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There’s a discussion going on at Pandagon about Janet Crouse’s reaction to the Harvard School of Public Health’s article on an analysis of viginity pledges.

In a nutshell, the article says that teens, when asked, will lie about their sexual experience or about if they had or had not ever taken a virginity pledge. The only place it mentions Christianity is when is says that teens who had abandonded born-again Christian beliefs were about as likely as those who had sexual intercourse to deny that they had ever taken a pledge. It concludes that, when evaluating the effectiveness of virginty pledges, researchers can not take the kids at their word and that another, more objective method of determining the effectivness of pledges needs to be employed in future studies.

Shocking, yes? That teenagers will lie about their sexual activity-unheard of! Clearly this is a study that reaches unheard of levels of controversy!

Janet, for example, goes into red-alert battle mode:

The Harvard report is wrong. I know numerous couples who have saved sex for their wedding night. Research is clear –– that it is the best recipe for marital happiness and well-being. Abstinence-until-marriage is a beautiful promise that should be encouraged and promoted.

Well that’s just peachy, but it’s not what the report said. There were no results about abstinence itself in that report. Nothing about STDs, nothing about comprehensive sex education. All it said was that, if you want to know how well a virginity pledge works, you can’t just take a survey of the kids who took it, because the ones that didn’t meet your Godly goal for whatever reason will lie about it, and they won’t all lie the same way.

Here are the two most important paragraphs in the article (we science types call them the conclusion):

The author concludes that adolescents’ self-reported history of sexual intercourse is an unreliable measure for studies of the effectiveness of virginity pledges. Moreover, the research suggests that teens’ pervasive recanting of sex makes general research on teen sexuality of particular difficulty. Most worrisome, said Rosenbaum, is that teens who do not acknowledge their sexually active past may perceive their new history as correct and will underestimate the sexually transmitted disease (STD) risk stemming from their prepledge sexual behavior. On average the retractors had more than two sexual partners.

“It’s very tempting to craft stories about what may have been going on in these adolescents’ minds as they changed their recollections,” said Rosenbaum, “but survey data doesn’t give us enough information to substantiate the stories. We can say that evaluating the effectiveness of virginity pledge programs is more difficult and complex than we may have thought. A better and more reliable measure than adolescents’ self-reported sexual history might be the straightforward results of medical STD tests.”

Amanda and the endless tolled thread at Pandagon are a must read if you want to talk about the actual study. I’m more interested in a throw-away comment by Eric of the Perfect Aspirations troll:

First off, that’s not science, that is a study from Harvard University, which is definitely agenda driven. Where the only people it is OK to criticize are christians.

That’s not science? That’s not science? And who, sir, the fuck are you?

Kyso,
I am not a scientist, I just think it’s an interesting topic for a Harvard study. In my humble opinion, academia is largely slanted toward a viewpoint that casts christians and christianity in a bad light. You may or may not agree, but that is my opinion.

You’re not a scientist, but you get to say what is and isn’t science. Because science is a democracy, and everyone gets a vote, even people with a paranoid persecution complex. And we vote on each and every thing science puts out, once we’ve had the opportunity to decide if the results fit in with our worldview. Or it’s not. He thinks it is “interesting” (and in this case, I read his “interesting” as synonomous with “mildy suspiscious,” go and read the rest of his comments and tell me if I’m off) that the Harvard School for Public Health would chose to study programs that affect the public health.

If this was one troll on Amanda’s site, his comments wouldn’t piss me off so much. There are crazy people everywhere and they are entitled to their opinions as long as they stay the hell out of my decisions. But it’s not an isolated incident-after all, Janet Crouse was basically saying the same thing, she’s just slicker about it.

Pop quiz: Circle the statements that are largely accepted by an increasingly information swamped American public:

“It’s not science because I think XXX works, and I am not interested in proving it because I just believe it, and it’s common sense.”
“It’s not art because it offends me.”
“It’s not medicine because I don’t like to get shots, besides, everyone knows that the problem is too much blood in the system. Get me some leeches.”
“It’s not engineering. This material is cheaper and it will be strong enough because I say so. Get that table full of numbers out of my face.”
“It’s not automotive repair. I think my timing belt is fine, and I don’t have to listen to your advice to the contrary. Get that estimate out of my face.”

In general, people who refuse standard medical treatment for paranoid reasons are considered a bit off, and we certainly don’t try to pacify them. No one in their right mind would think to question and engineer or architect if they didn’t have some education or experience in those fields. We don’t flip our trusted mechanic the bird and drive off when he suggests expensive or inconvenient maitenence-or if we do, we only do it until we’re towed back to the garage.

But science is open game, and your slack-jawed opinion on it is as good as Stephen f’n Gould’s. Brian Greene should take your phone calls, dammit, because you have a couple of things to tell him about string theory. A doctorate is a doctorate, be it from Harvard or a diploma mill. So anyone with a PhD is just as good as anyone else with a PhD. Just shop around until you find one saying what you want.

When Random McDouchebag feels entitled to look at any study and declare, this is good science, this is bad science, this is not science, then we are, as a country, finished. And if you don’t believe me, let Janet Crouse and Eric the Noble and George W. Bush have their own way for a few more decades and come back and let me know how that worked out.