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Anti-science and anti-contraception

How can it be that we are firmly into the 21st century and reading claims that birth control pills can cause prostate cancer and abort babies? Or, my personal favorite, that a woman can be considered pregnant before her egg unites with a sperm?

Such falsehoods are being touted not by yahoos but by educated conservatives who, in growing numbers, choose to ignore what science tells them.

According to a paper in a recent American Sociological Review, conservatives with at least a bachelor's degree have, over the last several decades, lost their faith in science to an amazing degree. Although the paper doesn't cite advances in contraception specifically, they are clearly one victim of this disaffection.

Our country's top health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, counts contraception as one of the 10 greatest health achievements of the 20th century. Yet recently:

-- A state legislator from New Hampshire, opposed to insurance companies being required to pay for birth control, called attention to a report suggesting that birth control pills cause prostate cancer. (Certain drugs in those pills become waste and eventually pass into the environment, according to the report, exposing men to carcinogens.)

The representative based her statement on findings that originally appeared in the British Medical Journal, findings that one author of the study later characterized as only a hypothesis, and were seriously questioned in a subsequent BMJ article.

-- Some members of Congress, in their attempt to derail legislation requiring insurers, including the insurers of some religious organizations, to cover birth control, falsely argued that Plan B, the "morning after" pill taken after sex in order to avoid pregnancy, causes abortions.

It does not, nor do other methods of contraception, James N. Martin, Jr., president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, pointed out in a letter to the editor in USA Today. "The definition of contraception is to prevent pregnancy, which occurs at implantation," he wrote.

The morning-after pill is often confused with another drug, RU-486, which, he said, does induce abortion and is therefore not considered contraception.

-- Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law a bill prohibiting abortions that occur 20 weeks after a woman's last period begins. (This is in contrast to starting the 20-week count about two weeks later, when fertilization likely occurs.) As Amanda Marcotte notes in RH Reality Check, Arizona conservatives, in effect, said that women could be pregnant before egg and sperm unite.

Apparently they were dozing off during ninth-grade biology.

Not all political conservatives are Flat Earthers, of course. But there are proportionately more of them than there used to be, according to the Review article.
For that piece, Gordon Gauchat, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, analyzed information from the General Social Survey, conducted every year since 1972 by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center.

He found that in 1974, the year Republican Gerald Ford became president, 48% of conservatives trusted science, a higher proportion, interestingly, than found among liberals or moderates.

By 2010, however, that number had fallen to 34%, while the degree of trust among moderates and liberals remained stable. Of particular note: Confidence dropped among conservatives who held bachelor's degrees, not those who only finished high school.

Gauchat theorized that because educated conservatives are more politically engaged than other voting blocs, they are more likely to seek information that conforms to their ideology. As the Los Angeles Times, writing about Gauchat's work, pointed out, some of them have big money to spend spreading their ideas.

"Right-wing think tanks, funded by corporate interests to undermine the scientific consensus on such expensive-to-fix phenomena as climate change, have proliferated, as have conservative cable-TV networks, blogs and radio talk shows," the Times noted. "These outlets are talking to a well-educated audience. And they're presenting a very one-sided view of scientific issues."

Gauchat also wrote about the influence of the religious right, "which rejects scientific contradictions of religious teachings on such issues as evolution and stem-cell research, and the growing use of science to inform public policy in such areas as environmental protection."

"Conservatives, ever wary of government interference with the free market, started to resent the scientists. ... Rather than debate remedies, they have turned on science itself. ... (They) really have their own subculture, complete with ontological claims about what the world is about."

One indication is a poll recently published by the Public Religion Research Institute, a think tank supported by a broad spectrum of scientists and religious experts. The poll showed a majority of Americans, including a majority of Catholics, believe that most employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception at no cost.

Another sign of change is the perceptible ease with which young men talk about and support contraception, including methods being developed for them.

Nick Halzack, a 23-year-old policy intern working in Washington, says he looks forward to the day when male birth control, in various testing stages around the country, goes on the market.

