The social sciences are, in general, easier to ignore than the harder sciences if you don’t like their conclusions (not that this stops people from ignoring inconvenient aspects of physics, chemistry, or biology.) Where social issues are concerned, our abilities to convince ourselves of whatever we already believe are rather magnificent in their scope and brazenness. Anyway, George Will apparently doesn’t like to pay attention to what social science has to say about the lack of negative impact gay people have on society. It’s not that he discounts the research that has occurred. He apparently prefers to ignore it or pretend it does not exist at all.

Nathaniel Frank at Slate offers a good analogy for Will’s basic refusal to engage on the issue:

Suppose a group of people claim that redheads can’t enter the town square because they’ll drive away commerce, badly harming the economy—and then this group gets a law passed barring redheads from public spaces. To reverse the discriminatory law, they then argue, redheads must spend however long it takes to amass definitive proof that entering the town square won’t cause harm (which is impossible since you can’t conduct research on scenarios you won’t permit). When redheads nevertheless begin to produce a growing body of research that points conclusively to the fact that their presence does not harm commerce, the law’s defenders consistently reply, “It still might; more research is needed.” Continue reading →