dlowan wrote:ebrown_p wrote:
You are missing my point Dlowan.
I am saying that hysterical fear of an unpopular group makes it more likely that people believe unfounded charges against them.
That may have been your point, and it is likely a very valid one, but it is not what you said.
Oddly enough, I did understand ebrown to be saying what he says to have been saying. (Grammar?)
You may be missing a piece of the puzzle here that is quite specific to the United States. When conservative politicians here argue against gay marriage etc., they often quote "studies", usually from wingnut think tanks, providing "evidence" that gay couples are more likely to abuse children and do other abhorrent things. The findings would be a valid argument against having the state recognize gay marriages, civil unions and the like, if the studies were sound. But for all I can tell, they are not. Every time I looked at one of them, the statistics turned out to be blighted with amateur errors that a janitor could catch after reading "Statistics for Dummies".
Compare that to what's happening in Texas these days. As soon as the courts started applying some scrutiny to what the state of Texas did in this case, it turned out that at least one of the "underage mothers" was not a mother, nor even pregnant. Numerous other "underage mothers" turned out not to be underage. It seems unclear how much of the government's case will survive, because according to (somewhat conflicting) accounts I saw on TV, Texas accuses the sect of (a) not getting birth certificates for their babies, and (b) being willing and able to fake birth certificates to make the brides seem older than they are. My interpretation -- which may or may not be sound -- is that Texas's assertions about the mothers' ages is grounded primarily in some field officers' guesses, based on how young the women looked to them.
It is a farce that Texas would sack hundreds of children, wholesale, without a shadow of due process, based on this evidence. The farce would have been transparent to everyone who has read "Evidence for Dummies", if there is such a book. The fact that it happened anyway is quite comparable to the "studies" about all those horrible things that gay couples are "more likely than" straight couples to be doing.
Neither I nor ebrown are saying that homosexuality and sex with minors are the same thing. But there is a hysteric reaction to both in the general American public, which is quite similar, quite disconnected to the merits of each case. And in both cases, state executives who should know better are catering to this hysteria.
