
A week after Toure recycled this hoax from the ’90s, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski said on “Morning Joe”: “Super Bowl Sunday has the highest rate of domestic violence.”
So at least they correct their mistakes quickly over there.
Finally, the Washington Post‘s Carol Leonnig is doggedly pushing the hoax about Obama getting more threats than any previous president. (They don’t make ‘em like Ken Ringle anymore.)
Even after being corrected by an MSNBC host, Frances Rivera, last Sunday, Leonnig plowed ahead with her thoroughly disproved thesis, based on what someone had told her — it was at either a DNC fundraiser or a Volvo dealership. And yes, Leonnig really was corrected by an MSNBC host for pushing an America-is-racist fabrication, which is like having Joseph Goebbels say to you, “Hey, lighten up on the Jews, would you?”
Leonnig’s source may be New York Times archives. Or it could be the archives from any mainstream media outlet in America, where the “more threats” rumor originated and was pumped out a mile a minute to an unsuspecting public for two solid years following Obama’s announcement that he was running for president.
But then, in 2009, the head of the Secret Service finally told a congressional panel that it was complete bunk.
In the middle of being browbeaten by Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton about the huge, unprecedented danger facing President Obama, then-Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan dropped the service’s usual practice of refusing to comment on threats against the president to say, under oath: “The threats right now, and the inappropriate interest that we are seeing, is the same level as it has been for the previous two presidents.”
Leonnig even recycled the old folk tale about Obama’s receiving Secret Service protection “much earlier than other candidates.”
How many times do we have to disprove this gibberish? The reason Obama’s Secret Service protection started earlier than usual is that campaigns start earlier than usual. Obama declared he was running for president on Feb. 10, 2007. Three months later, he got Secret Service protection.
Reagan announced he was running for president on Nov. 13, 1979. You know when he got Secret Service protection? That same day. And you want to know why? For the exact same reason as Obama: He was a major-party candidate and he asked for it.
Most hilariously, Leonnig actually broke down the (non-existent) excessive threats to Obama, telling MSNBC viewers that the increased threats used to come from Americans angry because Obama is black, but now they’re mostly from people angry about Obamacare.
(I wonder if the non-existent disproportionate threats go up on Super Bowl Sunday!)
In fact, the historical record shows that, apart from the occasional random nut, the people most likely to assassinate a president are leftists, socialists, communists, Palestinian activists, crazed environmentalists and communitarians, who have been responsible for every politically motivated presidential assassination attempt since at least 1900. (See “Mugged,” Chapter 14.)
Reagan took an assassin’s bullet to the chest within two months of becoming president. Jerry Ford was shot at twice within 13 months of assuming the presidency. But we still have to hear about angry right-wingers terrorizing President Obama.
The theme of all these liberal fantasies is that the greatest threat to women, minorities and liberals are right-wing white men with guns — especially on a Super Bowl Sunday. (Referees are beheaded at soccer games in Brazil, but liberals are terrified of America’s national sport.)
White men are even threats to themselves, should they be foolish enough to purchase a gun.
Reagan’s and Ford’s attempted assassins, by the way, consisted of two liberal women and a deranged white man — who was acquitted by a black jury. Despite Kristof’s warning about guns, all three of them are still alive. And out of prison.
Oh — and the two nuts who recently breached Obama’s White House security? They’re named Ortega and Gonzales.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Authored by 
What Did You Say? 
A major new report, published today in the journal The New Atlantis, challenges the leading narratives that the media has pushed regarding sexual orientation and gender identity.
Co-authored by two of the nation’s leading scholars on mental health and sexuality, the 143-page report discusses over 200 peer-reviewed studies in the biological, psychological, and social sciences, painstakingly documenting what scientific research shows and does not show about sexuality and gender.
The major takeaway, as the editor of the journal explains, is that “some of the most frequently heard claims about sexuality and gender are not supported by scientific evidence.”
Here are four of the report’s most important conclusions:
The report, “Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences,” is co-authored by Dr. Lawrence Mayer and Dr. Paul McHugh. Mayer is a scholar-in-residence in the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and a professor of statistics and biostatistics at Arizona State University.
McHugh, whom the editor of The New Atlantis describes as “arguably the most important American psychiatrist of the last half-century,” is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and was for 25 years the psychiatrist-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. It was during his tenure as psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins that he put an end to sex reassignment surgery there, after a study launched at Hopkins revealed that it didn’t have the benefits for which doctors and patients had long hoped.
Implications for Policy
The report focuses exclusively on what scientific research shows and does not show. But this science can have implications for public policy.
Take, for example, our nation’s recent debates over transgender policies in schools. One of the consistent themes of the report is that science does not support the claim that “gender identity” is a fixed property independent of biological sex, but rather that a combination of biological, environmental, and experiential factors likely shape how individuals experience and express themselves when it comes to sex and gender.
The report also discusses the reality of neuroplasticity: that all of our brains can and do change throughout our lives (especially, but not only, in childhood) in response to our behavior and experiences. These changes in the brain can, in turn, influence future behavior.