"My generation has always had contraception," he says. "It was a part of our sex education and is a part of our relationships. We are just beginning to get engaged in the politics, and the fight against it is a losing battle." http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/21/opinion/stepp-conservatives-contraceptio
n/index.html?hpt=hp_t3 there's this:

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The Texas State Board of Education reminded us of the phenomenon this month, rewriting textbook guidelines to match their conservative, theological worldviews. Not since the Kansas Board of Education voted to restrict the teaching of evolution has an entire state backlashed so strongly against science and reason.

In an editorial on the board’s actions, the Houston Chronicle wrote:

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In its revamp of the state’s social studies curriculum, a majority of the board has consistently voted to reshape our history. Instead of the messy, complicated past, the extremist members prefer a simple story of triumphant Christian soldiers.

Last week the board voted to remove Thomas Jefferson — Thomas Jefferson! — from a list of Enlightenment thinkers who changed the world. The Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason over tradition, doesn’t sit well with the board.

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From the Wall Street Journal:

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As Don McLeroy, one of the leaders of the board’s conservative faction, put it in last year’s debate over evolution, “somebody’s got to stand up to experts.”

Indeed, outrage against the conspiracy of intellectuals seemed to lurk just below the surface during last week’s deliberations, breaking into the open during moments of rancor. “I see no need, frankly, to compromise with liberal professors from academia,” railed board member Terri Leo when someone challenged the move to nix the word “capitalism.” “That’s part of the problem of how we end up with distorted and liberal biased textbooks is because that’s who’s writing them.”

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Are the actions of Texas and Kansas anomalies, or is there a larger movement at play?

Mostly white, undereducated, and underemployed, the Tea Party movement has become the poster child for American anti-intellectualism. Whereas the group’s members fared well in the industrial era, they find themselves unable to compete in a global economy powered by ideas. Simply put, they have few new skills to offer, and nobody wants to hire them.

The world is changing around them, and they are frightened. They do not understand the changes, and they do not want to change themselves. Worse yet, they do not want to understand what is going on. We see this in the surge in popularity of radical commentators (i.e., Glenn Beck) who provide simplistic narratives of the world that often have little or no connection to reality. They redirect their fear of what they do not know or understand and transform it into anger.

In January, the conservative columnist David Brooks lamented American anti-intellectualism and the backlash against educated people:

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The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

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http://www.educationfutures.com/2010/03/23/the-politics-of-american-an
ti-intellectualism/ this I did not know:

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If the findings of a new study on congressional speech levels represented their actions, senators would be busy passing notes in history class, while representatives attempted to trick the substitute trigonometry teacher.

A new study by the Sunlight Foundation found that Congress speaks at an average grade level of 10.6, equivalent to a sophomore in high school. That number is down from 2005, when Congress' 11.5 speaking level was in line with a high school junior.

Washington (CNN) – If the findings of a new study on congressional speech levels represented their actions, senators would be busy passing notes in history class, while representatives attempted to trick the substitute trigonometry teacher.

A new study by the Sunlight Foundation found that Congress speaks at an average grade level of 10.6, equivalent to a sophomore in high school. That number is down from 2005, when Congress' 11.5 speaking level was in line with a high school junior.

Lee Drutman and his colleagues at Sunlight took every word members of Congress said on the House and Senate floors between January 1996 and April 2012 and put them through the Flesch-Kincaid test, a tool that equates higher grade levels with longer words and sentences. Drutman found that while Democrats used to speak at a lower level then Republicans, in the last seven years, that trend has flipped.

The bottom ten on the list was dominated by freshman Republicans. Of the ten, all were Republicans and eight were freshman. Rep. Mick Mulvaney, a Republican freshman from South Carolina, found himself at the bottom of all 535 members of congress with a 7.9 grade level.

"We do it on purpose," Mulvaney said of himself and his other freshman Republicans. "People have been teaching this for decades. If you want someone to understand your message, you speak clearly and concisely."

"What you see is that both parties have dropped off," Drutman said. "It is certainly a bipartisan trend over all, Republicans have dropped a little more than Democrats but the trend is consistent across both parities."

In 2007, both Republicans and Democrats spoke at an 11.1 grade level. Since then, Republicans have fallen to a 10.4 grade level, while Democrats have fallen to a 10.8 level.More at http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/21/study-congressional-sp
eaking-levels-move-back-a-grade/

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Some people just don't want to find common ground. They want enemies. Not rivals, not opposition, enemies

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