This provides more reason for concern over the Obama administration’s recent transgender school policies. Beyond the privacy and safety concerns, there is thus also the potential that such policies will result in prolonged identification as transgender for students who otherwise would have naturally grown out of it.
The report reviews rigorous research showing that “only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood.” Policymakers should be concerned with how misguided school policies might encourage students to identify as girls when they are boys, and vice versa, and might result in prolonged difficulties. As the report notes, “There is no evidence that all children who express gender-atypical thoughts or behavior should be encouraged to become transgender.” (If the image below does not play, please proceed to https://youtu.be/O9RE_VD1nf8)
Beyond school policies, the report raises concerns about proposed medical intervention in children. Mayer and McHugh write: “We are disturbed and alarmed by the severity and irreversibility of some interventions being publicly discussed and employed for children.”
They continue: “We are concerned by the increasing tendency toward encouraging children with gender identity issues to transition to their preferred gender through medical and then surgical procedures.” But as they note, “There is little scientific evidence for the therapeutic value of interventions that delay puberty or modify the secondary sex characteristics of adolescents.”
Findings on Transgender Issues
The same goes for social or surgical gender transitions in general. Mayer and McHugh note that the “scientific evidence summarized suggests we take a skeptical view toward the claim that sex reassignment procedures provide the hoped for benefits or resolve the underlying issues that contribute to elevated mental health risks among the transgender population.” Even after sex reassignment surgery, patients with gender dysphoria still experience poor outcomes:
Mayer and McHugh urge researchers and physicians to work to better “understand whatever factors may contribute to the high rates of suicide and other psychological and behavioral health problems among the transgender population, and to think more clearly about the treatment options that are available.” They continue:
Policymakers should take these findings very seriously. For example, the Obama administration recently finalized a new Department of Health and Human Services mandate that requires all health insurance plans under Obamacare to cover sex reassignment treatments and all relevant physicians to perform them. The regulations will force many physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers to participate in sex reassignment surgeries and treatments, even if doing so violates their moral and religious beliefs or their best medical judgment.
Rather than respect the diversity of opinions on sensitive and controversial health care issues, the regulations endorse and enforce one highly contested and scientifically unsupported view. As Mayer and McHugh urge, more research is needed, and physicians need to be free to practice the best medicine.
Stigma, Prejudice Don’t Explain Tragic Outcomes
The report also highlights that people who identify as LGBT face higher risks of adverse physical and mental health outcomes, such as “depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and most alarmingly, suicide.” The report summarizes some of those findings:
What accounts for these tragic outcomes? Mayer and McHugh investigate the leading theory—the “social stress model”—which proposes that “stressors like stigma and prejudice account for much of the additional suffering observed in these subpopulations.”
But they argue that the evidence suggests that this theory “does not seem to offer a complete explanation for the disparities in the outcomes.” It appears that social stigma and stress alone cannot account for the poor physical and mental health outcomes that LGBT-identified people face.
As a result, they conclude that “More research is needed to uncover the causes of the increased rates of mental health problems in the LGBT subpopulations.” And they call on all of us work to “alleviate suffering and promote human health and flourishing.”
Findings Contradict Claims in Supreme Court’s Gay Marriage Ruling
Finally, the report notes that scientific evidence does not support the claim that people are “born that way” with respect to sexual orientation. The narrative pushed by Lady Gaga and others is not supported by the science. A combination of biological, environmental, and experiential factors likely account for an individual’s sexual attractions, desires, and identity, and “there are no compelling causal biological explanations for human sexual orientation.”
Furthermore, the scientific research shows that sexual orientation is more fluid than the media suggests. The report notes that “Longitudinal studies of adolescents suggest that sexual orientation may be quite fluid over the life course for some people, with one study estimating that as many as 80 percent of male adolescents who report same-sex attractions no longer do so as adults.”
These findings—that scientific research does not support the claim that sexual orientation is innate and immutable—directly contradict claims made by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in last year’s Obergefell ruling. Kennedy wrote, “their immutable nature dictates that same-sex marriage is their only real path to this profound commitment” and “in more recent years have psychiatrists and others recognized that sexual orientation is both a normal expression of human sexuality and immutable.”
But the science does not show this.
While the marriage debate was about the nature of what marriage is, incorrect scientific claims about sexual orientation were consistently used in the campaign to redefine marriage.
In the end, Mayer and McHugh observe that much about sexuality and gender remains unknown. They call for honest, rigorous, and dispassionate research to help better inform public discourse and, more importantly, sound medical practice.
As this research continues, it’s important that public policy not declare scientific debates over, or rush to legally enforce and impose contested scientific theories. As Mayer and McHugh note, “Everyone—scientists and physicians, parents and teachers, lawmakers and activists—deserves access to accurate information about sexual orientation and gender identity.”
We all must work to foster a culture where such information can be rigorously pursued and everyone—whatever their convictions, and whatever their personal situation—is treated with the civility, respect, and generosity that each of us deserves.